I think my brother always wanted to be a film producer.
— Kevin Macdonald
Documentary makers use other people's lives as their raw material, and that is morally indefensible.
Young people read their news online; they expect to get their news for free.
People listen to The Beatles, but while they were muscially influential, they weren't culturally influential in quite the same way. You can go into the back of beyond in a little Indian village, and they will listen to Bob Marley. But they're not going to be listening to The Beatles or The Rolling Stones.
I've done a few celebrity-related things, and I think on the first one - about Mick Jagger - I got stung and was not able to make the film I wanted to make.
It's obviously presumptuous in some ways to talk about somebody's sexuality who's not here to describe themselves.
I've fallen out very badly with some of the subjects I've interviewed, because they see their lives a certain way; to step into a cinema and see your life depicted in another way can come as a terrible shock.
Coming from documentaries, my biggest challenge was to understand actors' psychologies. American actors take it all very seriously; British actors don't enter into all this methody way of doing things.
If you want to do 'Sword & Sandals' movies, people think that means it equals 'epic.'
If you can understand, you can feel compassion.
The interesting thing to me is that somehow the future of movies will become a more social thing... I think that people will see them communally and will be talking about them as they're watching them, in a way, and immediately after watching them, and they'll all become the conversation. I think that's pretty interesting.
I love submarine movies.
No man, no woman is without their flaws.
I find it really difficult when you make a movie where it is set in Russia and everyone speaks in English. It drives me crazy.
If there is a tendency in modern television I hate, it is the unstoppable march of the dramatic reconstruction to tell the stories of anything from an ancient Egyptian battle to the early life of Paul Gascoigne.
In war films, even more than in other kinds of documentary, we've come to think that shaky, poor-quality footage is somehow more authentic than something classically 'well shot.'
The first documentary I saw that tried to show the actual experience of being a soldier in combat was 'The Anderson Platoon,' by French director Pierre Schoendoerffer, which won the Oscar for best documentary in 1967.
You can go to places in Africa and Asia and find Marley graffiti. In the slums of Nairobi, you see his lyrics painted on walls, and you realise he has this almost religious significance to the underclass of the world. He's a guy born in a hut with no bed, and now he's probably the most listened-to artist in the world. It's fascinating.
It is hard to find the soul of Mick Jagger. It is very hidden. I think his true personality has receded so far behind the facade that he can no longer find the real person himself.
When you're an outsider and going into a culture like America, it's easier to stay away from any cliches because you're not really aware of what they are.
The tradition has always been that in Roman films, the Romans are always British, and it's usually posh British: Laurence Olivier and his ilk. My take on all this was that it's a metaphor for empire and the end of empire.
As a filmmaker, I'm interminably curious and nosy, but certain times you meet people and think, 'I don't want to push you too hard because I can see this is painful for you.'
The relationship between director and subject can become very intense. It's a bit like therapy, with lots of transferences going on. It's easy to feel guilty.
In some ways, making documentaries is like being a journalist. You interview people and then use the bits you want to use as opposed to the bits they want you to use.
Most people in Uganda have something good to say about Amin - 'He was funny; he gave us pride to be African.'
I'm not doing any more music films!
Sometimes people give away more by not saying something.
A publisher friend of mine suggested that I write a book about my grandfather, who had just died. I had nothing else to fill my empty days with, so I started work on this book. While researching it - watching lots of movies, talking to moviemakers - I became interested in movies and started making documentaries.
What got me into making movies was that I wanted to be a journalist.
People who die in an untimely way who are artists, somehow that validates their art, we feel. Why culturally we feel that, I don't know.
Everyone's got to make one submarine drama in their life.
In film, I believe things should either be documentary or drama.
Despite the limitations of the bulky 16mm camera and 10-minute film magazines, 'The Anderson Platoon' feels as spontaneous and fresh as any films that have come out of the Afghan or Iraq wars.
We're all fascinated by the way other people live their lives, how they cope with hardship and triumph, what they put in their home movies and family albums.
I did not want to depict Al Gashey as evil. I wanted him to come across as someone who did what he did for reasons that were compelling. Whether or not we agree with him is a different matter.
The Internet has meant that advertising has migrated; there are hardly any classifieds in newspapers any more because they're all online. If people have a car to sell, for example, they sell it online; they don't go to the newspaper.
The thing with newspapers is that they are a filter. We're relying on the editors of that paper to be a filter and to tell you that this is worth reading about, this is quality, and this is quite reliable.
For everybody in the world, the answers to the mysteries in your life usually lie in your childhood, your upbringing, and your parents.
When you're trying to make a film, you're trying to find a way to love your subject, and you want your audience to love your subject.
The only obligation you have as a film-maker is to tell your version of the truth and to use your film to illuminate reality. Whatever that means.
You can get good performances in quite sizable roles from people who have never been in front of a camera, people who maybe have never been in front of a movie theater.
I was a teenager in the '80s, and I was always a bit dismissive of Houston, as I think a lot of people who considered themselves 'cool music fans' were. She was poppy, bubble gum, making music not considered very cool. But you can't help but dance to some of those songs or feel emotionally affected by 'I Will Always Love You.'
In my early career as a documentarian, I suppose I was trying to make films which - where it was all about making a big cinematic statement, and I think with 'Marley,' I slightly changed my direction and adopted a more mellow approach.
'State of Play' is a romantic story at its heart.
I love Humphrey Jennings. People ask me who my favorite documentary maker is, and he's certainly in the top three.
You can relate to someone with a flaw.
It feels like we're all so familiar now with the traditional three-act structure that, actually, stories that are more complex, more naughty, that allow for disagreement and discussion, are more interesting to us.
The great thing about making a film on a submarine is that it's kind of like making a play. You've got this limited environment.
There were many times during the filming of 'Touching the Void' when I wondered why I had ever thought I wanted to make this film.
Although 'The Anderson Platoon' was what we would now call an 'embedded film' - with all the ambiguities that term implies - somehow Schoendoerffer got away with showing things as they really were from a grunt's perspective.
