Quotes from Kevin Macdonald

I started as a documentary maker, and they're my first love.

I don't think of myself particularly as a Scottish director, but you are what you are because the first ten years of your life, and where you spend them, brand you. In that sense, I'll always be a Scottish director.

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.

With 'Black Sea,' I long had an idea that I wanted to do a film about people stuck on the bottom of the ocean. I thought that was a terrifying scenario.

No man, no woman is without their flaws.

We should not confuse having a Flip camera with making a documentary.

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 amazing thing about Bob Marley is that there is no moving footage of him at all for the first ten or eleven years of his career. From 1962 to 1973, there's nothing, not a single frame.

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.

Documentary makers use other people's lives as their raw material, and that is morally indefensible.

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 see how people in the developing world react and how they use a camera, you realise how narcissistic we are and how the filming of ourselves and thinking that we're interesting enough to care about is odd.

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.

I recommend to any of you, that's always a good way to make a film: use the interesting bits.

Every film that is made about the past is always a reflection of the present.

The things that are hardest to shoot are the things where you want people just to feel very natural, and you want to do love scenes, and you want to do just kids hanging out and trying to get them to relax.

I think everything that I've done, I've been involved with for longer. Either you develop it from scratch, or you take something, and you develop it, and you work on the script, but I'm not sure how good I'd be at just sort of taking a piece of material and being a director for hire like that.

I think we're all greedy. Who do you know who says, 'I have enough! I don't need any more!'? It's part of human nature.

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 me, what works well about 'Life in a Day' is that it's emotionally affecting without being manipulative. It really does make you think about the connectivity of the world, the similarities and differences. It shows the experiences we all go through: birth, childhood, falling in love, having kids, getting ill, dying.

I can't claim my grandfather's work has influenced mine directly, but his life certainly inspired me to follow this path.

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.

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.

People think that the Italians invented neorealism, but actually, Humphrey Jennings did. He was revolutionary in using non-professional actors in his films, and he got extraordinary performances out of them.