Kevin Macdonald
Kevin Macdonald

When you look at almost every submarine movie, to some degree or another, there's this 'Moby Dick' element, this Ahab element to them.

Kevin Macdonald
Kevin Macdonald

It's nice to stretch in different directions and use different muscles. You can get swallowed into Hollywood, where it's all about bums on seats and how commercial a film is.

Kevin Macdonald
Kevin Macdonald

I love submarine movies.

Kevin Macdonald
Kevin Macdonald

You can relate to someone with a flaw.

Kevin Macdonald
Kevin Macdonald

For me, the aim of making any film like this, any film about an artist, would be to send you back to the art.

Kevin Macdonald
Kevin Macdonald

I used the same designer and costume designer on 'The Eagle' and 'The Last King of Scotland.'

Kevin Macdonald
Kevin Macdonald

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.

Kevin Macdonald
Kevin Macdonald

'State of Play' is a romantic story at its heart.

Kevin Macdonald
Kevin Macdonald

I love Humphrey Jennings. People ask me who my favorite documentary maker is, and he's certainly in the top three.

Kevin Macdonald
Kevin Macdonald

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.

Kevin Macdonald
Kevin Macdonald

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.

Kevin Macdonald
Kevin Macdonald

I'm not particularly ethnically Scottish; I have one grandfather who is Scottish, although he's called Macdonald, and you don't get a lot more Scottish than that. The Scottish part of my family are from Skye, and I've always been very aware of that - always been very attracted to Scottish subject matter, I guess.

Kevin Macdonald
Kevin Macdonald

I think the parallels of a giant power with overwhelming military superiority and might, with America and Rome, it seems obvious to me.

Kevin Macdonald
Kevin Macdonald

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.

Kevin Macdonald
Kevin Macdonald

No man, no woman is without their flaws.

Kevin Macdonald
Kevin Macdonald

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.

Kevin Macdonald
Kevin Macdonald

I suppose making documentaries is like doing journalism on film.

Kevin Macdonald
Kevin Macdonald

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.

Kevin Macdonald
Kevin Macdonald

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.

Kevin Macdonald
Kevin Macdonald

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.