100 Quotes by Kevin Macdonald

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.'

When we made 'Life in a Day,' we asked people around the globe to record their lives on a single ordinary day. When we were cutting that film, we talked about what it might be like if we chose a day that already had significance to people. The result is 'Christmas in a Day.'