100 Quotes by Kevin Macdonald

There's something about the lack of certainty with a documentary, which is exhausting if you do three in a row. It's nerve-wracking.

You can relate to someone with a flaw.

With fiction, I've grown to really love the challenge of lying, the challenge of telling a good tale that isn't truthful, and working with performers is endlessly fascinating. You know, learning what a good performance is, how to get a good performance, how much or how little you need to create emotion or to create character.

What got me into making movies was that I wanted to be a journalist.

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

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

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.

I was born at Rotten Row in Glasgow and brought up in Loch Lomond near a small place called Gartocharn. And it's a bit like anyone: where you're brought up, you have an irresistible attraction to that place; it defines who you are.

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.