Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
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.
Elvis Presley's estate is making 30 million a year, and they say that Marley shouldn't be, but he is from a much poorer part of the world, and a lot more people need the money.
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.'
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.
My grandfather died before I started making films, but I definitely learnt this from him: believe in your own judgment and stick to your guns - 99% of the time, you'll be glad you did.
I suppose that the Western has always been a kind of mold to which you could pour the concerns of the day, but have them seen in the simple terms of the Western, of one alley or whatever.
I don't think life gets any better than sitting in the sun while a legend of French cinema tells you stories about making 'Belle de Jour' and other wonderful films, and eating great food.
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.
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.
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.
I went to see 'Francis Ha,' which I could certainly relate to. She ends up wandering the streets of Paris all alone - something I've ended up doing a number of times in capital cities around Europe.
I always loved digging away at the story, trying to find out things that people don't want you to find out and piecing it all together. I love the treasure hunt aspect of it, the thrill of the chase.
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.
I remember going to the university film club to see 'The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp' one night and being bowled over. It was one of the most beautiful films I'd ever seen. And it felt so personal.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Like a lot of expatriate Scots, when you want to be called Scottish, it's useful. I see myself as being without nationality, as a European: my region is Scotland; my nationality is European - isn't that a very Alex Salmond thing to say?
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.'
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.'
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.
I was fascinated by making a submarine movie, inspired by the Kursk disaster. This idea of being trapped down at the bottom of the sea seemed so terrifying. I was very interested in making a sub film which wasn't a military film. You think, Well, why are they there, then, if they're not in the military? Oh, well, they must be looking for treasure.