Thursday 20 January 2011

Kevin Macdonald's Life in One Day


A conversation I had with the outstanding Scottish film director Kevin Macdonald for The List magazine, in respect of Macdonald's new movie Life in One Day, is now online here.
One of the glories of Macdonald's work is that he can tell compelling stories that reach out to wide audiences without compromising the discerning, questing intelligence that informs his choices of what he does. For instance, he's not only an Oscar-winning documentary maker but also co-editor of a definitive source-book on documentary history, Imagining Reality. And though Life in One Day would seem as up-to-the-second and box-fresh as a documentary could be due to its association with and use of all the speed and facility that digital cameras and YouTube have to hand... still, Macdonald can speak easily of drawing inspiration from Humphrey Jennings' Listen to Britain and Nikita Mikhalkov's Anna From 6 to 18.
And then you look aside from the intimate marvels of Life in One Day to the mud and muscle and glorious scale of Macdonald's upcoming feature film The Eagle... This is quite some career in cinema taking shape, you'd have to say.



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