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.

Roeg the Warlock

Last Friday night's Nicolas Roeg tribute at BAFTA was a very special and memorable evening - for all attendees, I hope, including the honoree, but certainly for me. It's probably sufficient to say that I got to meet Jenny Agutter and Julie Christie - wouldn't you say? But really the joy of the occasion just went on and on. It's one thing to share a stage with speakers of the order of Danny Boyle, Stephen Frears, Kevin Macdonald and James Marsh. Another to be startled and moved anew by extracts from Nic's inimitable body of work. And another still to enjoy the good drink and the good crack that tends to follow such a ceremonial. (As Nic put it succinctly after taking receipt of his honorary Bafta, 'Time for a large one, I'd have thought...?') But nights such as these remind you what it's all about. My speech was big on personal reminiscence, since I can't pronounce as Nic's fellow practitioners can about why his films are the way they are (though Stephen Frears still declares himself quite baffled on this score...) But when I think about what those films have meant to me, as I did unavoidably throughout the evening, well... life to date would have been an unenlightened experience without them. Eureka, indeed.