Director Profile: Kevin Macdonald

From One Day in September to Life In A Day, Kevin Macdonald has mined the common truths that connect the extraordinary and the everyday in a range of award-winning documentaries, features, and adverts. He talks to Tim Cumming about truth, interpretation, and having one of Britain’s most famous filmmakers as a grandad

There’s a distinct thrill in walking down Goldfinger Avenue, the road that runs through Pinewood Studios on the ragged edge of west London, home to the huge 007 Stage and decades of movie classics, from Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus through the Bond films to this year’s Maleficent, posters of which adorn the security fence.

I take a plain door marked Post Production and through that, a wide dark corridor that leads to the Powell Mixing Stage where Kevin Macdonald is coming to the end of a morning’s editing on his new feature, Black Sea. It’s slated for December release, and stars Jude Law in an adventure concerning lost treasure and tough submariners – and shot not on Pinewood’s unique Underwater Stage but on an old Soviet sub in the Medway. Typically, Macdonald insisted on the real thing.

I sit in on the end of the session. Three editors/mixers are ranged before a formidable console, and the director and his team sit near the back, focusing on a bar-room scene with Law playing out on the big screen as they parse over the music, sound levels, fish for alternative specks of dialogue buried in the shoot notes, and probe the cavities that must be probed to turn a working edit into a tight, taught final cut.

As they break for lunch, Macdonald greets me warmly, guides me through the canteen and into the grounds, past the original Heatherden Hall from which Pinewood arose in the 1930s under J Arthur Rank, and into a garden of elegant topiaries and neat borders – I half-expect to see Goldfinger’s Oddjob stepping out, bowler in hand, trailing his master’s golf clubs.

Pinewood and Pressburger

Macdonald seems very much at home at Pinewood – and so he should; there are family connections. “My grandfather was Emeric Pressburger, who worked with Michael Powell,” he says. “We’re mixing in the Powell Theatre. Next door is the Pressburger Theatre, which is slightly smaller. There’s a picture of him on the door.”

Macdonald defines himself as “a curious person, interested in the world”. Curiosity is the essential tool required of any good journalist or documentarian and when he started out, it was newspapers, not films, that attracted him. “But I couldn’t get a job as a journalist, so I ended up making documentaries, home-movie documentaries for fun.” A commission to make a five-minute short for BBC Scotland led to “low-rent things for BBC Scotland, STV, Channel 4. Then I started to get more interested in what you could do with a documentary on the big screen.”

In 1999, he became one of the first British directors to helm a documentary for cinema with the Oscar-winning One Day In September, about the 1972 Munich Olympics terrorist atrocity in which 11 Israeli athletes were killed. 2003’s Bafta -winning Touching the Void, a gripping account of mountaineering Valhalla (albeit in deepest Peru) followed, and his most recent foray into the form was 2012’s Marley, an acclaimed, probing account of the reggae legend’s life and music.

Seeking Ugandan authenticity

The success of Touching the Void – which used reconstructions – led to his first fictional feature, The Last King of Scotland in 2006, a vividly evoked and disturbing portrait of Uganda under the lunatic child-king rule of Idi Amin. The investors wanted to do it in South Africa. Macdonald insisted on filming where it actually happened, in Kampala. “I’d never even been on a set for more than about an hour,” he admits, “and here I was making a feature when I didn’t really know what I was doing.” What he did do was import some of the ideas and stylistic approaches of documentary into fiction. “I didn’t know there were ways you were meant to film a conversation, that there were conventions for that, and I filmed it as I would as a documentarian. Allowed things to happen and then filmed them, rather than figuring out set-ups.” He laughs. “I’ve since become more self-conscious about how to shoot things.”

In 2011, he used crowdsourced footage – 4,500 hours of it – to construct the web of delights, juxtapositions and dramas that is Life In A Day (and reprised with the Sainsbury’s-sponsored Christmas In A Day). Recent ads – he has around a dozen under his belt – include real-people assemblies for Land Rover Can and Will and a quirky, fresh Indian travelogue for NatWest. When producers engage Macdonald, whether for movie studios or major brands, they’re pretty well guaranteed delivery of work that’s unique and particular to the director’s probing, curious, real-world vision. The World Is Not Enough may have been okay for Brosnan’s Bond, but for Macdonald, the world in all its untidy complexity is his inspiration, a call to duty.

It seems appropriate that his first long-form doc, 1995’s The Making of an Englishman, was about his grandfather, Emeric Pressburger. “If you’re a documentary maker, you’re interested in people, and in true stories, real stories. I was interested in my own grandfather’s story, he had an amazing life history, and when it’s connected to you in some way, by blood, you feel it more deeply and you’re even more fascinated and have this desire to find out and know. Everyone has mysteries in their life, and it’s always interesting to find out what they are. Families have secrets and mysteries, and I was happy to delve in. You need to be a little bit callous sometimes to do that kind of thing,” he adds. “All of us who use material from real life negotiate that. You have to work out where the line is for you.”

That issue of truth and interpretation, and making films from other people’s sometimes traumatic experiences and lives – and where one must draw a line or step over it in pursuit of screen truth – preoccupies Macdonald. “The immorality of the documentary filmmaker – you’re using other people’s lives and other people’s traumas to make entertainment, if you want to call a documentary entertainment. There s always a bit of queeziness about that. You’re taking raw life and other people’s stories or hard-won adventures, and you’re doing what you want with them.”

For One Day In September, he pioneered a thriller style that drew criticism from the traditional documentary world, “because in some ways it was putting the style before the substance. It was stylistically different from what had been done before. We had this concept right from the beginning – let’s take a subject like this and present it like a thriller.”

Controversy and truth

Equally controversial was the fact that it included an interview with the one surviving terrorist behind the massacre, still in hiding. “It was a very murky and controversial story,” says Macdonald, “and a long tortuous process of research and flying around the world.” He describes it as his “first contact with the idea of what is truth and how you represent it in film”.

Touching the Void probed this particular cavity between truth and interpretation even deeper, by using actors and dramatic reconstruction alongside talking head footage of Joe Simpson, the climber who almost died but lived to tell the tale and write the book, and Simon Yates, whose only possible hope of survival was to cut the rope between him and his fellow climber, sending Simpson plummeting into a crevasse of life or death struggles, and a confrontation with the spooky, disembodied void of the title.

“We filmed with Joe and Simon in Peru,” he says, “did all the landscape shots. Then we had two actors playing them, and they came with us to the Alps and we shot for five weeks. I’d been utterly uninterested in working with actors before that, but this was a totally different art form, a different skill, especially coming at it in that way, where you have such a truthful story, and you’re trying to get a fake performance. You’re trying to get someone who’s just acting to feel weighty and real and it’s very hard to match those two things up. You’ve heard what happened, and you can see in their face how traumatic it is. Someone who’s really been through something talks about it in a totally different way than an actor would, so you try and get closer to that in terms of the weight of their performance. It was very, very difficult.”

The I-am-a-camera collage of Life In A Day offered very different challenges. “We had 20-something assistant editors trawling through all this material to find the golden nuggets,” says Macdonald. “I watched about 150 hours with the editor, Joe Walker. Things would leap out at you straight away – we edited the first draft in about five days. We had the structure; we knew this and that bit had to be in. It was pretty obvious from the beginning what the form was going to be.”

Beginning at 3am and ending at midnight, you’d think that all human life is there but not quite. “The hardest thing was to try and represent the darker side of life,” admits Macdonald. “One criticism levelled at it was that it was too upbeat, too optimistic about life. In this 24-hour period, surely bad things happened – but people don’t want to record the bad things, normally.”

Life In A Day was inspired by one of Macdonald’s favourite writers, Humphrey Jennings, a founder of Mass-Observation, a British social research project launched in 1937. Eighty years later, cameras replaced written accounts, but the focus on minutiae stayed the same. “It was fun to find a different way to use real life,” he says, “to give voice to people who don t normally have a voice. And to glory in that home-movie concept of the significance of the insignificant, the things that normally get forgotten.”

There have been several ‘In-A-Day’ formats since then – the Sainsbury’s-sponsored Christmas In A Day, a BBC-commissioned Britain In A Day and a Fuji-sponsored Japanese version. But with the novelty of crowdsourcing for the silver screen as exhausted as Macdonald and his team have become with other people’s home movies, the project, for now, is over

However, the real-life ethos of Life In A Day has expanded into his advertising work. “I’ve done a couple of ads that are in documentary style,” he says. “In the ad world, they want things to be very on message in a very short time, but people aren’t like that often. Their lives and opinions are a bit messier. You can handle that in a half-hour documentary but, in a commercial, it’s a real challenge – in a good way. It’s trying to do something that retains some of the complexity of real life in 30 or 60 seconds. It’s nice when you use real people in a celebratory way,” he adds, “because in most documentaries they’re not, they’re usually about some issue.”

Inside the minds of the paymasters

His first ad work dates back to 2003, and though he’s only done one or two a year since then – fitted in between all-consuming documentary and fictional features – fusing his own documentary style with clear brand messaging in a minute or less is a challenge he relishes as much as the comparatively fast turnaround that comes with advertising work. He’s also intrigued by the world view of his paymasters – the corporates behind the brands. “They’re the people that rule the world,” he says, “so it’s interesting to see what their priorities are and understand how they see the world. For me that is, strangely, part of the attraction. And the money,” he confesses. “Someone’s going to pay me to do something that’ll take two or three weeks, not the huge amount of commitment and time that a documentary demands.”

With recent assertions that no one views branded content on social media anymore, Macdonald’s embrace of real life and experience – together with hands-off sponsorship deals from big brands paying to be associated with good content rather than spilling their products all over it – could point to a solution for brands and agencies seeking real engagement from viewers.

The trouble is, Macdonald sees creatives themselves as being “some of the worst people for censorship – they are so used to seeing things in that glossy way that the idea of anything else is more shocking to them than to the client”. But he’s convinced that hands-off sponsorship is the way to get audiences onside. “The conflict is, they know that’s the way to get audiences interested, but they can’t get away from the old advertising mentality, the idea that we can’t be associated with anything negative, with anything downbeat with anything political. Real life is messy and there is controversy and there are people you’re not going to like who’s opinions you don’t like but that’s life – don’t try to control it.”