Kevin Macdonald

“I think the parallels of a giant power with overwhelming military superiority and might, with America and Rome, it seems obvious to me.”

“Most people in Uganda have something good to say about Amin - 'He was funny; he gave us pride to be African.'”

“I'm not doing any more music films!”

“It's always nice to have the same people that you are familiar with and shorthand with, obviously, to be around you.”

“In some ways, making documentaries is like being a journalist. You interview people and then use the bits you want to use as opposed to the bits they want you to use.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“It's so nice to be totally artistically free.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 think there's always been interest in Bob Marley.”

“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.”

“If you go to pretty much everywhere in the developing world, you will find Bob Marley murals, and you'll find people playing his music.”

“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.”

“Every film that is made about the past is always a reflection of the present.”

“Documentary makers use other people's lives as their raw material, and that is morally indefensible.”

“I think we're all greedy. Who do you know who says, 'I have enough! I don't need any more!'? It's part of human nature.”

“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.”