“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.”

Scottish film director

Kevin Macdonald is a Scottish film director known for documentaries and feature films. His work spans from One Day in September (1999) through The Mauritanian (2021), and he won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for One Day in September. He has made films across several genres, including the climbing documentary Touching the Void, the drama The Last King of Scotland, the political thriller State of Play, the Bob Marley documentary Marley, the post-apocalyptic drama How I Live Now, the thriller Black Sea, and the Whitney Houston documentary Whitney. His films often move between biography, politics, survival, and conflict.