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.

Kevin Macdonald

When you see how people in the developing world react and how they use a camera, you realise how narcissistic we are and how the filming of ourselves and thinking that we're interesting enough to care about is odd.

Kevin Macdonald

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

Kevin Macdonald

For everybody in the world, the answers to the mysteries in your life usually lie in your childhood, your upbringing, and your parents.

Kevin Macdonald

It's nice to stretch in different directions and use different muscles. You can get swallowed into Hollywood, where it's all about bums on seats and how commercial a film is.

Kevin Macdonald

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.

Kevin Macdonald

If there's a principle really worth sticking up for, I'll go the whole way.

Kevin Macdonald

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.

Kevin Macdonald

The only obligation you have as a film-maker is to tell your version of the truth and to use your film to illuminate reality. Whatever that means.

Kevin Macdonald

The amazing thing about Bob Marley is that there is no moving footage of him at all for the first ten or eleven years of his career. From 1962 to 1973, there's nothing, not a single frame.

Kevin Macdonald

'Uprising' was one of the first three or four albums I ever bought in 1980 when I was 13, and that had a strong impact on me.

Kevin Macdonald

I was born at Rotten Row in Glasgow and brought up in Loch Lomond near a small place called Gartocharn. And it's a bit like anyone: where you're brought up, you have an irresistible attraction to that place; it defines who you are.

Kevin Macdonald

I was a teenager in the '80s, and I was always a bit dismissive of Houston, as I think a lot of people who considered themselves 'cool music fans' were. She was poppy, bubble gum, making music not considered very cool. But you can't help but dance to some of those songs or feel emotionally affected by 'I Will Always Love You.'

Kevin Macdonald

When I was growing up on Loch Lomondside, one of the first albums I ever bought was Marley's 'Uprising.' I guess that would have been 1980 - just before he died.

Kevin Macdonald

There were many times during the filming of 'Touching the Void' when I wondered why I had ever thought I wanted to make this film.

Kevin Macdonald

Elvis Presley's estate is making 30 million a year, and they say that Marley shouldn't be, but he is from a much poorer part of the world, and a lot more people need the money.

Kevin Macdonald

I've fallen out very badly with some of the subjects I've interviewed, because they see their lives a certain way; to step into a cinema and see your life depicted in another way can come as a terrible shock.

Kevin Macdonald

No man, no woman is without their flaws.

Kevin Macdonald

I love Humphrey Jennings. People ask me who my favorite documentary maker is, and he's certainly in the top three.

Kevin Macdonald

I love submarine movies.

Kevin Macdonald

You can relate to someone with a flaw.

Kevin Macdonald