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 Read Quote
Despite the limitations of the bulky 16mm camera and 10-minute film magazines, ‘The Anderson Platoon’ feels as spontaneous and fresh as any films that have come out of the Afghan or Iraq wars. Kevin Macdonald Read Quote
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. Kevin Macdonald Read Quote
The first documentary I saw that tried to show the actual experience of being a soldier in combat was ‘The Anderson Platoon,’ by French director Pierre Schoendoerffer, which won the Oscar for best documentary in 1967. Kevin Macdonald Read Quote
We’re all fascinated by the way other people live their lives, how they cope with hardship and triumph, what they put in their home movies and family albums. Kevin Macdonald Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
The things that are hardest to shoot are the things where you want people just to feel very natural, and you want to do love scenes, and you want to do just kids hanging out and trying to get them to relax. Kevin Macdonald Read Quote
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. Kevin Macdonald Read Quote
