Kevin Macdonald Quotes

I really think the biopic thing so rarely works, because people's lives don't have a dramatic shape that can be satisfying.

The research period of a film is the most exciting part of the process, and filming is sometimes a letdown because when you're dealing with biopic material, the real thing is always much more intricate than the story told in the film.

The biopic also wasn't a form that I necessarily believed in, because you can never really get it right, you know? It's also a form that's very popular - the straight-ahead biopic.

Each movie you do about a real person is like a painting, and you choose certain things in the painting that you want to pull out and you want to show.

A mockumentary is supposed to be real, and we were frustrated with mockumentaries on TV, which are so rampant because of the success of 'The Office.' It's not real. You watch and ask why is there even a crew there. They never set it up in the narrative. You have a documentary crew following families for reasons we don't understand.

A biopic teaches you a lot.

You are always invested in a film, but there is always a different feeling you get when you are portraying a character that is based on real life and you are re-telling events that actually took place.

I think the struggle, whenever you make a film or television movie based on a real person's life, is finding a dramatic arc that will hold an audience's attention.

Unlike fiction, which you create before you go into production, with reality you kind of create it after everything is produced. The drama and the storytelling is really done in post.

I like A&E. I like those corny intimate-portrait things. They're so kind of ingenious and artificial and soothing.

I've read the 'Public Enemies' script and, no, it's not 100 percent historically accurate. But it's by far the closest thing to fact Hollywood has attempted, and for that, I am both excited and quietly relieved.

If you lined up 10 writers and asked them to write a movie about Steve Jobs, you'd get 10 very different movies.

I wouldn't let a biopic be made on me. That's because I don't believe in them. I don't like them.

I feel like biopics are so difficult to get around.

On the sets of the movie 'Manto,' I found that one of the challenges of embodying real-life stories is the mixed medium of facts and imagination, and how one's collage of experiences colour ones representation on celluloid.

I am interested in biographical stories. Seldom are good biopics like 'Maha Nati' being made.

To do a movie about someone who actually lived gives you two responsibilities. You have to try to be accurate to the facts of what he did and what he was like as a character. Then, at the same time, you have a responsibility to make a movie that entertains and can get an audience.

I get people saying, 'Opera is too large a canvas for me. I don't love it. I love movies that feel almost like documentaries,' in terms of artistic vocabularies of storytelling. I totally get that discussion; that makes sense to me.

I always thought of documentaries as films through which you find your voice as a narrator.

'Richard III' is a really difficult play to film - it's involved, often obscure. I felt it absolutely necessary to do more simplification than I've ever done before.

I like to make films with characters that resemble real people, about societies that exist.

In film, I believe things should either be documentary or drama.

It's much better to write a book and stick to the research - that's history. In cinema, emotional truth and psychological truth is much more important.

Storytelling has changed. Shows like 'Adventure Time' have taken storytelling in a different direction.

There's a really fine line between artistic license and artistic licentiousness. And history is a lousy filmmaker. It doesn't give you all the ingredients you need. No story will quite fulfill that three-act structure.