‘A blockbuster’ ‘A cinematic tour de force’ ‘Five stars’ ‘Star-studded’ ‘An edge of your seat epic’ ...And that’s just film director’s life!
EXCLUSIVE: Scotland’s foremost movie-maker on dealing with malaria, A-list egos... and a Russian invasion
ON THE way to becoming Scotland’s most successful filmmaker, Kevin Macdonald has learned a hard lesson – to capture great drama on screen, you usually have to deal with just as much drama off-camera. While shooting his acclaimed mountaineering documentary Touching the Void, for example, he battled freezing snowstorms and altitude sickness in the Peruvian Andes.
For The Last King of Scotland, he had to negotiate outbreaks of malaria and dysentery to produce the first major movie made in the troubled African nation of Uganda.
While filming in the Crimean Peninsula for the movie Black Sea, with Jude Law, cast and crew were forced to abandon the shoot when the Russian army invaded.
Yet despite these hardships – or perhaps even because of them – Macdonald has carved a reputation as one of the world’s foremost directors.
At next month’s Bafta ceremony, his star could rise even higher with his latest film, The Mauritanian, nominated for five awards.
‘The glamour people might think of really is not there’
Now, the 53-year-old has spoken up about battling against the odds to make movies in exotic locations around the world.
In an exclusive interview, he described the inspiration he drew from his grandfather, the legendary filmmaker Emeric Pressburger. He also lifted the lid on working with some of the biggest stars in Hollywood – among them Jodie Foster, his fellow Scot James McAvoy, Brad Pitt, Ben Affleck, Russell Crowe, Benedict Cumberbatch, Saoirse Ronan, Jude Law and Dame
Helen Mirren.
‘Filmmaking is almost always an unbelievably arduous process,’ said Macdonald. ‘The glamour people might think of really is not there.
‘Each movie is tough in its own way. But there’s something that feels very good when you find a story that you really want to tell and fight to get made.’
That has never been truer than with his latest film, released this week. The Mauritanian is based on the true story of the legal battle to free engineer Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who was detained in Guantanamo Bay as a terror suspect – without charge – for 14 years.
Jodie Foster, who plays the crusading lawyer trying to free him, won a Golden Globe for the role this year – and stunned the virtual awards audience by wearing her pyjamas, unlike her rivals who were sitting in their living rooms in their finest gowns. She is also nominated for a Bafta, as is Tahar Rahim, who plays Slahi.
The movie is up for the Best Film Bafta and Best British Film, a prize Macdonald first won 17 years ago for Touching the Void and again in 2007 for The Last King of Scotland.
He said that not only did Ms Foster’s star power ensure the new film, which also features Benedict Cumberbatch, was made but her selfless contribution on the set was an amazing lesson in teamwork.
He added: ‘I don’t know whether I’ve worked with someone who is a certifiable legend other than her – she is one of the icons of cinema.
‘When she won the Golden Globe for this, she had been nominated for one in every decade since the 1970s.
‘Who else is there like that? It took two-and-a-half years to get this film off the ground. The moment Jodie said yes, that was the moment we were able to say we had got the green light, and I thought she would be ideal for this.
‘She’s also the only actor I’ve ever worked with who actually cut lines. She was constantly cutting her own lines. She also said to me, “This is not my film, it shouldn’t be my film. I’m there to support the narrative”.
‘It doesn’t happen very often, in my experience, when someone says,
“It’s not all about me”. She’s cool.’ His Hollywood success and international travels are a world away from his rural upbringing in the village of Gartocharn, near the shores of Loch Lomond.
Even though he comes from a cinematic family – grandfather Emeric Pressburger made classics such as The Red Shoes and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, while his grandmother was screenwriter Wendy Orme – Macdonald was a late starter.
Having intended to become a journalist and author, he was drawn into the family business by researching a book about Pressburger following his death in 1988. Watching his amazing back catalogue made him fall in love with film.
His brother Andrew is a producer famed for the likes of Shallow Grave and Trainspotting.
Macdonald moved from TV documentaries to feature-length work in the late 1990s and won an Oscar in 2000 for One Day in September, about the 1972 Munich Olympics terror attacks.
He pushed the envelope with his blockbuster follow-up Touching the Void, about the fateful Andes expedition in which mountaineer Joe Simpson was abandoned by a friend on Siula Grande in Peru.
The film was an international smash, but Macdonald recalls a hellish shoot retracing the adventurer’s crampon steps.
He said: ‘Doing Touching the Void in 2002, that was as hard as it gets.
‘We were up mountains, sleeping in tents out in Peru, getting mountain sickness that was physically just unbelievably demanding. And even when we were filming scenes with actors in the Alps, we slept in dormitories in these mountain huts and didn’t sleep a wink as we had to get up and battle the snow and storms. I don’t think I could do that today, that’s definitely a young man’s game.’
Now based in London with his three children and wife Tatiana – herself a Bafta nominee for set decoration on Netflix film The Dig – Macdonald recently enjoyed watching old friend McAvoy on The Great Celebrity Bake Off, 15 years after they stormed Hollywood with The Last King of Scotland.
He was desperate to shoot in Uganda and make the first major movie ever shot there.
The rewards were worth the efforts, as Forest Whitaker won an Oscar for playing dictator Idi Amin in the film, which also offered a breakthrough role for Glasgowborn McAvoy.
Macdonald has been delighted to
see him go from strength to strength in blockbusters such as Wanted and the X-Men series.
‘I was quite amused to see him on Bake Off the other day,’ he said. ‘You know you’re embraced by the British public when you’re on Bake Off. It was very nice to see him on there, but he wasn’t a very good baker. He’s a brilliant actor, and he’s had the kind of career anyone would dream about.’
For Macdonald, the film helped him jump onto the radar of the Alisters. Brad Pitt recruited him to direct an adaptation of hit BBC political series State of Play, alongside Edward Norton, Dame Helen Mirren and Rachel McAdams.
But the project was thrown into chaos weeks before the shoot. Pitt left in reported disputes over the script, at the height of a writers’ strike in Hollywood, and Norton soon followed.
Macdonald said: ‘State of Play was a politically incredibly difficult film as we were originally doing that with Brad Pitt, who asked me to do it, then he pulled out just before we started shooting.
‘The weight of expectation, with actors and crew waiting, and all that stress around, that was a very difficult experience to go through.’
Crowe stepped in to save the day at the last minute, taking the lead role, while Ben Affleck came in for Norton. The Scot revealed he was amazed by the former, who had recently been part of the ‘Bennifer’ celebrity couple hype with former fiancée Jennifer Lopez.
Macdonald said: ‘We had lots of big stars in that movie, but Ben Affleck comes to mind as he’s not what you would expect.
‘People think he’s this goodlooking guy with a playboy image going out with Jennifer Lopez and in all of the tabloids. But, actually, he is one of the best educated and most thoughtful and well-read people you could possibly meet.
‘He’s fascinated by international politics and told me about going to refugee camps in the Congo to find out about the situation in Rwanda post-genocide and try to help.
‘He’s a very different person than you would imagine.’
After returning to Scotland for Roman epic The Eagle, with Channing Tatum and Jamie Bell, he worked with Saoirse Ronan and George Mackay for apocalypse drama How I Live Now.
TV work has included Stephen King thriller 112263 with James Franco and Amazon sci-fi pilot Oasis with Scots Bodyguard star Richard Madden.
He braved the eastern bloc to make submarine thriller Black Sea with Jude Law – and narrowly avoided the annexation of Crimea.
Having shot in the Ukraine port of Sevastopol, he was due to return for more filming when Vladimir Putin’s forces invaded the peninsula forcing them to divert.
Since that adventure, Macdonald has been working diligently on labour of love The Mauritanian.
But, as he has always done between features, he dipped back into documentaries and made worldwide headlines with a shock revelation about singer Whitney Houston. Three years ago, his film Whitney included allegations that the late superstar had been sexually abused as a child by her aunt Dee Dee Warwick, also now dead.
He said: ‘I love making documentaries and I have always wanted to keep making them because dramas take such a long time to get off the ground.
‘If you are just doing that, it can be pretty soul destroying, whereas with a documentary you have a tiny team and you can follow your nose.
‘But a feature can enter into the public consciousness because if you get it right, it is entertainment that people all over the world are looking for, so then it can have a longer life.’
Macdonald hoped that dramatic approach would work with his latest film.
Having read Slahi’s book detailing his incarceration, he decided to undertake the challenge.
He also had an eye-opening chat with the man who had spent 14 years detained in Guantanamo without charge after being taken from his family home one evening in August 2002.
Macdonald said: ‘Before I first spoke to him, I thought I was going to get this angry, resentful man.
‘Instead he greeted me with, “Hey dude, how’re you doing?”. He told me he’d seen The Last King of Scotland while in Guantanamo Bay.
‘Here’s a man you’d enjoy going for a drink with, here’s a man you can relate to. He’s so likeable and funny and intelligent and you can’t help connect with him.’
The epic story was filmed in the Saharan climes of Mauritania and in South Africa, where they built a replica Guantanamo Bay outside Cape Town.
After a virtual world premiere at the Glasgow Film Festival this year, the film’s big-screen release has been swapped for a Covid-safe launch on Amazon Prime this Thursday.
It is also the first of Macdonald’s efforts which he thinks would finally meet the approval of his legendary Hungarian-born grandfather, one half of the famed Powell and Pressburger filmmaking team responsible for some of the best British movies ever made.
He said: ‘It’s sad to say, but I don’t think my work are his kind of films. I don’t think he would have understood the kind of stories that I approach, and I’m not sure he would have understood the darkness in some of my films.
‘I think that would have been quite alien to him.
‘Their films are so incredibly fantastical and stylised, and they are so humanistic.
‘But the themes of their films are of acceptance and I think that’s something he would have liked about The Mauritanian, that it’s a film about accepting “the other”.
‘As a Jewish man in Germany pre-war, he understood what it was to be an outsider and maybe he would have related to that character and that situation. They believed in human beings.’ l The Mauritanian is available on Amazon Prime from Thursday. The 74th British Academy Film Awards are on Sunday, April 11.
‘I always wanted to keep making documentaries’
A feature film can enter into the public consciousness