'It's Like Working With A Proper Actor As Opposed To Working With A Movie Star'
Interview - Will Lawrence
The Herald Magazine U.K
11 April, 2009

When Brad Pitt walks off the set of your new film you're sunk, right? Wrong.

If you're Kevin Macdonald you count yourself lucky - and call Russell Crowe.

Pitch the slim, Glasgow-born filmmaker Kevin Macdonald against the heavyweight profile of Brad Pitt in a battle of wills and you might
bet on the actor coming off better. But you'd be under estimating the director, who has quietly built himself a reputation in the corridors of movie-making power. His latest film, State of Play, a big-screen adaptation of the eulogised BBC mini-series, initially attracted the interest of Pitt, yet when director and star wrangled over the script, the studio backed Macdonald and it was Pitt who walked.

While Macdonald had won critical acclaim with the independently released Touching the Void and the Oscar-winning The Last King of Scotland, State of Play represented his first project with a major Hollywood studio. "Like everyone, I had images of coming to Hollywood and being trampled on by the nasty studios," he says. "And yet they were so supportive of me throughout. I'm not just trying to suck up to them." He pauses then laughs. "Okay, I am sucking up to them, but they stuck with me when Brad Pitt pulled out of the movie. They didn't need to do that. And it's rare that a studio is willing to make this kind of grown-up movie and do it with big stars. It's not the kind of film that studios make any more."

Indeed, State of Play is a labyrinthine thriller set in the world of Washington politics and hard-nosed investigative reporting. Like its small-screen progenitor, which aired on BBC One in 2003, it deals in murder, corruption and sexual intrigue. And just as the BBC series featured British acting's leading lights (Bill Nighy, David Morrissey, James McAvoy and John Simm among them), the movie too is oozing screen talent, with the likes of Ben Affleck, Helen Mirren, Rachel McAdams and Robin Wright Penn all supporting Russell Crowe, the man who walked in when Pitt walked out.

"Brad pulled out because we had different conceptions of what the film should be like," continues Macdonald, who is 41, "and when the studio asked who I wanted, I said Russell Crowe. Of all A-list actors, he's the best one, no doubt. In a way I was lucky it didn't work out with Brad.

"For a start there had always been a dynamic problem, which is the relationship between the journalist [Cal McCaffrey, played by Crowe] and the politician [Congressman Stephen Collins, played by Affleck]. The story was always meant to be a relationship between somebody who feels inferior - who's a bit of a schlump, who can't get a girlfriend - with somebody he's looking up to and admires, this polished politician friend of his. And that is just not the dynamic of Brad Pitt. He's not looking up to anyone thinking, 'Oh, I wish I could have your girlfriend!'"

Macdonald says Crowe, on the other hand, was able to flourish in the character's dishevelment. "Russell is very opinionated, but he comes and creates. And he took that character much further and was much braver about how far to take it than I think I would have been," he says. "Because I would have been thinking, 'The studio aren't going to like it if he looks like this or if he dresses like this,' and Russell doesn't care about that. He is, I think, the only A-list movie star who has no vanity at all.

"When Brad had been on, we had chosen all these costumes for him. It was all cashmere this and beautiful shades of that. Yet when the costume designer went to see Russell, with suitcases and suitcases of clothes, and all the different suggestions, Russell goes, 'Nah, I'm going to wear these jeans, that jacket, this coat, every day. That's it.' I think he changed the shirt once. He sees everything through the point of view of the character. That's fantastic. It's like working with a proper actor as opposed to working with a movie star."

Indeed, the film is packed with exemplary acting - including arguably a career-best turn from Affleck, playing the Colgate-toothed politician - and bears testimony to the vision of its director. Many critics were sceptical of a Hollywood remake which transposes the story to Washington, citing the original as an untouchable British TV classic. Yet Macdonald succeeds in capturing the essence of the six-hour series in a two-hour film and, some believe, actually improves upon it. His movie is a muscular examination of the perils facing print journalism, which, despite its dented reputation, fulfils a necessary function in the democratic system of checks and balances.

"I loved the original series but that was just the starting point for me," says Macdonald. "I wanted to look at the world of All the President's Men. In that film there's a very idealised view of journalists existing in an environment that represents rationality, with this very deep-focus photography, white crisp clean lines, tidy office space, primary colours. I thought, 'How do we move that on to today?'

If you look at our newsroom in the film, you can tell it was crisp, clean and modern in the 1970s but nobody has painted it since. Nobody has changed the carpet. The paper has just piled up. The dust has piled up. The whole thing becomes a kind of metaphor for what has happened to newspapers, what has happened to newspaper journalism.

"In some ways the mechanics feel like they belong in another era. It feels like it's a dying animal." He smiles. "The film is a eulogy to print journalism, and I hope it also asks what happens when all the newspapers close down. What happens when there aren't people asking politicians the difficult questions or doing the investigations into companies' dealings? What happens then to society? What happens to democracy? I think it's one of the most important issues affecting us today."

Macdonald has form in the world of journalism. His first on-screen efforts were documentary films, and when he left college he harboured hopes of joining a newspaper and immersing himself in the world of investigative journalism. "Unfortunately for me I made that decision just as the recession hit in the early 1990s," he says, smiling. "I applied to all papers trying to get placements, but I couldn't get anything. And then I had a crazy idea that I was going to go to Argentina and work on a paper there. I couldn't speak Spanish - told you it was a crazy idea - so I went to Spain to learn.

"I came back for a few months before heading off and just picked up a camera. I started making little documentaries, just for fun. Somebody at the BBC saw one of them and I started making documentaries for them, which I suppose is kind of like being a journalist, but in film. That was how my film career began."

Filmmaking is in Macdonald's blood. He was born in Glasgow in 1967, the grandson of Emeric Pressburger, the acclaimed Hungarian-born filmmaker who fled to the UK to escape Nazi persecution in 1935. Pressburger started his professional life as a journalist, turning to screenwriting in the late 1920s. When he arrived in England, he discovered a film industry that was particularly congenial to Hungarian émigrés, and soon fell in with Alexander Korda, the owner of London Studios, who employed him as a screenwriter.

Korda assigned him to attempt rewrites on The Spy in Black, the 1939 film directed by Michael Powell, and writer and director hit it off straight away, forging the famous Powell-Pressburger alliance that produced 13 films between 1943 and 1955. To prove celluloid does flow in the bloodstream, Pressburger's other grandson - Kevin's older brother, Andrew Macdonald - is a regular collaborator with Danny Boyle and the producer of almost 20 movies, including Trainspotting, 28 Days Later and Sunshine.

The Macdonalds' parents divorced before Andrew had hit his teens, their mother moving to the United States and her sons living with their father in Scotland. "I was young. There was the divorce and it wasn't particularly pleasant," Macdonald says. "They decided between the two of them that it would be best if we lived with my father. It wasn't anything to do with me. I was too young to be a decision maker. I suppose going to live with your dad rather than your mum was unusual at the time. But I enjoyed growing up in Scotland with my dad, in the countryside.

"We lived on Loch Lomondside, a middle-class upbringing. My father had a factory making sheepskin things - coats and hats and stuff like that. His father before him did hats. Very much the rag trade. Emeric Pressburger was my grandfather on my mum's side. He died when I was 21. He lived down in the south of England and we were up in Scotland, but I used to see him about three times a year. It was a strange situation because my mother and father divorced and my mother lived in America, so in a way my brother and I were the only relations he'd see.

"I had been fascinated by hearing him talk, great stories of his life. And then when he died, my brother and I were the ones who cleared out his house. Going through someone's belongings is very moving and a sad thing to do, and yet I found all these clues to different aspects of his life. He fascinated me, and at that time I didn't have a job because of the recession, so I decided to write a book."

That book, Emeric Pressburger: the Life and Death of a Screenwriter, was picked up by Faber and Faber, who offered Macdonald a part-time job at the publishing house, which he took to fund his growing passion for documentary. Among his first works was a cinematic interpretation of that book, The Making of an Englishman (1995), in which he tracked his grandfather's journey from Hungary to England.

"It was kind of sad, because for many years his films had been totally forgotten and kind of despised," says Macdonald. "Then in 1977 there was a retrospective on BBC Two. We got a video recorder as a present and taped all those films on VHS. I was 10 years old and, to be honest, I didn't like them much.

"But when I went to university I went to see a lot of movies, and one of them was The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. I was moved and blown away by it, which was possibly one of my reasons for writing the book. I recognised him in the movie - the three different stories of the same character, three different time periods, an epic, and the last one is 1942.

"When I watched it I saw it's about him and I recognised in the film so much of his own experience. That way it was important personally to me, but it didn't really get me into films. I wanted to be a journalist. I couldn't get a job. I did bits of freelance stuff here and there and then started doing documentaries."

The first of those to awake worldwide interest was 1999's One Day in September, examining the terrorist attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, which left 11 dead. Central to Macdonald's film was an interview with Jamal Al-Gashey, the last known surviving terrorist. Given the delicate nature of its subject matter, the film aroused caustic criticism in certain quarters.

"Anyone who has ever had anything to do with writing or making a film or anything to do with the Middle East usually lives to regret it - or not," says Macdonald. "What I tried to do was make an apolitical story. That was the naive thing. I thought you could make a film that was about human beings, a story about a slice of time. But when you talk about the Arab-Israeli space everything is about history and about who did what and who deserves what going back 2000 years. And unless you put it into context they feel is perfect you are f---ed. Both ways."

That said, the documentary was admired within the world off film and allowed Macdonald to secure funding for Touching the Void, the brilliantly chilling documentary charting the story of two climbers and their ill-fated mission to tackle the west face of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. The film employed live-action simulations of real events - ordinarily a mainstay of cheap TV documentary - yet it impressed audiences around the world and earned Macdonald a crack at his first major feature, The Last King of Scotland.

That film follows the brutal actions of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin through the eyes of his personal physician - played by James McAvoy - and earned Forest Whitaker an Oscar. Macdonald was lavished with praise for a movie infused with a startling realism. "The truth is I still love documentary," he says, "but I've only done one since I finished The Last King of Scotland [2007's My Enemy's Enemy, about Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon]. The fact is I am married and have a family, and I want to make decent living."

Surely, given his rise up the Hollywood ladder, he'll be in a position to flit between studio fare like State of Play and more intimate, personal documentaries? "That's the ideal," he replies. "That's what everyone wants to do, but certainly that is what I'd look to do. In fact my next film is going to be low-budget. I'm really looking forward to it."

That movie is The Eagle of the Ninth, an adaptation of Rosemary Sutcliff's 1954 children's novel set in Roman Britain. "I read it when I was 11 or 12," says Macdonald. "It made such a huge impression on me. I begged the producer to let me direct it. At first he said no - he wanted to make it a big Hollywood thing. Then I think Troy came out and he thought, 'This doesn't look very good.' So he came back to me and hopefully we're going to shoot it in August."

And will there be a part for Brad Pitt in The Eagle of the Ninth? Macdonald pauses before offering a wry smile. "Yes," he says. "He can play the horse."

State of Play (12A) is in cinemas from April 24.

Thanks, Oz Fan