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Life in a Day

Coverage by Nobuhiro Hosoki

Story : A documentary shot by filmmakers all over the world that serves as a time capsule to show future generations what it was like to be alive on the 24th of July, 2010.

Opened July 29, 2011 (Limited 7/29)

Runtime:1 hr. 35 min.

 

Interview with Director Kevin Macdonald

 

(Q) : How do you manage the balance between your documentary side – because you’ve done your docs and then you’ve done “The Eagle,” which is such a different thing. I know you were telling me you apply some of that documentary sensibility.

(Kevin Macdonald): I think I’d like to take a little of what I learned in fiction and apply it to documentary and visa versa. My job is not a traditional director’s job in this film. I didn’t shoot any of the footage here so my job was a curatorial one that was primarily about giving structure to this amorphous mass of stuff and say “How do we make this feel like it’s a movie? Something that actually works as a whole rather than just a series of clips, like a best of selection.” And so of course that sort of idea of how to create a sense of something being of a piece…

(Q) : A narrative.

(Kevin Macdonald): Not necessarily a narrative in this case but actually feeling like it’s a whole comes from fiction films rather than documentaries.

(Q) : So how did this concept come about?

 

(Kevin Macdonald) : I came in right at the beginning. What happened was that YouTube and Scott Free(Production that established by Ridley and Tony Scott) were talking about making a movie. I think YouTube wanted to do a movie to celebrate or help celebrate their fifth birthday, which was last year, last December or something, amazingly because it feels like YouTube has been around forever.

So then Liza Marshall, who’s the producer, Scott Free came to me because we knew each other, and said, “What can we do?” So we came up with this idea together, which was for me inspired by something I’d learned about when I was studying documentaries, which was this man Humphrey Jennings, who made one of my favorite films, which is “Listen to Britain,” which is a 20 minute film which is no dialogues, sights and sounds of different places around Britain during the war in 1943. It’s a classic; it’s beautiful.

So there’s inspiration in that and he also was part of creating a movement, which sounds like something from George Orwell in 1984, but it’s called the Mass Observation Movement. And what they did was they asked people in Britain during the war and just before the war to write diaries detailing the mundane details of their lives. And then they would take those diaries and they’d also ask them questions actually. They’d ask them “What do you have on your mantelpiece?

What are the names of five dogs you’ve seen this week?” Things that were sort of seemingly mundane, and they’d ask them these things, get them to write these diaries, and then they’d take this and form it into books or magazine articles or whatever, trying to discover the extraordinary, the weird, the interesting in what seemed to be the ordinary. And I thought that’s a great model; we could to that with YouTube. That’s a way of exploiting this extraordinary tool of all this material that’s out there and all this material that’s uploaded all the time.

(Q) : Is that where you came up with the three questions?

(Kevin Macdonald) : Yeah.

(Q) : And that’s the point?

(Kevin Macdonald) : That’s where that came from as well. So I thank this very obscure British filmmaker, Humphrey Jennings, for stealing all his ideas for this.

(Q) : Were you every torn between the idea of maybe doing one movie of one question, one movie of the other question, one movie of the other question? Or was it always that you’d integrate these? And then how did you decide on how much of each you wanted to run?

(Kevin Macdonald) : Well obviously the point of the questions really was to allow us to get a way into talking about important, intimate things, so that the love question obviously is transparent, the fear question’s transparent, the question about your pockets or handbag, that’s really a way of getting to talk about materialism, consumerism, inequality, possessions, all those sorts of things. But that was just one way of structuring the film. The other way of structuring the film, because there’s no real traditional narrative you find other means of structuring.

So there’s the microscopic structuring of here’s a montage about people brushing their teeth and going to the toilet, and okay I’m going to make a two minute thing about that. And then there’s the structure of pieces of music, like the end girl and woman who are singing and beating their corn, and that’s structure’s about food consumption and production.

Then overarching it all you have the structure of the day starting at midnight, ending at midnight, and then you also have a structure of different characters appearing and then reappearing, so that gives you a sort of tension in a way, a suspense, because you’re not sure is that person going to reappear? I want to know more about them, and then maybe they do, maybe they don’t, and you learn a bit more. So that was really my role was to try and figure out a way to make the film of a piece.

(Q) : So how did you collaborate with your co-director Joseph Michael?

(Kevin Macdonald): No, I didn’t collaborate with him. That’s a mistake. That was annoyingly in the “New York Times.” You finally get a piece written about you in the “New York Times” and they make a mistake and give you a co-director who doesn’t exist. The reason that they made that mistake is because at the end of the film it says my name, Kevin Macdonald, and then it says “and,” and I’ve got the names of all 380 other people who’s footage is in the film, and he is one of the people whose footage is in the film.

(Q) : With that in mind, you did talk about on the TV this morning though all those assistants. You’ve probably never had so many assistants.

(Kevin Macdonald) : It was great. A megalomaniac’s delight. Nobody could watch all of this material on their own. Well, it would take them two years I’ve calculated.

(Q) : How many hours?

(Kevin Macdonald) : 4,500 hours. So that’s a lot of material. So that took 24 or 25 people who spoke many different languages. We had a Japanese speaker, a Chinese speaker, a Russian speaker, a Danish speaker, a Swedish speaker, whatever, French Italian, and they watched all the stuff that came from their countries or in their languages, and then we had to send some out. We had some very obscure languages. We had some Pigmy language from Cameroon, and that song of Angolan singers actually they sing three different songs that weave into each other and they’re in three different dialects.

And then there’s something in Balinese dialect of Indonesia, which was incredibly hard to find someone who spoke that in London. So anyway, there’s a lot of very obscure stuff. So those people they watched everything, the watched four and half thousand hours, 12 hours a day, two and a half months it took them. So as they were finishing that I took a month off after the filming day happened and let them start and then I came back. Joe Walker, the editor, and Joe’s the kind of unsung hero of this, he and I sat down and watched 350 hours, which was the best stuff.

So what they did was they rated it from one to five. They did one star for really terrible, they made less effort filming this than we are watching it, up to five star, this is great, there’s something fascinating here. So then Joe and I watched four and five stars, 350 hours.

(Q) : How’s the average though? Did you have more bad or more good?

(Kevin Macdonald) : Well by the very fact that there were only 350 hours of four and five stars. It’s all just different. I’m not going to say it’s bad. There was some bad stuff in there, but my attitude is everyone who got involved in this was being incredibly generous, because they were doing something in which they had no chance of financial gain. There was a prize in effect I suppose that people whose clips we thought were the best got invited to Sundance.

20 people from the film were there. The little Japanese boy and his father, the Peruvian boy and his father. But other than that people did it because they wanted to be involved in something and be generous and share something from their own lives. So I’m not the one to say to them “What you did was horrible.”

(Q) : You covered the Japanese kids who recently lost their mother or something. They don’t have that much working space. Did you consciously choose a different cultural element to put them in? This is the part of Japanese that is they are confined into a tiny room.

(Kevin Macdonald): You’re reading too much into it. I chose the clips that were the best clips, and I thought that single clip is the most beautiful short film I’ve ever seen. You learn something every second. It was almost a single shot, there’s one cut in there, you learn something every moment as it’s going on until you get this reveal his mother has passed away so he’s in mourning, he goes and he lies back down. It’s incredibly moving but it’s also a piece of film art, whether intentionally or accidentally it is.

If only I’d had 10 other films as good from Japan showing people on a farm and showing people on a mountain and showing people in a palace I would have used them, but I didn’t. So any sense that it’s portraying clichés of any country is purely accidental. The tricky thing was finding characters like that who made a film or who through a series of very short clips you felt like you learned something about their lives and you got involved in the story about them and that you related to. And I think those few people who managed to achieve that, those were the sort of backbone of the film, and then into that we then poured all the different ingredients.

(Q) : I have a twofold question for you. How has making this film changed your life in some way? And the twofold part is both you as an artist and you as a person.

(Kevin Macdonald): Well I think it’s changed me in both ways. I think that as a filmmaker I think it’s make me even more aware of the use of serendipity, of luck in filmmaking. But I’m really admiring a lot of the visuals in this film. People have shot really beautiful things and there are ideas to steal in there. And there are things that I realized you can only shoot with a home video camera that you couldn’t shoot with a professional camera.

The fly being picked off the windowpane by somebody. You film by camera here, fly goes up to his hand, takes the fly, holds it in his hand, films his hand, goes through a door, the iris changes, the focus changes, he lets it go, you see the fly going off. To do that using a conventional professional camera would be millions in special effects. Not millions but it’s a big, complicated shot to do.

Something that’s very simple. And there’s a beauty to that, there’s a whole aesthetic of the amateur, and I think I came to appreciate that. And then I also think from a personal point of view I learned to be less cynical about the world I suppose. I think maybe more positive about people. I’m a cynical person who’s normally attracted to the dark side of things.

(Q) : We know from some of your movies.

(Kevin Macdonald) : And actually in this I kind of felt like yes, you confront the dark side of things, there’s a lot of death and pain and illness and tragedy and whatever in there, but overarching everything in the material I saw I got this sense of this tremendous life force, that people even when they’re in their last hours or last days of life or are confronting death they still have this sense of wanting to live and of life being special and wonderful. And I think that made me more optimistic.

A lot of people who filmed in this were very, for want of a better term I would say ordinary people. They were not people who are part of the media, they’re not the kind of people that I would necessarily meet when I come to America or go to Japan or whatever. They’re not people in the film business, they’re not people that are involved in media in any way at all, and there’s something great about that, about giving voice to people who are just people and who are people first and foremost before they’re commentators, before they’re this, before they’re that. And that was kind of lovely.

(Q) : There’s one kid that’s doing wall climbing.

(Kevin Macdonald) : In Russia, yeah.

(Q) : He goes into a supermarket and he’s obviously shoplifting something. Was that trouble to show?

(Kevin Macdonald) : It might get them into trouble but they sent it in and they knew we might use it. I think they’re naughty boys and I find that they’re naughty boys but they’re naughty in a childish kind of way. They’re bad people, they’re just naughty. They were jumping on the back of the bus, they were not paying at the metro. They’re kind of like bad boys, and that’s what made it kind of funny, and also you instantly know who those characters are. You don’t need to see very much. You see like a minute of those people and suddenly you feel like I know those kind of guys.

(Q) : That brings us back to the dark side. Is that what you’re going to do next?

(Kevin Macdonald) : I’ve done another documentary that I’m just finishing editing this week. I’m going back to London tonight and finishing editing, which is a documentary about Bob Marley. A life story about Bob Marley.

End.