>>Kirsty Wark: I'm going to begin with Kevin Macdonald. He is certainly, as far as I know,
the only Oscar-winner on stage. One Day in September, Touching the Void, The Last King
of Scotland and The Eagle. An accomplished and determined filmmaker.
And I can remember many, many years ago, when we were making a show, Kevin and his brother
coming. They looked about ten. And what they were doing was, we were filming them for the
three weeks toting a script about, which they finally got made, actually.
>>Kevin Macdonald: You always humiliate me with this story.
>>Kirsty Wark: You look younger all the time. It's okay.
The big thing that you have just completed, which is a Herculean task, was a life in the
day. And before I get you to explain it, I'll just say that some of the information I was
given was wrong. It wasn't 80,000 submissions from 4,500 countries -- as far as I know,
there aren't that many countries. Explain what the project is.
>>Kevin Macdonald: The life in the day project came through a collaboration between myself,
Ridley Scott's company, Scott Free big production company, and YouTube. And the idea was to
use YouTube to somehow make a feature film. And so we had lots of discussions about how
to do this. And we ended up with the idea that on a single day, we'd invite people from
all around the world to film their lives and answer a few simple questions. What do you
love? What do you fear? And what do you have in your pockets?
And I can explain that one later. Seems a bit random, but it's not.
And we had 81,000 submissions from 191 countries. And so four and a half to 5,000 hours of material.
So I got together a team of people, 23 editing assistants from all around the world who spoke
many different languages, to watch this material. >>Kirsty Wark: In their own countries?
>>Kevin Macdonald: No, no. They watched it all in London in a sweaty little office on
Greek Street in SOHO. They sat in front of a row of computers 12 hours a day and would
give a star rating and also enter key words into a database, if it was Brazilian, sunset
on a beach, they would enter that into a database. They would give a star rating one to five,
five being excellent, one being unwatchable. And then there was a six for so bad it's good,
for those great comedy moments. >>Kirsty Wark: You distilled it into how many
minutes? >>Kevin Macdonald: We distilled that into
a feature film, 94 or 95 minutes, something like that. Which was premiered at Sundance
Film Festival and shown at Berlin and at South by Southwest, lots of festivals. It's now
getting a theatrical release, starting in Russia next week.
>>Kirsty Wark: Tell me a little bit about what we're about to see.
>>Kevin Macdonald: Little clip here from the film which is a Russian user who has incident
a clip of he and his friend being naughty in Moscow for a day and also a flavor of the
kind of global sense of this, where you cut within a few seconds between, you know, all
the continents of the world. [ Video. ]
>>Kirsty Wark: Extraordinary. Absolutely amazing, if you get a chance to see it.
[ Applause ] >>Kirsty Wark: But how did you set about setting
it up? How did you make the call for the material? >>Kevin Macdonald: Well, Ridley Scott and
I both did films, opened a channel on YouTube and put these films on asking for people to
come forward. And the model for me was actually based on the same thing that happened in the
1930s and '40s, mass observation, because there's no new ideas in the world, obviously,
where a bunch of artists and surrealists asked people to record their lives in diaries and
write down mundane things, which to us are totally fascinating. And ask questions about
what's on your mantle pieces and what's in your pockets and reveals an awful lot about
people's consumption, et cetera. So we made a little film about that as well.
And we put those on YouTube. Then we did a massive kind of a publicity blitz. And we
got this huge response. I think what was so amazing to me was the amount of time and effort
that people in the same way as the LEGO film demonstrates, the noncommercially motivated
generosity of people on the Web and what they will do in order to be part of a project which
they feel is really worthwhile. >>Kirsty Wark: And some extremes of humanity
as well. At one point, there's a guy being filmed with his children living in essentially
a small, empty mausoleum in a cemetery. >>Kevin Macdonald: There's all sorts of heart-breaking
things. What happens when you film yourself or when you film the people that you know
closely around you is you get very intimate material. And that's something that you just
have to go onto YouTube to see so much very, very personal intimate stuff that a film crew
could never get or could only get after months of being with somebody and really generating
trust. >>Kirsty Wark: Has it altered -- I mean, you're
going to presumably still do what you might call classic films.
>>Kevin Macdonald: Yes. >>Kirsty Wark: But has it altered your whole
relationship with the medium? >>Kevin Macdonald: I think it has in a way.
I certainly -- just mundane ways like seeing how truthful emotion is portrayed on film
as opposed to by an actor actually seeing some of the emotion in the film is extraordinary.
But -- and also just seeing the beauty of some of the cinematography. It's incredibly
inventive. I think the thing that it's reassured me about as somebody who's too old to change
careers now is there's always going to be a place for the storyteller, for the director,
the writer. And that, actually, the idea that user-generated content is going to completely
take over the world, that it is the new form of cinema, the new form of television, is
not really true. >>Kirsty Wark: No, because the thing is the
edit is very important. >>Kevin Macdonald: It's all about the edit
and the story that you as the director or the writer actually have in mind when you
go into this massive chaotic material. >>Kirsty Wark: Imagine, J¯rgen, you could
imagine a life in the day of LEGO users. >>J¯rgen Vig Knudstorp: I was going to say,
we have studied, of course, intensively through intergraphic studies how children play. The
key word that came out of that was storytelling, which I think is just a mirror of what played
the most essential play pattern of all time is role play. I'm the fireman, I'm going to
turn out the fire. So I think you're absolutely right, storytelling
is here to stay. >>Kevin Macdonald: Yes, thank goodness.