Kevin Macdonald Interview

Congratulations on an excellent film. Have you been pleased with the reception so far?

When you're making something like this, you swing between euphoria and despair and when you finish if after two years, you're never quite sure what you've got, but it hasn't been universally greeted with acclaim. In America, where it came out first, the reviews were a bit divided. I don't think they really understood that you could have a central character who was ambivalent, who was a bit of an anti-hero, even although he is likeable. Hopefully you can recognise yourself in him, you recognise that could be you. We all in one way or another deny things in our lives, a lot of us look the other way because our lives are too comfortable.


You've only made documentaries until now - had you been looking to make a feature film and how did you become involved with Last King?

I'd never been interested at all, I'd only been interested in documentaries. Touching the Void gave me a taste for what you can do in drama that you can't do in documentary and the time was right. People started offering me scripts after One Day in September and I thought maybe I should take the chance while someone was giving it to me because it's not every day you get offered a feature film. But then I got sent the Last King book and I got together with the writer which was a really interesting and enjoyable experience.


Can you see yourself making more features?

Yeah, I'm just doing a documentary at the moment and I'd like to another feature, but it's such an exhausting, drawn out process. I really admire these filmmakers like Ken Loach or Stephen Frears who can make one film every year.


That's your Klaus Barbie documentary?

Yeah. We just finished the editing and we'll be doing post production in the next couple of months. I guess it bears some relation to Last King in that it's about someone who does the dirty work for states. I was very interested in the way that as the Cold War began, people kind of lost their morality when they started using some pretty despicable people, like Klaus Barbie.


One of the most impressive elements of Last King was the way it built in intensity towards the end, in much the same way as something like Goodfellas did. Were there any films that you looked at for inspiration?

There is one thing I looked at which became my Goodfellas shot, a sort of montage in a bar with Amin and Garrigan and three prostitutes where they come out of the smoke with the steadicam and it's that Scorsese red. Other films that inspired were things like City of God, I suppose, the energy of that film really inspired me, but also political thrillers like Costa-Gavras' Z and The Missing.


The producer of Last King alluded to there being a Scottish set scene which took place after the climax. Can you tell us about that and why it was cut?

The beginning is filmed in Scotland, but we also filmed a day in the Glasgow Royal Infirmary where there was meant to be a scene of him working as an ordinary man. In a way the story is about someone who desperately doesn't want to be ordinary and wants to be someone special and different. But he's accepted this fact now and he's giving something back. But no matter how much you work on the script, you just sometimes get a feeling that something isn't right and as soon as we were piecing the movie together we saw it just didn't work.


Is award recognition something that interests you?

We're excited but it's all a bit like entering a lottery. It adds a certain fun to the whole thing but I don't take it too seriously because I don't think they necessarily always get it right and you need to be judged by other things. Forest is winning lots of critics' awards in America. People have seen him before as really gentle and sweet and he's been around for a long time and now here he is doing something completely different, utterly dynamic and explosive, and that's surprised people.


In many ways though, James McAvoy's performance is just as strong isn't it?

I agree with you completely. James is the one that holds the film together, it's his story. Because the Amin character is the larger than life character, people think it's an Idi Amin biopic, which of course it's not. This is a film about a Scottish doctor, he's our eyes and ears, he's the one we can relate to as Brits. So James is fantastic, but in a way, because it's not the showy part, because he's playing much closer to himself, he suffers in comparison.