By Robert Goldrich

SHOOT caught up with Kevin Macdonald as he was in the cutting room. It’s a venue to which the feature filmmaker, documentarian and commercial director has grown even more accustomed given his commitment to the YouTube movie “Life in a Day,” a project that intends to document July 24, 2010, based on user-submitted videos from around the world. The call for entries yielded some 80,000 submissions representing 197 countries, with content in 45 languages.
    Macdonald is charged with culling from this content a final movie of 80 or 90 minutes, which will debut at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival in January. Twenty-two people are logging, viewing and describing the material, as Macdonald sits down with an editor and watches the best footage, developing a game plan for what to use and how to use it. Executive producing the project is filmmaker Ridley Scott, with his and brother Tony Scott’s feature/TV company Scott Free Productions producing the film.
    Several factors led to Macdonald agreeing to take on the job. For one, he’s fascinated with the Internet and “the opportunity to get involved in something that’s never been done before on this scale.” He also comes off of having done three feature films in succession, the latest being The Eagle, a period piece centered on a Roman soldier and a Celtic slave who go on an expedition that takes them to no man’s land, an experience that transforms their master-slave relationship into a friendship.
    “When you go from one feature to the next all in a row-with just several weeks off before the next one–you can end up feeling drained and debilitated,” related Macdonald. “Each movie takes a lot out of you. This YouTube project represents something utterly fresh and takes me somewhere quite different. Instead of making all the decisions, I wanted to open myself up to what other people thought–what they chose to capture to represent life in a day. It has been refreshing to see all these different perspectives, even to just see the places where people put their cameras. It’s been a stimulating experience for me, reconnecting you with regular people from all walks of life, reconnecting you with life–and that can only help when I get back into commercials and narrative films. We as directors are trying to make things real in ads and films. We draw upon what we see in real life–but that bank can get overdrawn after awhile. I feel I’m stocking up, getting a deeper understanding and awareness of reality as expressed by other people.”
    As for what he’s seen thus far, Macdonald shares, “You get an optimistic and reassuring sense that people care, that many are really fundamentally interested in the same things–Earth, love, death, family, food, simple honest joys. There’s been a huge variety of parties, celebrations, family. Some of it is shot beautifully on 5D camera, some on film, some amateurish stuff. But the texture of all this work combined is beautiful and interesting.”
    At the same time, there’s material that inherently belongs on the cutting room floor. “A lot of stuff feels like teenagers in their bedroom fantasizing about being famous. We stripped that stuff out immediately.”
    Macdonald added that American culture is dominant in the entries. “That’s partly because people in America are so much more used to having cameras and are familiar with the Internet and movie making. Even entries from other countries often show an American influence–aping stateside pop culture in places like France and Pakistan.”
    Currently, assorted submissions can be seen on YouTube’s “Life in a Day” channel. And the final feature-length movie will become available at YouTube.com simultaneously with its screening at Sundance. Those whose footage makes it into the film will be credited as co-directors and 20 of them will be flown to Sundance in Park City, Utah, for the premiere.
    “Life in a Day” also has a marketing/branding side. The initiative is sponsored by LG Electronics. Thematically “Life in a Day” is somewhat aligned with the spirit of LG’s “Life’s Good” campaign mantra.
    Macdonald is no stranger to the advertising/marketing discipline. He is repped stateside for commercials and branded content by Chelsea, and in the U.K. by Rogue Films. His spot endeavors have primarily been European and marked by documentary sensibilities such as work for HSBC, the Royal Bank of Scotland, and BBC’s Radio 2. For the latter, Macdonald directed a spot featuring R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe and another starring Paul McCartney. Macdonald’s work with celebrities extends beyond the small screen. He helmed the documentary Being Mick, which follows Mick Jagger and the making of the singer’s solo album “Goddess in the Doorway.”
    Macdonald is also quite accomplished in long-form filmmaking. He directed the 1999 Academy Award winner for best documentary feature, One Day in September, as well as the acclaimed mountain-climbing documentary Touching The Void, which won the ’04 British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award for outstanding British film of the year.
    The director’s narrative feature filmography includes State of Play, and The Last King of Scotland in which Forest Whitaker’s portrayal of dictator Idi Amin won him the 2007 Oscar for best performance by an actor in a leading role.
    Macdonald said he has been inspired as a director by the work of 1930s and ’40s British documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings. In 2000, Macdonald made a documentary about Jennings who co-founded the Mass Observation movement, which chronicled everyday life by turning hundreds of diaries into a book. In a sense cut from this cloth, the contemporary “Life in a Day” is described by Macdonald as being a kind of time capsule containing what people give of themselves as reflected in the content they submit. Macdonald sees “Life in a Day” as the ultimate experimental film, and thus far he’s very much enjoying the ride and the process of discovery.

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