WHEN Oscar-winning documentarian Kevin Macdonald was growing up in the village of Gartocharn, Dunbartonshire, he never even considered becoming a filmmaker.
“It’s the wettest place in Britain. We were 20 miles from the north-west of Glasgow. We lived in the countryside on a sheep farm; my dad ran a sheepskin tannery,” Macdonald recalls while talking to The National over Zoom.
Instead, he had dreams of becoming a journalist. After completing his studies at St Anne’s College, Oxford, he even tried to get placements with various newspapers, but to no avail. So, he pivoted to making videos one of which was picked up by regional television and then BBC Scotland, which helped to kickstart his hugely successful career as a director.
While he has dabbled in narrative feature films, overseeing the likes of The Last King Of Scotland, State Of Play, How I Live Now, and The Eagle, Macdonald is primarily known for his work as a documentarian, especially after he won his Academy Award for One Day In September.
Through documentaries Macdonald has told the true stories of the 1972 Olympic terrorist attack, plus Joe Simpson and Simon Yates’s near-fatal descent in the Peruvian Andes, as well as the lives and careers of Bob Marley, Whitney Houston, and now, with his new documentary High & Low: John Galliano, the eponymous fashion designer.
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However, filmmaking was already in Macdonald’s blood. “My grandfather was a filmmaker,” he admits. In fact, alongside Michael Powell, MacDonald’s grandfather, Emeric Pressburger, was one half of arguably the greatest filmmaking pair in British cinema history, responsible for the creation of A Matter Of Life And Death, The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus, to name but a few of their classics.
“I had a totally non-filmmaking-related upbringing. But my grandfather was a filmmaker. I used to see him once or twice a year down in Suffolk,” explains Macdonald, who offers the reminder that up until the mid-1980s Powell and Pressburger’s more operatic style of works were very much overlooked in favour of the gritty realism and kitchen sink dramas that were favoured in the 1950s and beyond.
“They were very obscure and unfashionable. He had no connection to the film industry and lived in a tiny village in Suffolk. I think four people came to his funeral. But maybe that’s where it got into my head that I could do something like this. Interestingly, I never wanted to be a filmmaker until after he died.”
Even now, though, Macdonald – who wrote a biography of Pressburger that he later turned into a TV documentary – still alludes to his grandfather’s work in his own films. High & Low: John Galliano features scenes from The Red Shoes to highlight Galliano’s own obsession with his craft.
But while Galliano is regarded as one of the most important fashion designers of the last 40 years, working as the creative director for Givenchy and Dior, he is also remembered for his recorded antisemitic outburst in Paris in December 2010, which led to his dismissal.
Through High & Low, Macdonald is able to explore the subject of “cancel culture” and forgiveness, particularly how “we find forgiveness in a post-religious world.”
Macdonald raises these topics through High & Low, but he doesn’t offer concrete answers. Instead, he wants to promote debate and discussion, which has already been fervent after screenings of the film.
“I’ve seen so many people argue about it after screenings of the film. I like the fact that different people can have different views on the subject. I’m in the same position as the audience – I can’t get inside his head; I only know what he told me.
“I think one of the lessons of the film is that we should stop being so dogmatic and black and white about these things, and actually understand that there is a human being at stake here.”
Going into making High & Low, Macdonald is the first to admit that he was far from a fashion person. In fact, he was actually “quite dismissive” of it and had “patronising views about fashion and the people who are into it”.
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Over the course of making the documentary, he began to truly appreciate the world of fashion, especially Galliano’s impact on it. “I did begin to think that he was some kind of genius. It made me appreciate fashion as an art form.”
But while he sees High & Low as a “fascinating character study” of Galliano that also raises a lot of moral questions, paradoxes, and conundrums, the deeper he got into production he also realised that it was a mystery story. “It’s the mystery of the mind. Why would somebody say these antisemitic obscenities? What happens to get them there? And what happens to them after that? How did he deal with the repercussions of what he did?”
Galliano has now seen the film several times, and Macdonald believes that he likes it. The designer is also incredibly nervous about the reaction to it and him, and his hope is that people “understand him more”, says Macdonald, adding: “His aim isn’t to be forgiven. He understands that a lot of people will never forgive him.”
Macdonald shows no signs of slowing down his work. He’s trying to get a couple of feature films off the ground, while he has also spent the last 18 months making a documentary about the Klitschko brothers, the professional boxers from Ukraine, one of whom, Vitali, is currently mayor of the war-torn country’s capital, Kyiv.
“I spent a lot of time there in the last year with them in the city. It’s about the difference between boxing and fighting in the ring and fighting on the battlefield,” he says. And while depicting a war couldn’t be any more different to the content in High & Low, Macdonald takes it all in his stride and sees getting a chance to explore such disparate subjects as a great benefit of the profession.
“As a filmmaker, you get to spend a year diving into a world that is not yours, you learn so much about it and meet amazing people. It’s such a great privilege.”
Macdonald will be at the Glasgow Film Festival this week, introducing the screenings of High & Low: John Galliano and the UK premiere of Made In England: The Films Of Powell & Pressburger, a documentary on his grandfather, both on March 5
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