Film director Kevin Macdonald

Acclaimed film maker Kevin Macdonald, director of Touching the Void, State of Play and The Last King of Scotland, discusses his new documentary about Jamaica’s most famous son: Bob Marley. We catch up with him at a Q&A hosted by DocHouse.

Marley is a film that has been long in the making. Macdonald tried to shoot the first version nearly eight years ago, but gave up due to legal wranglings over rights to the music. Since then others have attempted to document the reggae legend, notably Martin Scorcese, but walked away for similar reasons. Then two years ago Macdonald got a call to say the film was back on.

‘The producer paid for the whole project – he’s a rich American guy and a passionate Bob Marley fan – who will never see his money back.  As you can imagine the music is not cheap and it’s a long complicated process. So you needed someone who was a bit a God Father. He bought the rights to the music to make the documentary.’

Did he approach the film as a big fan? ‘Not really. I’ve become more of a fan since. I was as a teenager, Uprising was one for the first albums I bought. And I think he still speaks to young people, with his message about the corruption of the world and seeing a better place.’

Marley had three passions, he says. ‘He was driven by music and religion – probably religion more. And football.’

Macdonald says he discovered the portrait of Marley through a long process of editing. ‘I didn’t know what I was going to find, so I just interviewed everyone and started to see it take shape. I had no preconceptions of what this was going to be.’

Would he have wanted to make it as a biopic rather than a documentary? ‘No, it would have been hard to do that. I think Muhammad Ali, played by Will Smith – who is a great actor – and was made by one of my favourite directors Michael Mann, it still not Muhammad Ali. And you sort of think well if it’s not Muhammad Ali, I don’t care. It would have been the same for Bob Marley as we all know what he looks like and how he acted. You perhaps could have made a film about his early life before he became recognisibly and aurally who he became.’

The film documents Marley’s time in London following an attempt on his life in Jamaica. It was an obvious destination for him to seek refuge, says Macdonald. ‘He’d already been a few times and its one of the biggest ex-patriot Jamaican communities in the world. He had friends here and he felt at home. I think it’s interesting that his most creative period was when he left Jamaica after the shooting and came to London in exile. He was able to have distance about what was going on and yet the focus of knowing his life was going to be short, and that made him very creative.’

Next up for Macdonald is shooting a fiction film in Wales, based the young adult book by Meg Rosoff, How I live Now. Does he feel the process of making a fiction film is much different? ‘When you make documentaries it’s much more intellectual, cerebral. With fiction you try and switch off that side of your brain and get in touch with your more creative side. You are concerned with texture and colour, you want emotion and performance in a way you don’t with documentary.’