Oscar®-winning film director Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland/ The Eagle) has been talking to education charity FILMCLUB about his new film Life In A Day, which is released in cinemas on 17th June.
The director caught up with Young Ambassador Shaguftah at the film’s premiere, and also spoke to hundreds of FILMCLUB members through an exclusive webcast for the charity, where youngsters quizzed him about the new documentary - which charts the lives of individuals from across the world and filmed on a single day, enlisting the global community of everyday people to capture a moment of their lives on camera serving as a time capsule to show future generations what it was like to be alive on the 24th July 2010.
Telling the pupils what inspired him to make the film, Macdonald said; "It just seemed that nobody’s made a film like this before, and it’s the kind of film you could only really make now, with modern technology, with cameras that are so cheap and readily available.
"Almost everybody in the western world has some form of video camera - on their phone, or at home, or something that their mum and dad use for home movies and that kind of thing - and also there’s YouTube, there’s a way of uploading all this video so that people can look at it.
"So, I wanted to take advantage of those new tools and make a new kind of movie, because that’s what life in a day is, it’s a new kind of movie."
When asked which emotion he wanted the audience to feel, the director told the youngsters; "I wanted them to feel a lot of emotions. There’s something about the fact that these clips of film were made by amateurs, that they’re not done by professionals, that makes them more immediate, more moving, more emotional, I think.
"And I wanted people at the end of the film to think, 'you know, it’s great to be alive', and 'there’s so much great in life that even though things can go wrong at any moment' there’s illness and there’s accidents and there’s death in life - but that actually life is great and you should appreciate it at ever moment that we have it.
"And also, I think, to realise that we are all the same, that actually we all want the same things, the same basic ideas we all share. I think that’s a very powerful thing."
The Oscar®-winner also revealed what his all time favourite film is; "Singin’ In The Rain which is constantly entertaining.
It’s so funny, everyone’s really hilarious in it, and it’s got great dancing. And I don’t really like dancing that much but actually this is dancing where its really incredibly energetic, its stunt dancing, there’s all that running up the wall and stuff.
That is probably about my all time favourite film, because its one of those films that if it comes on TV, I switch it on, it’ll cheer me up no matter what mood I’m in."
Life In A Day has been exclusively screened for hundreds of FILMCLUB members through a special film tour to schools across the UK.
The events were held as part of the charity’s Power of Film campaign, which highlights the unique and wide-reaching ability film has to transform lives.
Life In A Day released in Vue Cinemas across the UK on Friday 17 June.
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