Hannah Rothschild: How did you get into filmmaking?

Kevin McDonald: I was writing a book about my grandfather, the filmmaker and screenwriter Emeric Pressburger, an Eastern European Jew who came via Prague and Berlin to London and formed a partnership with Michael Powell. And the book became a documentary. It was my first experience of working with Channel 4 and what was great was that they were happy to give someone who was very inexperienced a shoot with £120,000, which is more than you probably get these days for a one off documentary film.

What was your next film with them?

I was sent the book Touching the Void and I loved it and felt we should make this not just for TV but also for cinema. Film4 was then under Paul Webster and had a lot of film money. It was pretty much the last production that Film4 made before it collapsed. There’d been five years of flops and then along came Touching the Void and The Motorcycle Diaries.

Did you always see documentaries as a stepping stone to features?

Nothing in my life is planned; it’s all been accidental. I actually used to really quite despise filmmaking and was evangelical about documentaries. But then I made Touching the Void and experienced a little bit more of the control that you can have as a director in terms of controlling the performances of the actors and the special effects and realised that documentary can be a bit limiting sometimes. There are things you can do in documentary that you can’t do in any other form and it is the spontaneity and the intimacy and all those things, but there are also great limitations. But I wanted to stretch myself technically as a director and drama allows that.

The Last King of Scotland has a fresh and documentary feel at times. Is this down to your training in that field?

We could only make that film in eight weeks because I was a documentary film maker. If I’d been a trained dramatic filmmaker I’d probably have been there four months later still trying to get the shots. Nothing went according to plan in Uganda. You would be promised X,Y & Z and it wouldn’t show up or you couldn’t start shooting until-mid day because of such and such. And the extras were traumatised soldiers from the war in the north and weren’t able to act. But if you come from a documentary background you are used to working, making the most of that and using accidents and embracing accidents rather than to trying to control absolutely everything. We shot a lot on two cameras to cover everything.