Director Kevin Macdonald has always tried to traverse the line between reality and fiction with his work going back to Touching the Void and its dramatization of a daring story of survival in the Andes. His dramatic work, which includes the Oscar-winning The Last King of Scotland, the thriller State of Play and The Eagle released earlier this year, all strove for realism, whether they were based on real events or straight fiction.
With Life in a Day, Macdonald goes for the ultimate statement in capturing reality. Taking literally 80,000 video submissions via YouTube and other sources, Macdonald pieces together a single day in the life of the world, covering everything from the mundane to the spectacular via the work of amateur filmmakers and everyday people. The results are quite mesmerizing and emotional, especially as you see an event like the Love Parade Stampede in Germany, which caused the death of 21 people on the day chosen, and seeing it from numerous camera angles shows us just how the world has changed with the ability for anyone to be a journalist merely by having a camera.
Just over a year after the day being documented, July 24, 2010, the resulting film is being released, having already made waves at festivals like Sundance and South by SouthWest.
ComingSoon.net has spoken with Macdonald numerous times over the years for his many films, both dramatic and documentary, but to talk with him about Life in a Day, it only seemed appropriate for us to do it on camera.
(Note: There’s a tiny glitch in the interview when our FLIP cam ran out of room due to all the stuff we had been filming at Comic-Con. Oh, the irony of our error!)
Life in a Day opens in select cities on Wednesday, July 26.
