I like clipboards, hi-vis vests, Windows XP and finding ghosts in places that aren't haunted.
Inspirations include COI films, Donald Sutherland gently stroking a peach, bureaucracy, sadness, technology, institutions and the occasional tasteless joke.
“Alec's behaviour is good; he is polite and well mannered. He mixes well with others and thinks as an individual. He rarely gets involved in silly mishaps.” Mrs McKye, Year 4
I make films about ordinary people trying to remain human while careless machinery carries on around them.
I live on a Scottish island and make most of this stuff there. Occasionally the films escape and people show them in cinemas.
Nobody has to care about the films I make. I've no-one to blame and no-one to impress. No list of awards. Not because there aren't any, but because they're not why I make films. I just don't know how to stop.
Unfundable since 1976.
THIS ONE.
I want to make films about the world I live in. Not the world as I remember it, or the world as I might wish it to be. This one.
It's strange, contradictory, frequently baffling and full of people whose experiences I don't share and whose lives I don't always understand.
I don't think I have to understand everybody. I do think I have a responsibility to be curious.
I want my characters to have the same freedom as the people around me. To be complicated, ordinary, difficult, funny, generous, selfish, surprising and occasionally impossible to explain.
I don't want people to have to be good, admirable or understandable before they're allowed to belong. Nobody should have to justify their presence in a story by representing something larger than themselves.
I don't want to make films that explain people to other people. I want to make films in which people are allowed to exist.
And I believe in extending people the same ordinary dignity I expect for myself. You don't have to understand someone to respect them. You don't have to share their experience to recognise it. And you don't lose anything by allowing somebody else to be themselves.
That doesn't mean everybody is right, or nice, or interesting. It doesn't mean we have to agree. We don't. The disagreements, contradictions, misunderstandings and spectacular stupidity are part of what makes being alive so fascinating.
I'm suspicious of nostalgia for a world that was simpler, better or more recognisable. Particularly when what's being mourned is often nothing more than the comfort of not having to think about people who were always there.
The world hasn't been ruined by becoming unfamiliar to some of us.
It's not perfect. It never was. But it's extraordinary, constantly changing and full of fucking people.
I DON'T WANT ANY OLD WORLD BACK.
I WANT TO LIVE IN THIS ONE.