Kevin Macdonald's Definitive Doc Marley Nominated for BAFTA Award

Chelsea Director Kevin Macdonald's definitive documentary about reggae legend Bob Marley has been nominated for a BAFTA Award. The nomination places Kevin Macdonald's film amongst very good company. Check BAFTA's full list of nominations, here.

If you haven't seen Marley yet, and you're a fan of the man, the music, and the legend, check it out on Netflix or iTunes.

Kevin Macdonald Shoots New Nike Spot with Cristiano Ronaldo & Rafael Nadal

Magnolia Releases Official Trailer for "Marley," Chelsea Director Kevin MacDonald's Forthcoming Documentary

Magnolia, which acquired the rights to Kevin MacDonald's new feature documentary, "Marley," just a few weeks ago on February 6th (Bob Marley's Birthday), has released the first official trailer to North American audiences. The film will open nationwide on 4/20. 

Check it out below:

"Marley" had its world premiere at the Berlinale International Film Festival earlier this month, and will have its North American premiere next month at SXSW 2012. 


For more details on Kevin MacDonald's "Marley," check out this story and more from the Hollywood Reporter after the jump, here.

Q&A With Chelsea Director Kevin MacDonald

Oscar winner Kevin MacDonald sat down with Huffington Post to discuss his new film, Life in A Day, which opened in theaters July 29, 2011.

In the Q&A, MacDonald discusses his inspiration for the YouTube global film experiment and what he took away from the unique experience.  "I got [a] sense of this tremendous life force, that people -- even when they're in their last hours or days of life, confronting death -- they still have this sense of wanting to live, of life being special and wonderful," said MacDonald.

The rest of the interview can be found here.

Kevin Macdonald's The Eagle - in theaters today

Right on the heels of Life in a Day's much buzzed-about Sundance premiere, Chelsea director Kevin Macdonald has another new release in theaters with  The Eagle, starring Channing Tatum and Jamie Bell. Check out the trailer above, and catch it now in theaters - nothing like swords and sandals for an antidote to the freezing weather.

Kevin Macdonald and Alex Gibney screen at Sundance this week

Sundance is always one of our favorite weeks of the year, and this year sees the premieres of some seriously exciting projects from two of Chelsea's own: Alex Gibney's joint directorial project with Allison Ellwood,  The Magic Trip, and Kevin Macdonald's collaboration with YouTube, Life in a Day.

For The Magic Trip, Alex and Allison compiled never before seen footage from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest author (and subject of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) Ken Kesey's trip to the 1964 New York World's Fair with his infamous band of merry pranksters, a psychedelic bus, and a seemingly bottomless supply of LSD. Needless to say the results are captivating -- both as further insight into the mind of a polarizing figure, and as something of a time capsule of the 1960s.

Kevin Macdonald's Life in a Day also centers around around real life footage, though in a completely different way. Sponsored by YouTube, this unprecedented project enlisted users across the globe to capture a moment of their lives on camera, all on one day: July 24, 2010. The word was spread, and the world responded with more than 80,000 submissions; over 5,000 hours of deeply personal, powerful film clips were uploaded from contributors from Australia to Zambia, resulting in Life in a Day, a compilation of the most compelling images honed by Macdonald, executive producer Ridley Scott and his team, and a crew of talented editors. The film’s 2011 Sundance Film Festival premiere will coincide with its world premiere, thanks to a live broadcast from the festival at 5PM PST on Thursday, January 27 on the Life in a Day YouTube channel - check out this clip from the movie below, and get online with us to watch the world premiere!

Reminder: Life In A Day Shoots Tomorrow!

Everyone get your cameras ready and your interesting friends in one place, because tomorrow is the shoot day for Kevin Macdonald's "Life In A Day" Youtube project. Make your film tomorrow and you have a week to upload it on to Youtube at www.youtube.com/lifeinaday. The Youtube home page has been having a countdown for the last few days, and email reminders have been flying fast and thick, so it's shaping up to be a serious event! The above video is instructions from the main editor of the project, Joe Walker, with some helpful and inspirational words about making your film. So get ready, get filming, and hopefully we'll see you at Sundance!

Kevin Macdonald + Youtube = Big News!

Logging on to Youtube yesterday, you may have noticed a site takeover by a project called "Life in a Day". The idea is that on July 24th, 2010, everyone around the world is going to upload a video documenting their day and answering the questions, "What do you love?" and "What do you fear?" Then a number of videos will be selected and stitched together into a documentary/time capsule about life on Planet Earth on 7/24/2010, and the resulting film will premiere at Sundance 2011. And which Oscar-winning director is at the helm this unprecedented, crowd-sourced, new media extravaganza? Chelsea's own Kevin Macdonald! Which you probably guessed from both the headline of this post and the video of Kevin discussing the project, but it's always fun to have a dramatic reveal.

Shoot coverage is here and Creativity coverage is here. And there is also the CNN story here and the official Google Blog entry is here. And I'm sure there's more to come! You've already seen Kevin talking about the project, so here's the trailer video:

Two Kevin Macdonald Films Make "Top 100 Films of the Noughties"

The Times of London has just released their "Top 100 Films of the Noughties" and Chelsea's Kevin Macdonald made the list twice! The only limit for the list were that the film have been released in the UK between 2000 and 2009, so the competition was stiff.

You'll find Kevin's Touching the Void at number forty-five, and The Last King of Scotland all the way up at number seven. The Times wrote:

Forest Whitaker gives one of the great performances of the decade as Idi Amin. He nails the Ugandan dictator’s deadly charm — he’s a charismatic monster; part amiable buffoon, part stone-cold killer.

The link to the full article is here and not to brag any more than we might have already, but make sure to take a look at the lead picture illustrating the article. And as for hot-off-the-presses Macdonald news, Kevin has just finished shooting The Eagle of the Ninth in Scotland and is going straight into the edit. Look for it in theaters everywhere early fall of 2010.

State of Play Interview with Kevin MacDonald in The New York Times

As we all know, MacDonald's State of Play is coming to theaters on April 17th, and the New York Times interviewed the director about the film and adapting this cult TV series to the big screen. Here's an excerpt, and catch the full interview here.

"I loved the series, but it never crossed my mind you could make it into a film,” the movie’s director, Kevin Macdonald, said in late March, talking on his cellphone from the back of a London taxicab. And even when he was shown a script, he added, he had a lot of reservations. “It’s sort of like what they say about books,” he said. “You know, good books make bad movies, and it’s better to make a movie from a bad book. This was a very good series, and I worried that we would just let down all the people who loved the original.” What changed his mind, he added, was his realization that the emotional core of “State of Play” involved themes of friendship and loyalty that could be translated anywhere.

Kevin MacDonald's State of Play Trailer

Check out Kevin's trailer for State of Play:

Based on the BBC mini-series of the same title, a team of investigative reporters work alongside a police detective to try to solve the murder of a congressman's mistress. The original series starred Bill Nighy and launched the career of James McAvoy (who later starred in Kevin MacDonald's Last King of Scotland), and the film stars Russell Crowe, Ben Affleck, Helen Mirren, Rachel McAdams, and Chelsea favorite Jason Bateman.

Theatrical Release: April 17, 2009.

Welcome to Chelsea POV

Welcome to the Chelsea blog, an ongoing collection of everything that doesn't fit on the rest of the site. Upcoming director's features, television projects, music videos, news, interesting links, and, most inciminating, pictures of staff parties. Stay tuned!