Interview: Kevin Macdonald on Bob Marley

Kevin Macdonald tells Stephen Applebaum about his determination to avoid the ‘celebrity bullshit’ in his search for the man behind the legend that is Bob Marley

ONE of the first albums Kevin Macdonald ever bought was Bob Marley’s Uprising. Punk was on its way out, the New Romantics were coming up, and music had gone soft. Marley’s was different, though. “It had a sort of dangerous quality to it that was attractive,” he remembers, 31 years later, “and it had a big impact on me.”

Today, spliff-smoking college kids stick images of the dreadlocked star on their bedroom walls, knowing little about the man – who died of cancer, aged 36, in 1981 – or what he stood for. “He has become a poster,” says Macdonald. “But even worse than that, his music has become background music to listen to in a mall or in an elevator.”

If its meaning is now lost on a lot of listeners in the “rich West”, the story is quite different in the developing world. There the liberationist message of songs such as Get Up, Stand Up and Exodus is still understood loud and clear by people grappling with poverty and political oppression. For many of them, Marley is more than just a musician; he is a philosopher, a prophet, a religious figure.

Macdonald became aware of this while directing The Last King Of Scotland in Uganda in 2005. “Especially in the poorer part of Kampala, there was graffiti and murals of Bob and Rastas, and people playing his music. It struck me that his music and his image still had this huge significance for people so long after his death.”

Someone told him that there is a billion dollars’ worth of counterfeit Bob Marley merchandise available in the world at any one time. “What is that about?” he says. “I thought, ‘What does he represent for people? What is he saying that resonates?’ ” He was fascinated by Marley’s enduring cultural currency, but also wanted to know more about the man behind the legend.

Chris Blackwell, the head of Island Records who found Marley and brought him to a major audience, heard about Macdonald’s interest, and invited him to make a film about a group of Rastafari going from Jamaica to a concert in their spiritual homeland, Ethiopia, to celebrate what would have been Marley’s 60th birthday. Macdonald visited Jamaica in 2006, but “political problems” ultimately stymied the project.

Blackwell then contacted the film producer Steve Bing, who had tried to make a Marley documentary with his Shine A Light director Martin Scorsese (he had too much on his plate), and then with Jonathan Demme (he departed over “creative differences”), and told him about Macdonald.

The result is Marley, a 144-minute authorised documentary, made with the full cooperation of the Marley estate. If anyone assumes this means Macdonald was just a puppet hired to make a hagiography, or that he didn’t have full creative control, the filmmaker made sure that wasn’t the case.

He’d already had a bad experience when a documentary he was working on about Mick Jagger was taken away from him in the cutting room. “I really loved hanging out with him, but it didn’t end up being the happiest experience,” he says. This time he got an assurance from Marley’s son Ziggy that the family wouldn’t interfere. “So I had some sort of contractual security when I took the film on that would have made it very difficult for them. But, in fact, it never came to anything like that at all.”

He began not knowing what kind of film he was going to make, just that he wanted to interview everyone he could find and wanted them to be candid. “My rule of thumb for the film was that I didn’t want any kind of airbrushed celebrity bullshit.” If he achieved nothing else but an “oral history of these people talking,” he told Bing, “that would be worth something.”

It was obvious to him when he interviewed one of Marley’s daughters, Cedella, his widow Rita, and Ziggy, and they talked openly and emotionally about Marley’s long absences and womanising – he had 11 children with seven different women – that they also had their eyes set on the truth. “They weren’t trying to burnish the legend,” says Macdonald. “[The children] just wanted to get the human side of it. Their father has been used in all sorts of different ways to different people’s ends; they feel his image has been misunderstood. That was the thing for them, that this was people who knew him talking about him, and they were driven by wanting to know their father on some level.”

Jealousy, bitterness and money (Macdonald’s words) meant that it took time to get everyone on board, and interviews continued throughout the editing process. Bunny Wailer, who was part of Marley’s original band – and, according to Macdonald, believed he had been written out of the story – took eight months to persuade. Other band members “felt like they weren’t given some of the royalties because the music only really started to make a lot of money after Marley died. So they felt, ‘Why should we take part in a film when we’ve been ripped off?’ ”

Macdonald needed everyone he could get, not least because there is no known surviving footage of Marley before 1973, by which point he was 11 years into his career. “And even after that there’s not that much. He remains always just out of reach, he’s a bit of a mystery,” he says. “You don’t see him, you see the space around him. And because all the people are talking about him, you begin to feel him, but you don’t really feel like you’re grasping all of him.”

He could have used dramatic reconstruction the way he did in Touching The Void. Instead, he chose a more classical approach, using interviews, concert footage, photographs, and Marley’s music to tell the artist’s story. Formally, the film is his most conventional documentary to date, but this is entirely consistent with the subject, he insists. “One of the themes of the film is integrity and honesty and trying to actually get at the flesh and blood individual behind the legend. I felt like I didn’t want to put myself in the way of the material.”

Moreover, there was so much ground to cover – so much historical and anthropological detail to get in – that putting a layer of style between the audience and the material could have made it confusing.

Macdonald takes us from Marley’s birth in the village of Nine Mile, Jamaica, through his move to the poor neighbourhood of Trench Town and conversion to Rastafarianism, to his success as an artist, and, finally, his last desperate bid to defeat his cancer at a clinic in snowy Bavaria.

Some may be surprised to learn that his father, Norval Marley, was a white Englishman, which made Marley an outsider and played a key role in his political and spiritual life. “That worked against Bob,” says Neville Garrick, the Wailers’ artistic director and occasional percussionist. “Where he went to school [in Nine Mile], there were guys who wanted to beat him up, and that’s how he learned to run fast.” When he got to Trench Town, his light skin set him apart from the darker-skinned majority. “All throughout his life he dealt with obstacles, and these were some of the things that Kevin was able to into get the film: what made Bob Marley.”

Marley’s struggles informed his songwriting, says Garrick. “These weren’t throwaway lyrics, these were things he actually experienced. And this is why we’re speaking about him today, because nothing has changed.”

Indeed, Macdonald found footage (there wasn’t room for it in the film) showing lyrics from Get Up, Stand Up – a song used by Amnesty International – daubed on the wall next to where Mohammed Bouazizi, the fruit seller whose suicide sparked the Arab Spring, had had his stall. When the Berlin Wall came down, revellers sang Three Little Birds, with the famous lyric: “Don’t worry about a thing/Cause every little thing gonna be all right.”

“So, you know,” Garrick muses, “he has really been a cultural icon by being true to himself and caring about the rest of the world.”

Macdonald is in no doubt about Marley’s stature. “I came to believe that Bob is one of the major cultural figures of the 20th century,” he says. “People listen to The Beatles, but while they were muscially influential they weren’t culturally influential in quite the same way. You can go into the back of beyond in a little Indian village and they will listen to Bob Marley. But they’re not going to be listening to The Beatles or The Rolling Stones.” «

• Marley is in cinemas from Friday