Directors: Jacqui Morris & David Morris / Producer: Jacqui Morris / Executive Producers: Rankin, Christo Hird, Steve Milne / A Frith Street Films production in association with Dartmouth Films and British Film Company / 89 minutes
I first worked on McCullin in the summer of 2010, when I cut a trailer for Jacqui Morris, the film’s director. She was trying to raise interest in a film that (unbelievably) no-one was interested in – photographer Don McCullin’s story. Jacqui and her brother, David, somehow kept going and two and a half years later, here we are with a great movie and two Bafta nominations. So, if there’s a take home message from the making of this film, it’s this: believe in your vision, believe in the strength of your material and believe in your ability to get your film on screen and in front of an audience. All of us who worked on this film – myself, the two other editors, Andy McGraw and Alison Carter, the cameramen (and women), the audio guys at Molinare (Tom Foster, Nick Ashe and Steve Cookman), Mike Curd at Silverglade, our composer Alex Baronowski, our Exec producers Rankin, Christo Hird from Dartmouth Films and Steve Milne from British Film Company – believed. And now everyone else does too – which is testament to Jacqui, David and Don himself.
“This searching documentary portrait of the photographer Don McCullin is also, necessarily, a distillation of the most harrowing atrocities witnessed since the Second World War… Directors Jacqui and David Morris have done a good, unfussy job with dynamite material.” Anthony Quinn, The Independent “Just watching this impressive documentary, you feel a little unhinged by the scale of suffering.” Cath Clarke, Time Out “Devastating black and white images of humanity’s most shameful moments… I didn’t shed a tear throughout 157 bombastic minutes of Les Misérables. Yet when the lights came up at the end of McCullin, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. This is real cinema.” Jackson Caines, The Tab. “Here’s a man who has witnessed what he terms “the price of humanity”: his pictures and this compelling documentary are eloquent testimony to the darkness and light inherent in those words.” Trevor Johnston, Radio Times “This is searing, insightful, deeply upsetting stuff.” Adam Woodward, Little White Lies ““War is partly madness, mostly insanity and the rest is schizophrenia,” says the renowned photojournalist Don McCullin, in this thought-provoking career retrospective by Jacqui and David Morris. If anyone would know it is McCullin, who spent 18 years of his life shooting nightmares in Vietnam, Biafra, Cambodia and the Congo. His recollections are as sobering as his images, and a great many of both will embed themselves in your head.” Robbie Collin, Daily Telegraph “For all the discomfort triggered by these photographs and their brutally vivid portrayal of humanity, the narrated montage delivers on the promise made by the beautiful and haunting opening credits: this is a film that will stay with you for a long time… The exceptional editing skills of Andy McGraw and David Fairhead manage to tie together the abrupt rhythm of depicted events in a mellifluous fashion.” Filmwatch.org “To bear witness is to offer us the tools to take stock and change our behaviour – and so the work of war photographer Don McCullin isn’t simply about having a ringside seat for some of the most brutal conflicts in the 20th century, it is about trying to educate and therefore hopefully stop atrocities happening again… This extraordinary documentary, made by Camden-based Dartmouth Films and nominated this week for a Bafta, is a biography of the photojournalist… Watching this documentary on the same day as Django Unchained was a sobering experience. While Tarantino’s film is full of a bloodlust-infatuation with violence, McCullin’s film makes you wonder what our infatuation with watching nasty stuff happen in fiction is based on.” Dan Carrier, Camden New Journal “And now comes Django Unchained, with its certificated warning to the unaware, or perhaps welcoming words to the aware, that it contains scenes of “strong bloody violence”… the subjects Tarantino finds consistently exciting are people being murdered, people screaming in pain, people begging for mercy… The next day I saw a documentary about the war photographer Don McCullin, whose pictures of wars and disasters have informed so much of our understanding of the world over the past half-century. In the film, his pictures from Biafra, Vietnam, the Congo and Beirut are supplemented by some disturbing and rarely seen footage from the same conflicts. Heart-breaking cruelty, no slow-motion blood: the sight of real violence tends not to inspire or seduce.” Ian Jack, The Guardian “McCullin is an incredible, multifaceted documentary, at once a paralysing account of war and humanity and a heart rending portrait of a figure plagued by demons. If a picture can paint a thousand words, then this is a film of encyclopaedic proportions enclosed within 95 spellbinding minutes.” John-Paul Pierrot, Picturehouse Blog “Without forced sentiment or glorification of the protagonist, the unjust tragedy of war is reiterated most bluntly; while the extraordinary life of this reporter is unforgettable, it’s his images which remain with the viewer far beyond the credits.” Tom Bevan, Plastik Magazine