Documentaries Quotes

Reportage is interesting only when placed in a fictional context, but fiction is interesting only if it is validated by a documentary context.

I mostly like documentaries, so I always think things that happened in real life are so astounding that why would you make a movie about something fake.

I'm strictly a movie person. I mean, I watch the HBO documentaries and Netflix.

There's a documentary film-maker called Werner Herzog, who's a German film-maker. I really dig his stuff, I'd love to chat with him.

I don't think that there is any hard and fast rule that says that documentary has to be linear at all.

If we have anything to offer, as filmmakers and as TV makers now, it's this ability to feel as close to a documentary as you can get in a narrative form.

I don't like things about serial killers. There's so much serial killer information out there in documentaries constantly. A lot of it's just sort of gratuitous or it's almost like pornographic, really. There's no reason for it being shown.

Everybody is doing you a favor when you're doing a documentary. You can't pressure them into it.

For me, as a documentary filmmaker, I'm interested in telling stories of real people whose experiences tell us something about ourselves or our history, or who we are and our potential.

Ten years ago I was not heavily involved in the film world but on reflection it was a boom time with the mineral boom happening, so there was immense growth for industrial training films, documentaries to do with the mining, and the outback world.

After I read all the medical journals and watched all the documentaries, I still didn't understand the physical sensation of ticking and where it comes from and what it feels like

While it is increasingly possible for filmmakers to find an audience on their own (something that is particularly popular amongst documentary filmmakers) I'm still a believer in the "specialist". By this I mean, I back myself as a filmmaker, but I leave the marketing and distribution of my films to the experts.

Twenty to thirty years ago, who was making documentary films? Nobody. Well, relatively few people. It was an art form that had limited theatrical distribution, if any at all. Some television distribution, but relatively small audiences regardless. And in the intervening years it's become more and more popular with a lot of people.

And to be fair, most documentaries are half an hour too long, anyway. Let's not kid ourselves. Most movies are an hour too long. I will say that the internet has changed everything in terms of distribution and because of iTunes and other outlets like that, length is no longer something you really think about, in my opinion. It's irrelevant.

["Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas"] is a very hard book to translate to film because there's so much interior monologue. The what if factor. I tried to write it cinematically and let the dialogue carry it but I forgot about the interior monologue. It's kind of hard to show what's going on in the head. I think we should do it like a documentary.

Documentaries are my favorite thing, and the more depressing, the better.

When I do documentaries, my best information ends up on the cutting-room floor. People have trouble dealing with sexual honesty.

People outside the documentary world don't realize how time-consuming making a documentary film is there is a lot of responsibility, and in order to make something good you need time.

All of these years that I have been singing, no one has done a documentary about my music as far as I'm concerned.

Joe Berlinger's documentary 'Whitey' is so hard-hitting and compelling, you can't take your eyes off the screen.

It's the best - combining the mediums of television, documentary, and books, to give you this transmedia experience for kids, for families, and for teachers.

Even the best documentaries reach tens of thousands in their cinematic window. I believe that by launching online, we could potentially reach millions.

A lot of the commercials that I was doing were very slice-of-life, emotional, documentary-style, not big and cinematic and ultimately like the kind of movie I wanted to make.

My documentaries have always been very much constructed in the spirit of dominant cinema. From the time I started making non-fiction, I was mainly interested in designing and creating documentaries like fiction, so it was a natural evolution to try and embark on doing a dramatic narrative.

One thing people often forget when making a documentary is that, in a sense, you still have to cast, find a star, and it has all of those built-in challenges.

Alejandro Amenabar is a different kind of director than I lot of the directors I've asked for. He really asks you to enter his dream as opposed to, you know, a guy like Sidney Lumet or something is going to ask you to create a character almost like a documentary. He wants you to make the people really real and he's going to capture it like a documentarian.

My first priority when taking pictures is to achieve clarity. A good documentary photograph transmits the information of the situation with the utmost fidelity; achieving it means understanding the nuances of lighting and composition, and also remembering to keep the lenses clean and the cameras steady.

Documentary film without nuanced journalistic sourcing risks being sensational, tendentious or broad-brushed.

I personally can watch an eight-hour documentary on Woody Allen because I'm fascinated by him. But, an audience can't really sit through more than two and a half hours on any movie. It doesn't matter if Marlon Brando came back from the dead. It's just impossible.

Recently, while I was in England, I saw a documentary on the BBC about the border between India and Pakistan at Wagah. When the border closes each evening around six o' clock, the soldiers on each side do these amazing high-stepping peacock march-offs (like a dance-off). The displays are almost identical on each side and thousands gather to watch them. Though they're patrolling along their separate borders, what comes across is how similar they are.

I always remember what Bob Dylan said in that [Martin] Scorsese documentary on him. When he was asked about Joan Baez's complaints about the way he treated her when they were together, Dylan laughed and said, "It's impossible to be in love and wise at the same time."

Society? Can we trust us? Doubt it. We're probably not even real, as was revealed in the popular documentary The Matrix. That bloke next door? Made of pixels. Your co-workers? Pixels. You? One pixel. One measly pixel. You haven't even got shoes, for Christ's sake.

Since I come from documentary background and my father is a documentary filmmaker, for me the core essence of cinema is it's social statement. It is somewhat similar to the work of a journalist, just on a different level. This is the kind of cinema I enjoy.

This whole business of documentary being a second-class citizen is bullshit. A documentary can be as interesting, as dramatic, as sad, as funny, blah, blah, blah, as a fiction movie. Or it can be as awful as a fiction movie!

I was painting sets, working in editorial as an assistant, driving their trucks... lying that I knew how to drive a truck... and doing commercials and documentaries.

First of all, being a woman is an incredible asset in many ways in making documentaries. You can be less intimidating, you have a heightened emotional sensitivity and you have the ability to listen to multiple conversations at one time and multi-task.

With documentary-film projects, you hope you highlight an area of concern people haven't thought about before. A lot of times, I'm asking myself - 'This seems to be a significant problem. What can be done that hasn't been done?

My wife made me watch this documentary about the Iraq War, and there was a really powerful moment where they followed some civilian whose family had been killed. This was 5 or 10 minutes of this woman talking, and it was extremely arresting. You realize how you never hear from the person on the receiving end of a war without a reporter stepping in to compartmentalize the story. Usually they're just a few shots at the end of a news report, wailing and screaming at a funeral.

I watched a documentary about the immigrant crisis around the world. And it does make me blush at all the times I've stood up on the stage and given your speech about the healing power of fiction.

I think when I envisioned my documentaries, what I wanted to do when I left, I had no business doing those documentaries. I didn't know what I was doing. I was delving into an arena that I had no experience in, and Netflix paired me up with two documentarians that really executed my vision perfectly. That was great, to see that. All of a sudden I'm at Sundance, and those are premiering. I just thought, "Wow, they were four ideas I pitched one day, and now it's coming to fruition on this scale."

The great thing about 'The Office' and it being single-camera and the documentary style is that it's mostly a comedy, but 10 percent of it is, we get to show the existential angst that exists in the American workplace.

Dice Rules is one of the most appalling movies I have ever seen. It could not be more damaging to the career of Andrew Dice Clay if it had been made as a documentary by someone who hated him. The fact that Clay apparently thinks this movie is worth seeing is revealing and sad, indicating that he not only lacks a sense of humor, but also ordinary human decency.

For some reason or other there was in me the desire to see the world clean and fresh and alive, as primitive things are clean and fresh and alive. The so-called documentary picture left me wanting something.

When was the last time you saw a documentary that fundamentally changed the way you think? ...Pandora’s Promise is built around what should be the real liberal agenda: looking at an issue not with orthodoxy, but with open eyes.

Voicing acting is usually fun. I'm very curious about that world. I'm a fan of documentaries, as well, and the voice kind of makes it right. Mostly for me, though, it's all about the acting -you don't have to get hair and makeup and the whole bit. You just can have fun with the acting.

The picture is not a documentary, ... It's a drama that has to be crafted. Reality is not art. You have to make choices when you're trying to make something work. And the choices we make I think are accurate. There aren't any lies in it. There are assumpt

I began filmmaking in high school, at the Chicago Academy for the Arts. My first documentary was about a dysfunctional obese middle-aged carpet cleaner named Bill, who lived with his Mom, and his love affair with Anna, a drug-addicted prostitute. I made that when I was 16.

An important documentary that sheds light on one of the most terrifying realities in the U.S. today—the commercial sexual exploitation of young girls. TRICKED is a comprehensive portrait of all the players in this human rights abuse: survivors, traffickers, johns and cops. Everyone should see this film.

Documentary photography is becoming more illustrative as people become more familiar with photography’s limitations and vulnerabilities. Reality has always been interpreted through layers of manipulation, abstraction, and intervention. But now, it is very much on the surface. I like this honesty about its dishonesty. Every photograph has many truths and none. Photographs are ambiguous, no matter how seemingly scientific they appear to be. They are always subject to an uncontrollable context. This is a tired statement, but worth repeating.

For more than twenty years by my own work and personal initiative, I have gathered from all the old streets of Vieux Paris photographic plates, 18 x 24 format, artistic documents of the beautiful civil architecture of the 16th to the 19th century: the old hôtels, historic or curious houses, beautiful facades, beautiful doors, beautiful woodwork, door knockers, old fountains This vast artistic and documentary collection is today complete. I can truthfully say that I possess all of Vieux Paris.