Top 22 Quotes & Sayings by Davis Guggenheim

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American writer Davis Guggenheim.

Last updated on December 21, 2024.

Philip Davis Guggenheim is an American writer, director and producer. His credits include NYPD Blue, ER, 24, Alias, The Shield, Deadwood, and the documentaries An Inconvenient Truth, The Road We've Traveled, Waiting for "Superman", Inside Bill's Brain: Decoding Bill Gates and He Named Me Malala. Since 2006, Guggenheim is the only filmmaker to release three different documentaries that were ranked within the top 100 highest-grossing documentaries of all time.

American - Writer | Born: November 3, 1963

Source: Wikipedia

If a movie can take you to the place that I've been to, and the audience can experience what I've experienced, then I feel - success might not be the right word, but I'm satisfied that I did my job.

Davis Guggenheim

If you look at great reform, it always starts from parents. If you look at the movement to reform the special education movement, it was driven by parents who were fierce advocates for their children.

Davis Guggenheim

Is being negative more journalistic for some reason? I don't know. But I don't set out to make puff pieces and I don't set out to be blindly positive. I just can't do a movie about something I don't care about.

Davis Guggenheim

I don't set out to make movies about famous people, though I guess I have. I think what I set out to do is to try to understand things that we don't understand. Or to find out what is blocking us from understanding things we should understand.

Davis Guggenheim

The more I work, the more I try to keep myself open like a raw nerve. When I feel things in a story, I want the audience to feel them as well.

Davis Guggenheim

I'm not one of these guys who thinks testing is the only thing. But testing is a piece but there has to be more human ways to evaluate what job teachers are doing and we have to do a better job of that.

Davis Guggenheim

It's interesting when you talk to someone who has really been through something very, very terrible. They are less likely to talk about it. People who have had a bad day because their soup was cold can talk about their 'suffering' all day long.

Davis Guggenheim

You look at the trajectories; and as our schools have declined, you see the other alternatives increase, private school, home schooling, all of the other alternatives are going up.

Davis Guggenheim

The good news is everybody believes in education, Republican or Democrat, we want great schools.

Davis Guggenheim

I don't like it when a filmmaker has an agenda and I don't know it. When the contract is not clear, that's when there's a problem.

Davis Guggenheim

The very first film, documentary that I made, was called 'The First Year.' It was 11 years ago and I followed these five novice teachers. I was actually with them on their first day of school and followed them for their first year.

Davis Guggenheim

It's so interesting, when you're a parent, you have these big ideals. Before I had kids, you imagine this sort of egalitarian society. You project this perfect world on the path you're going to set for your kids.

Davis Guggenheim

I do a lot of audio-only interviews at first just to capture a feeling and go deeper, as if you're having the most quiet, intimate conversation you've ever had with someone you love. If I can get that tone of intimacy, then the film will have that.

Davis Guggenheim

Often I've met people who are famous, and as you get to know them, they disappoint you.

Davis Guggenheim

I'm interested in a realization that's hiding beneath the surface, and maybe that's what documentaries can do best, is to try to unpack that and make you think about it.

Davis Guggenheim

Underneath it, in 'An Inconvenient Truth', we talked a lot about the unspoken decisions that people make in their heads.

Davis Guggenheim

Too many documentaries are intellectual exercises. I want documentaries to be alive.

Davis Guggenheim

As a filmmaker, the most dramatic and the most dread-inspiring thing is when the audience can see more than the characters themselves can see.

Davis Guggenheim

I was a terrible student. When I went to Sidwell Friends, there were 100 kids in my class. I was the worst student, by far. But I had a few teachers who, despite all that, believed in me.

Davis Guggenheim

Our schools are not geared toward building, preparing kids for the modern economy.

Davis Guggenheim

The Muslim world is portrayed as a monolith that is consistently scary and negative, and as much as you can be an open-minded person, if the only diet of information you get is scary images of men in beards, that starts to play on you. But you come to find out that the Muslim world is not a monolith.

Davis Guggenheim