A Quote by 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
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.
I'm interested in psychic phenomena, I'm interested in things that are happening invisibly beneath the surface.
I think we need to make documentaries about fantasy and storytelling. I think I just started to scratch the surface of a method that allows us to do that. We want to be sucked into the events, suspend our disbelief and imagine that this is a fiction, but actually putting onscreen the gap between who the people are and who they want to be and therefore opening the question about why they want to be this person.
The underlying tension of a lot of my art is to try and look through the surface appearance of things. Inevitably, one way of getting beneath the surface is to introduce a hole, a window into what lies below.
If I could make a decent living doing documentaries, I would. I don't really care about [the other] stuff so much. But you can't make a living doing documentaries. Although it has affected my work, at least in that I think I make fairly realistic-looking pictures.
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.
The message films that try to be message films always fail. Likewise with documentaries. The documentaries that work best are the ones that eschew a simple message for an odd angle. I found that one of the most spectacular films about the Middle East was 'Waltz With Bashir,' or 'The Gatekeepers,' or '5 Broken Cameras.'
Some filmmakers are more eclectic than others. I'm not one of those! I'm interested in what I'm interested in, which is films about the world, about what's going on. I started in TV documentaries with 'World in Action,' and those interests feed into the films I make now.
I don't think there's so much difference between making documentaries and feature films. I think it's even harder to make documentaries.
We want to make politics sort of entertaining. If it is entertaining, people are going to be interested in it, and if they are interested in it, they might think more about it and maybe involve themselves in some way down the line.
I like to just follow what I find compelling. In order for me to be compelling, I have to be compelled. I don't try to think about what people are interested in seeing, I have to be interested. For me, that works the best.
Phonetics, you know speech, all this kind of stuff, phonograph, simple, but when you unpack the meaning it actually kind of expands out and that is what I was going for in my book "Sound Unbound" was to try and get people to figure out how do we unpack some of the meanings that go into these kinds of sonically coded landscapes.
There's no other way to learn about it, except through documentaries. I encourage documentarians to continue telling stories about World War II. I think documentaries are the greatest way to educate an entire generation that doesn't often look back to learn anything about the history that provided a safe haven for so many of us today. Documentaries are the first line of education, and the second line of education is dramatization, such as The Pacific.
All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
... freshness trembles beneath the surface of Everyday, a joy perpetual to all who catch its opal lights beneath the dust of habit.
You have to be aware that whenever you leave your house, you're probably going to be photographed by someone somewhere. Maybe those pictures will surface. Maybe they won't. Maybe those videos will surface. Maybe they won't. But you have to always be aware that it could be happening.
It's not unusual to find big political shifts that take place beneath the surface before they're visible above the surface.
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