The luxury that I have is I'm not career-minded, I just live from one film to the next. For a time, I was making documentaries, and all my documentaries were winning awards and stuff, and then I lost interest in documentaries.
I'm not one of those people who sees documentaries as a stepping stone to doing fiction. I love documentaries and watch tons of documentaries. But, I like fiction films a lot, too.
I love the idea of documentaries. I love seeing documentaries, and I love making them. Documentaries are incredibly easy to shoot. The ease with which you can hear something's going on, somebody's going to be somewhere: That sounds so interesting. Pick up your camera and go.
Too many documentaries are intellectual exercises. I want documentaries to be alive.
When I go to the DVD shop, I mostly buy documentaries because you learn a lot from documentaries.
I'm fascinated by documentaries, to begin with. Because of the nature of television, as opposed to theatrical, documentaries can be in this long form and take you on a journey.
One day I decided to move towards documentaries or to move to more directing in documentaries at this point in my career. Why documentaries? I also love fiction. I would love to direct a fiction movie as well. But I think where I come from, reality is so interesting and has in it so many good stories to tell, this is why I'm doing that. I'm enjoying that.
Reality television hasn't killed documentaries, because there are so many great documentaries still being made, but it certainly has changed the landscape.
I love documentaries and I watch documentaries to no end.
For me, the distinction between documentaries and feature films is not so clear - my "documentaries" were largely scripted, rehearsed, and repeated, and have a lot of fantasy and concoction in them.
I hope that not only my documentaries, but everybody's documentaries, last. It will really confuse historians in the next century, because they'll have, in addition to all the print material, they'll have all these pictures to look at.
I started in documentaries, and that was a great help to me with improvisation, because with documentaries, you're handed a big lump of footage, and you have to shape it and make it into a story - which I love doing.
My philosophy as a filmmaker is to inform and entertain at the same time. And when I went away from documentaries into miniseries like 'Roots,' I did the reverse. Instead of just entertaining, I want to inform at the same time.
I don't think there's so much difference between making documentaries and feature films. I think it's even harder to make documentaries.
You make documentaries because you love doing it; it's the only sane reason to make documentaries.
I started in documentaries. I started alone with a camera. Alone. Totally alone. Shooting, editing short documentaries for a French-Canadian part of CBC. So to deal with the camera alone, to approach reality alone, meant so much. I made a few dozen small documentaries, and that was the birth of a way to approach reality with a camera.