A Quote by Fatih Akin
Maybe every two films you need to do documentary to tell what you really want to tell and not be limited by the medium. With documentary you don't create the reality you have to hunt the reality.
Related Quotes
It's difficult to make movies. For me it was easier, as a refugee in Switzerland, to make documentary films, because I didn't need a lot of money for it. The way I tell my story or my opinion would be very similar in both fiction and documentary forms. But I found I could speak more effectively to convey this brutal reality through documentary than I could through fiction.
I need there to be documentary photographers, because my work is meta-documentary; it is a commentary about the documentary use of photography.
I'm a huge fan of the Ken Burns documentary style, big time. I love documentaries full stop. I'm a big documentary fan. That's my reality. I don't like reality TV. I like it like that.
Somehow, in the novel format, I don't really like to do upfront, ideological discussion. In my heart, literature remains a poetic and ambiguous medium. On the other hand, I trained as a documentary filmmaker in film school, so my films very much reflect reality and socio-political problems. They're less subtle I would say.
When you're making a real documentary, you shoot it and the movie happens. You don't make - this sounds corny - you don't make a documentary, a documentary makes you. It really does.
I've always been interested in how to present something that relates to our reality - which is not really... I don't even know if documentary itself does as good a job. It has its own problems in trying to get at the reality of the situation.
In a one-hour documentary, you can tell maybe ten stories. That's how the documentary is structured. I wrote to forty of the greatest historians of both African and African-American history, and hired them as consultants. I had them submit what they thought were the indispensable stories, the ones they felt this series absolutely had to include.
When you say documentary, you have to have a sophisticated ear to receive that word. It should be documentary style, because documentary is police photography of a scene and a murder ... that's a real document. You see, art is really useless, and a document has use. And therefore, art is never a document, but it can adopt that style. I do it. I'm called a documentary photographer. But that presupposes a quite subtle knowledge of this distinction.
If you're a great documentary filmmaker, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're a great narrative filmmaker. There are fantastic documentary filmmakers that can't direct actors. You don't have to do that in a documentary, if it's a real documentary.
Most people look at a feature film and say, "It's just a movie." For me there is no border or wall between fiction and documentary filmmaking. In documentaries, you have to deal with real people and their real feelings - you are working with real laughter, happiness, sadness. To try to reflect the reality is not the same as reality itself. That's why I think that making a good documentary is much harder than making a good feature film.
The key fact missed most often by social scientists utilizing documentary films for data, is this: documentary films are not found or reported things; they're made things.
I don't really believe that documentary is objective reality and fiction is all illusion.
There is a documentary element in my films, a very strong documentary element, but by documentary element, I mean an element that's out of control, that's not controlled by me. And that element is the words, the language that people use, what they say in an interview. They're not written, not rehearsed. It's spontaneous, extemporaneous material. People
Reality shows are for reality stars. Celebrities do, maybe, Dancing With The Stars, maybe they might do Celebrity Wife Swap, but dealing with strangers, with people you don't know, in a real situation? People say it's fake, it's based on what they tell other people to do but won't tell you, but you still have a gut reaction, you know.
We need to find another way or another shape or an allegory or something that tells us more. Even Vagabond - it was a fiction but it was really a documentary. I mean, it has the texture of documentary. Even if I made up every line, it has the texture of being true.
You kind of form a bond with your subjects, in a way. You're in it together. To a degree that people don't realize, documentary films - or at least the kind of documentary films I'm interested in - are a collaborative undertaking with the subjects.
Related Authors
Costa-Gavras Quotes
French
Film director
Franny Armstrong Quotes
British
Film director
Gabe Polsky Quotes
American
Film director
Hassan Blasim Quotes
Iraqi
Film director
James Ponsoldt Quotes
American
Film director
Jaume Collet-Serra Quotes
American
Film director
Jean-Pierre Jeunet Quotes
French
Film director
Joseph McGinty Nichol Quotes
American
Film director
Julian Huxley Quotes
English
Film director
Kimberly Peirce Quotes
American
Film director
Larry Clark Quotes
American
Film director
Laura Poitras Quotes
American
Film director
Len Wiseman Quotes
American
Film director
Oren Moverman Quotes
American
Film director
Ti West Quotes
American
Film director
