A Quote by Frederick Wiseman
Documentary filmmaking ruins you for real life, because you learn to be extremely attentive.
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I think documentary filmmaking is a braver way to make films because it's real, and you're really there.
Most songs come from being attentive. Attentive to life, attentive to scripture, attentive to your heart. Pay attention!
I'm very influenced by documentary filmmaking and independent filmmaking, by a lot of noir and films from the '40s. Those are my favorite. And then, filmmaking from the '70s is a big influence for me.
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.
What's great about documentary, it seems to me, is that it can be experimental filmmaking. You have a license to do a lot of diverse things under the umbrella of 'documentary.'
What's great about documentary genre, it seems to me, is that it can be experimental filmmaking. You have a license to do a lot of diverse things under the umbrella of "documentary."
With portable cameras and affordable data and non-linear digital editing, I think this is a golden age of documentary filmmaking. These new technologies mean we can make complicated, beautifully crafted and cinematic films about real-life stories.
Documentary filmmaking has all the challenges and hardships of narrative filmmaking without any of the infrastructure or support. That's both a blessing and a curse.
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.
Filmmaking is about moments. In real life, things might take six months, a year, but [in filmmaking] you have to create the moment where it happened.
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 need there to be documentary photographers, because my work is meta-documentary; it is a commentary about the documentary use of photography.
I became a documentary filmmaker because I wanted to make socially conscious films. I never studied filmmaking - everything I have learned has been on the field.
That's the beauty of filmmaking: it's extremely humbling because you do it all over again all the time.
As the world of independent feature filmmaking became increasingly commercialized by the mid-1990s, there was also a parallel, much more positive development: a resurgence in documentary filmmaking, thanks in part to the advent of the cheaper, lighter digital format that helped to offset the daunting costs of pursuing political aims through film.
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