A Quote by Thelma Schoonmaker

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.

Thelma Schoonmaker

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Because Big Documentaries Doing Footage Great Handed Help Improvisation Love Lump Make Me Shape Started Story Which

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Thelma Schoonmaker
Algerian - Editor
Born: January 3, 1940

You make documentaries because you love doing it; it's the only sane reason to make documentaries.

Morgan Neville

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.

Marshall Curry

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.

Jonathan Demme

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.

Dror Moreh

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.

Penelope Spheeris

Reality television hasn't killed documentaries, because there are so many great documentaries still being made, but it certainly has changed the landscape.

Todd Phillips

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.

Pawel Pawlikowski

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.

Denis Villeneuve

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.

Brett Morgen

Reality television hasn't killed documentaries, because there are so many great documentaries still being made, but it certainly has changed the landscape. There is this breed of gimmicky documentary that is basically a reality show.

Todd Phillips

As far as documentaries go, I believe unreservedly that they serve an important function in our culture. I'd love to be able to make both documentaries and feature films simultaneously, but so far that hasn't happened.

Hirokazu Koreeda

When I first started, I saw myself shooting documentaries or making documentaries, which is what I did, mostly, for a number of years. So it was quite a surprise how I found myself shooting features. It was like my wildest dreams as a kid collided.

Roger Deakins

When I go to the DVD shop, I mostly buy documentaries because you learn a lot from documentaries.

Gaspar Noe

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.

Barry Levinson

I think when I envisioned my documentaries, what I wanted to do when I left, I had no business doing those documentaries. I didn't know what I was doing. I was delving into an arena that I had no experience in, and Netflix paired me up with two documentarians that really executed my vision perfectly. That was great, to see that. All of a sudden I'm at Sundance, and those are premiering. I just thought, "Wow, they were four ideas I pitched one day, and now it's coming to fruition on this scale."