Top 786 Documentary Quotes & Sayings - Page 8

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.

I had a very short time on that film [The Possibilities Are Endless] and it was quite strange because the process was kind of like a documentary, which was different for me. The way everything was filmed was very casual.

Post-war filmmakers gave us the documentary, Rob Reiner gave us the mockumentary and Moore initiated a third genre, the crockumentary.

I am deeply honored to be making 'Life Itself,' a documentary on the life of Roger Ebert, and to have had the full cooperation and enthusiasm of Roger and his wife, Chaz.

You're making a movie, not a documentary. If you made a film like the historians would like you to make, you're not going to go and see it. I'd rather see paint dry.

With documentary-film projects, you hope you highlight an area of concern people haven't thought about before. A lot of times, I'm asking myself - 'This seems to be a significant problem. What can be done that hasn't been done?

I think pulling off, pulling off a kind of fake documentary of me being a, you know, actual dictator would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible.

There's a documentary film-maker called Werner Herzog, who's a German film-maker. I really dig his stuff, I'd love to chat with him.

The biggest misconception is that I'm only a documentary filmmaker, but in fact I have made many narrative shorts. My biggest inspirations are narrative films, and that's ultimately where I see myself going next.

I don`t know the facts surrounding Andrew Jarecki`s work. I think it`s a triumph of television. But it does raise troubling issues that I think we as a documentary community, you know, need to address.

It's always important to understand as filmmakers that we're not making a documentary and it has to look good. It has to entertain, because otherwise your audience will switch and watch another series. It has to look better and larger than life.

I, for one, personally like rom-coms, silly rom-coms, but at the same time, I also want to watch a documentary or an award-winning drama.

When you make feature films, you have a script, which is a bible. The final result should be as it was written down on paper. And in documentary, you can write whatever you want, but life brings you situations where you have to be fast thinking, fast moving.

I learned how to tell stories with Jay-Z on 'City Is Mine.' I learned how to film and choreograph dancing on 'Can I Get A...,' and I got to kind of be a documentary filmmaker with 'Hard Knock Life.'

Phantom Films is an established production house and it will help to spread awareness about the documentary film 'Katiyabaaz' among the audience. I saw this film and I loved it. Then we decided to support this film.

There's nothing attractive about doing a documentary. Nothing. It's hard, hard work, and I find having all the attention of the day on me a very unattractive proposition.

I wanted to describe the world at the same time, through image, express what I felt. It was the time of the great documentary filmmakers: Richard Leacock, Joris Ivens. Today, television has put an end to this type of filmmaking.

It's impossible for one or two people to go out and shoot a narrative film; you need to have a cast, the person shooting sound, whatever. But you can legitimately have a couple people and go and do a documentary.

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.

A picture that is ghostly and silent can be more eloquent and less clichéd than a noisier photo-journalistic approach and I have attempted to make pictures that whilst they are not documentary in the traditional sense, they are still documents, like forensic traces.

Stylistically, in improv, I don't think you can have as many camera tricks; I think you're kind of shooting more like a documentary: you don't know where it's going, so you have to hang back a little more.

Depression is a real demon in the woods for a lot of creative people, you know? It's part of what the documentary is trying to be about for me, finding balance, where the beauty that is attainable in the creative arts can be matched with the scratchy roughness of regular life.

Whenever I'm making a feature film, I wish I were filming a documentary, because making feature films is so stressful. It happens every time.

I wouldn't do nudity in films. For me, personally... To act with my clothes on is a performance; to act with my clothes off is a documentary.

A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph.

Every time you are getting ready to make a shot in a documentary film, you are asking yourself questions about your cinematographic approach. You are approaching the truth, but the image is never the truth itself.

So many good fortunes have come my way, and I'm trying to pay it forward by helping to raise money to complete 'Bulbul: Song Of The Nightingale,' a documentary that brings attention to the social and human injustices suffered by the Banchara tribe in India.

I began to feel that the drama of the truth that is in the moment and in the past is richer and more interesting than the drama of Hollywood movies. So I began looking at documentary films.

If I wanted an open space, I could do a documentary about fishes. Then I would have an open space to play my music. That's not how I visualize the work I'm doing.

The documentary feature film 'Legion of Brothers' tells the stories of the handful of U.S. Special Forces soldiers who, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, went into Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and, within a matter of weeks, overthrew the Taliban regime.

My staged work looks so real that people actually take it for documentary. But, in fact, that is my intention, to disguise the manufacturedness of it. Half of my work, or probably more than that, is staged.

I watched a documentary about the immigrant crisis around the world. And it does make me blush at all the times I've stood up on the stage and given your speech about the healing power of fiction.

Other people's creativity inspires me. Seeing great art, or reading a fab book or watching an interesting documentary or an exciting film - these things make me want to let my own imagination fly.

Well it has been very exciting and very changing as well. Celebrating the 40th year and having the album out and the Channel 4 documentary and I resigned from Blind Date.

It's weird how people were always asking us, 'Are you real? Are you joking?' That seems like something Americans care about a lot. You can't answer the question 'Are you real?' If we're anything, we're documentary fiction.

Both those taking snaps and documentary photographers... have not understood information. What they produce are camera memories, not information, and the better they do it, the more they prove the victory of the camera over the human being.

I love 'Robot Chicken,' 'The Boondocks' and 'America's Funniest Home Videos.' Then there's this show called 'The First 48.' It's a documentary about killings where they try and find murderers. They interrogate people and they tell on each other - it's hilarious.

I stay at home a lot by choice but go out a lot due to work. As I've grown older, the simple pleasure of sitting on the couch with someone you love and watching a documentary is about as good as it gets for me.

What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow men's existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history.

With 'Street Fight,' it took an urban mayoral election and found lots of complexity in there. The same with 'Racing Dreams.' I wanted to show complexity within this world that most documentary people don't know anything about.

When you're shooting a feature that costs $200,000 a day with a crew of 250, you don't want accidents; you want to know exactly what's going to happen. But with a documentary, you don't, so you have to be sensitive to accidents because that is where the gold is.

In the documentary 'Facing Ali,' nearly half the fighters involved required subtitles despite speaking English, their speech slurred by the physical toll of their ring lives. This was their reward for testing their furthermost physical and mental boundaries.

You know, the process of making a documentary is one of discovery, and like writing a story, you follow a lead and that leads you to something else and then by the time you finish, the story is nothing like you expected.

But if anyone so much as threatened them because of what Kaia had once done, she would turn the Slumber Party Massacre into Blood, Bath and Beyond, a documentary by Kaia Skyhawk.

Bizarrely funny... Rarely is a documentary as well attuned to its subject as Howard Brookner's BURROUGHS, which captures as much about the life, work and sensibility of its subject as its 86 minute format allows.

It's supposed to be entertainment. It's not supposed to be a documentary.

I don't want to be on a soapbox, but I feel like a lot of documentary filmmakers are part of the ancient tradition of writing down notes, of saying, 'Hey people, hey people!'

I'd rather lose the small part of the audience that is going to be insulted because a documentary shouldn't have music than the big part of the audience that kind of gives itself over to the scene.

Movies, to a large extent, stand or fall on the strength of their scripts. But a documentary is a collection of found objects: fragments you've collected, accidents of interview and happenstance, pieces of stock footage that surface in the course of six to nine months of research and production.

Michael Moore announced that his next documentary film will attack the health care industry in America. He's not out to get the pharmaceutical companies. He's just looking for something to relieve the redness in the center of the country.

While the documentary community is way ahead of Hollywood, it is still nowhere near where it needs to be. Filmmakers of color rarely get hired by the powerful production companies, and they are not getting supported enough by broadcasters and funders to tell their own stories.

In documentary films, being able to be a storytelling and embrace film as an art form - while being very clearly connected in trying to help make the world a better place - is really important to me.

I would love to make a documentary on my father, Mahesh Bhatt. What is interesting about Bhatt sahab is that he became more interesting personality after he left work.

In documentary films, you're a storyteller using found objects. You still have to have a story arc and all the elements that make a good story. It really helped me mature as a storyteller.

As a documentary filmmaker, I'm very respectful, and my interview style is not intrusive. I don't really have an agenda. I just go in there, I mumble something or other, I wait for them to speak, and I wait for them to stop.

In the documentary space, the biggest and most obvious difference is that in those films you're not in it for a financial gain. It's a piece of collaboration and artistic expression, that pushes change and self expression, in the sense that everyone has a story.

I'm a documentary filmmaker, so often I'm in the position of talking to people who are sharing stories that are critically important to share, but often difficult to share at the same time.

I came through the ranks of the BBC documentary department. I was lucky working during this drama doc era, where they did reconstructions, basically like cheap drama made by the factual department.

And in reality, I don't think it's a real documentary. It's more a story of her life. It's a story of survival. It's a story of the time in which she lived. The story of success and failure.

On telly, there's been a move towards entertainment - with some very high-powered, fast-moving dramas. Then we have the Internet, where we get our information but it's all in bite-size pieces. I think the documentary, as a form, actually speaks to what's missing.