Documentary Quotes

Right after I did 'The Fountain,' I wanted to go make a documentary or something that was less constructed - more natural. I was searching for a project, and sniffing around, 'The Wrestler' fit right in.

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.

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.

When I look back at the way that I was in that documentary I cringe.

Documentary films are created in an inverted funnel of declining possibility.

My instinct was that it was Sidney's childhood in the Bahamas that gave him the fearlessness to fight racism. So this documentary was a kind of rounding out of what had begun in that scene in In the Heat of the Night.

My background was art school, documentary director and surfer with a keen interest in thrilling acts of life threatening stupidity.

Well, I want to do everything in sort of a documentary style, ever since I started in the '80s.

Well, like any time you're shooting documentary stuff, you've got to be in the moment, and you've got to be able to be in control enough to capture what's happening.

It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.

The power and appeal of Documentary is the way it alters and plays with the way the viewer relates to and understands the subject.

I remember when I took Quentin Tarantino with me to a very private screening of the documentary 'Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,' which shows some of the legal irregularities of his case. I was involved by the film, and it was an amazing experience to see people weep at the end of it.

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.

There is no way I could have ever dared to make a documentary, much less have the money to make a documentary, if it was on 16mm. But, with the magic of digital.

I'm really excited to be a part of it and sharing the legacy, any documentary I look up at the sky and Kevin Burns did and Bryan did and showed me again you know the history that's in this character and you know.

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.

Right now, I'm Writing song lyrics. Experimenting with a play. Toying with an idea for a documentary. I hope one of these will eventually be launched into the light of day.

When a documentary filmmaker, working in the style that I do, suggests that there has been a shooting ratio of 40 hours to every one hour of finished film, that doesn't mean that the other 39 are bad.

We're telling a story. And the demands of that are different from the demands of a documentary. The audience must believe in order to keep faith in the story.

The last reunion was a bit of a rushed job, we had to do a gig and documentary.

Those are just some of the people whom we interviewed in the documentary, but that should provide you with a good sense of the credibility of the individuals who bolster the case that this administration lied us into a war.

In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director.

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

I don't think the subject of a documentary film should be producers on it.

We have a documentary film festival in Mexico. It's really original. It's called Ambulante, and it's a film festival that travels around several cities in Mexico.

All the great novels, all the great films, all the great dramas are fictions that actually tell us the truth about us or about human nature or about human situations without being tied into the minutia of documentary events. Otherwise we might as well just make documentaries.

In a way then, the Divine Principle, this new revelation, is the documentary of my life. It is my own life experience. The Divine Principle is in me, and I am in the Divine Principle.

I have my ideas of what a good documentary is, but drama is a different animal because you're arranging everything.

I want to do a documentary about strippers, 'cause it's a moneymaker.

This was almost two hours of factual documentary. In our audience ratings, barely no one left the programme. The whole of his life is so fascinating and people kept watching for that reason.