Terry Zwigoff Quotes

We ended up with 19 hours of footage and had to narrow it down to an hour and a half. Our instructions were to film everything that came up, including the more mundane moments.

In documentaries, the process is that you film a lot of things, and out of what you've shot, something organically reveals itself, and there's a discovery process.

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.

I'm a documentary filmmaker by training. You got to start with the real people and the real place.

My stuff always starts with interviews. I start interviewing people, and then slowly but surely, a movie insinuates itself.

I use a lot of film images, analogies, and imagination.

Every stage of filmmaking's important while you're doing it, so I spend most of my time figuring out how to tell the story. I have all these stories and ideas, but it's how to tell the story.

I'm not necessarily scanning for clues when I make documentaries.

Personally, as a filmmaker, I think you should prepare your audience as to what they can expect.

Know the story before you fall in love with your first sentence. If you don’t know the story before you begin the story, what kind of a storyteller are you? Just an ordinary kind, just a mediocre kind – making it up as you go along, like a common liar.

I think making a film is as much knowing what you don't like as what you do like, and avoiding the things that you don't like like the plague and making sure that they never appear onscreen in any shape or form.

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.

When I do feature films, I usually have a very strong sense of what I want to do. I have topics and subjects, so I go for it. I even know technically what I want to. But in the case of documentary, the story comes to me.

I'm a filmmaker. I like to ask the questions, make others feel vulnerable. I don't want to be vulnerable.

The combo of a great story and good director works for me.

I would love to direct a documentary film if any good subject comes my way.

The making of the documentary is an involving and collaborative process where you go deeper unlike in movies where you just borrow someone else's script.

My starting point is always to read a script and have a conversation with the director about what their vision is, and then, after that, I love to do research.

Working with George Miller was an education. It was eight college degrees in character development and directing all at once.

As a director, what I'm trying to do is to create interesting stories.

I have been in advertising and I know my craft well, but ultimately in cinema every scene has to matter, and that has to do with the writing.

You could make a film out of just about anything so long as there is a clear vision about the story.

You find a story - or more importantly, you find some characters - that you want to be around as a filmmaker. The style and how we're going to shoot it and how we're going to design it and how it's all going to feel and look depends on that story. They tell me how I should shoot it.

I think you can make a gorgeous movie on any piece of equipment. Look at 'Tangerine,' which is a beautiful movie shot on an iPhone. You see so many movies that are impeccably shot but are vapid, and there's no audience for that except for other cinematographers who just like to watch two-hour-long music videos.

Documentaries are inherently instinctual; you're constantly moment to moment, determining what the best place for the camera is to tell the story, usually in service of natural lighting.