Alex Gibney Quotes

I don't normally make documentaries. I'm a drama director. I've made a few short docs, but I don't like talking heads or 'voice of God' narrators.

With the dramatic canvas, I found you could still operate with the documentarist's observational eye.

The message films that try to be message films always fail. Likewise with documentaries. The documentaries that work best are the ones that eschew a simple message for an odd angle. I found that one of the most spectacular films about the Middle East was 'Waltz With Bashir,' or 'The Gatekeepers,' or '5 Broken Cameras.'

As far as the balance between being a journalist, being an artist, being a storyteller - documentary filmmakers are all three of those things. The balance between them is affected by the film itself, the topic of the film.

I always thought of documentaries as films through which you find your voice as a narrator.

Raman Raghav' was shot on location, but there are many stylistic things in it. I like this mixture of documentary and extreme stylization.

So I do tend to do documentaries where I can move in and out of them.

I really admire Werner Herzog and Spike Lee. They're amazing documentarians. If you took away all the narratives, they'd just be amazing documentarians.

You should bear in mind that almost all my documentaries are feature films in disguise.

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

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

I did documentary film for a long time, and I spent a lot of time behind the camera, fervently wishing that the reality I was filming would conform to my narrative propriety. But you can't control it.

I have major credibility as a hip, out-there documentary filmmaker, and I'm not going to say, 'I'm only a drama filmmaker' anymore.

But one of the amazing things about documentary is that you can remake it every time you make one. There is no rule about how a documentary film has to be made.

Truth is quite constricting, in a way. You endlessly see at the start of a film 'This is a true story'.

My heart is in independent film-making. For me, it's where the fun, gritty storytelling is being told.

So much of art-making is about reducing things to the essentials, so I don't feel particularly crippled by this. I don't want it to look natural because then I would be making a documentary film.

I don't approach films purely in context of genre.

I treat the photograph as a work of great complexity in which you can find drama. Add to that a careful composition of landscapes, live photography, the right music and interviews with people, and it becomes a style.

We all need to be huge supporters of the theatrical documentary.

I'm very attracted to directors who want to experiment. The thing that attracts me the most are people who are trying find a language that is correct for their film, for that specific film.

I think the greatest thing about making a documentary is your ability to just follow the story and the subject.

All directors make films in individual ways. But the classical kind of view of filmmaking is that you have a script, and it's very linear. There's a script, then you're going to shoot the script, and then you cut that, and then that's the end of the film. And that's never really been how I've seen it.

I love documentaries. My problem is when the filmmaker becomes the star.

In my early career as a documentarian, I suppose I was trying to make films which - where it was all about making a big cinematic statement, and I think with 'Marley,' I slightly changed my direction and adopted a more mellow approach.