Asif Kapadia Quotes

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

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

Critics can say what they like about the films, but very often, there's a certain expectation of documentaries that they're supposed to be like PowerPoint presentations. I see documentaries as movies. So when I see some critics writing that we could have done without the recreations altogether - well, perhaps.

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

It's hard not to want to become Ken Burns at times. I'm interested in being a Ken Burns who reaches that 17-year-old who goes to the multiplex just to see a good story well-told. And if there's history in it, all the better.

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

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.

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.

Feature filmmaking is a different kind of complication as documentary comes in the editing room.

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

I don't know if I'd mastered that documentary format, but I wanted to move on from it.

I started as a documentary maker, and they're my first love.

There is a porous membrane between a documentary that doesn't use interviews and what you would call a neorealist hybrid film.

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.

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

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.

I am a big fan of Jim Jarmusch, and I do love big screen documentaries.

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.'

My background is sociology. Combined with my graphic approach, if I could do some film projects, I think I'd be very good at making documentaries eventually, but people don't think of me for that, of course. But dialogue is something I know I can be good at.

I like the boundaries, the kinds of conventions of a documentary and having to work within that.

You don't need the 'voice of God' commentary. Instead, by juxtaposing contradictory or confirmatory witnesses and archive material, your point of view becomes obvious.

In documentary films, the most difficult thing to achieve is to make something complex appear simple.

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

My time in documentaries was very educating, in terms of life experience as well as the filmmaking side of it.

I've obviously always been aware of actor-oriented films, being an actor. Altman and Cassavetes were really strong. And then I realized their structures were quite fascinating, too.