Danis Tanovic Quotes

I love the idea of documentaries. I love seeing documentaries, and I love making them. Documentaries are incredibly easy to shoot. The ease with which you can hear something's going on, somebody's going to be somewhere: That sounds so interesting. Pick up your camera and go.

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.

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.

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

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

I'm a big fan of documentaries. I've always loved them, and I've just never had the opportunity or the time to make a feature.

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

I didn't realize that, in doing a documentary, there is this process of discovery. It's not like a film or a play with a set script. It sort of reveals itself.

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.

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

My senior thesis was a documentary. By the time I graduated from college, I thought I was going to make films, and my interest in acting was there but kind of confused.

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

I'm a documentary filmmaker, I know what it means to craft a story, especially when you've shot a lot of material.

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

I love documentaries. I love the format. I've been doing them for a long time.

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.

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.

To me, form is not something that you can plan beforehand, especially for a documentary. You can't write it or sketch it. It requires a confrontation with reality, with history, with ethics and morals. After identifying good content, you have to find the right form to express that content.

Of course, when you're making a documentary, you don't have actors, but nonetheless, there is a writing process that does take place in the editing room.

I think everything you do, whether it's low budget things when you're first starting out or full feature films or when you're working with Hollywood, you're always learning, all the time.

Documentaries sometimes can be shot over 10 years. You plan to stop in two, but you still gotta catch more.

'Just' writing is every bit as important as any other creative part of a film.

There's some good films, there's some films that could be improved. So we keep trying until we get it right. That's the nature of storytelling, whether it's on paper or on film.

I think the sheer hell of trying to get a film made; I don't know if it would ultimately be worth it. The sort of format that I have, these TV things, sit somewhere between documentaries and reality shows and entertainment shows and dramas.