Gillian Armstrong Quotes

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.'

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.

Many people have this memory of traditional TV documentary-making that aims to portray pure reality, and I just don't see that as the only option.

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.

If you acknowledge that filming is an occasion where people express things they might not otherwise express, that offers a much more insightful analysis of why documentaries - even of the fly-on-the-wall variety - are powerful.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

I've studied documentarians extensively to come up with my own in-house style. I'm a student of Michael Moore's films, of Eisenstein, Riefenstahl. Leave the politics aside, you have to learn from those past masters on how they were trying to communicate their ideas.

I started in documentaries. I started alone with a camera. Alone. Totally alone. Shooting, editing short documentaries for a French-Canadian part of CBC. So to deal with the camera alone, to approach reality alone, meant so much. I made a few dozen small documentaries, and that was the birth of a way to approach reality with a camera.

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

With documentaries, what's beautiful about them is that you capture something unique in a shot, something that will never repeat itself.

Wiseman's films are some of the most pure cinema, and to take a journey in a Wiseman film is like no other. He's been doing it so long, with a body of over 40 films!

This is my real concern: to give each film a unique individuality.

I'm not trying to acquire a reputation as serious documentary maker for its own sake.

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.

I always thought that life is full of stories and characters that feel like literary stories and characters. So when I started making documentaries, they weren't humble empirical things, just following people around. I was always trying to impose a story.

When I'm filming a documentary, I feel like I should be the straight man, watching with a raised eyebrow.

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