Joshua Oppenheimer Quotes

I came from the school of cinema verite documentaries, which was: Do not manipulate reality as it was happening but create a narrative in the editing room.

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

I think it's a great pity in the Anglophone world that we conflate cinema verite and Direct Cinema; they're, in fact, ontological opposites. In Direct Cinema, we create a fictional reality with characters and pretend we're not that.

At Harvard, direct cinema was the core of the film department, and most of the students were trying to make socially conscious works, but I was trying to combine fiction and non-fiction to show how our seemingly factual world is constituted through fantasy and stories.

'Apocalypse Now' does not alienate us or deconstruct itself. In fact, it welcomes us in.

So-called reality TV, which dominates British channels, is destroying what made it cherishable to me and lots of others in the first place. I loved Alan Clarke, Ken Loach and Alan Bleasdale's work. In fact the first TV dramas I ever saw were 'Screen Twos' produced by David Thompson, who also produced a lot of Alan Clarke.

And shooting things in a documentary style was a good way to create tension and energy without money.

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.

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.'

Unlike fiction, which you create before you go into production, with reality you kind of create it after everything is produced. The drama and the storytelling is really done in post.

Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.

Realism is always subjective in film. There's no such thing as cinema verite.

Film is abstract, not definite. It is a dream.

All good performance pieces have some philosophical validity. That's the difference between mere theater and performance art.

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

You don't know reality until someone makes a fiction of it. Reality needs the completion of fiction.

We've evolved from sitting back on our tripods and shooting wildlife films like they have been shot historically, which doesn't work for us.

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!

The arts are what humanize science and history.

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

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

People think that the Italians invented neorealism, but actually, Humphrey Jennings did. He was revolutionary in using non-professional actors in his films, and he got extraordinary performances out of them.

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.

I never saw myself as a director. It's certainly a second language but making movies for 40 years, you pick stuff up. However, this style of making movies, this documentary style, is easier for me because I gather a lot of material and with an editor, write it on screen. You try to write based on what you shot.

Fantasy is hard to do when it comes to making it look good compared to something that's a documentary or hyper-realism.