Jean-Luc Godard 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.

I've documented a lot of things myself as a filmmaker. If you want a rockumentary, that's in there.

As a filmmaker, I always took my inspiration from a filmmaker named Marcel Ophüls, who said, "I always have a point of view, but the trick is showing how hard it is to come to that point of view."

I'm a moviemaker, not a documentarian. I try to hit the truth.

It's all about this abstract entity called the story. It's all about the best way to tell the story, and to make a movie about the issues that this story is about. Filmmaking is storytelling, for me.

To me, there are lots of different stories to tell and you usually find the best way to tell the one you are telling once you are in it.

Documentaries have always inspired me in narrative filmmaking.

Cinema has become my life. I don't mean a parallel world, I mean my life itself. I sometimes have the impression that the daily reality is simply there to provide material for my next film.

It's such a rich experience when you enter into a subject from a documentary point of view. It's hard for fiction to compete with that.

We ended up with 19 hours of footage and had to narrow it down to an hour and a half. Our instructions were to film everything that came up, including the more mundane moments.

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

I make films about stories that I get interested in.

I like to take a little of what I learned in fiction and apply it to documentary and vice versa.

Kendrick Lamar taught me that life experience is an important part of being a good illustrator. When you're illustrating a story, you have to go based off of your personal experiences.

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.

I never intended to be a documentary filmmaker. I think I became a documentary filmmaker because I had trouble writing, and I had trouble finishing things.

I'm a slave to my imagination in terms of making narrative films.

I don't think I'm more of a screenwriter than I am a fiction writer. I'm more of a reader than a film-watcher, so I imagine that I'm not approaching fiction or films in a particularly cinematic way.

I just always try to find an interesting story and tell it well. That's a hard enough thing to do, whether it's a piece of fiction or it's a small piece of reality. I just look for good story.

Directing is all about storytelling. It's not about equipment, or anything else.

There were [in Wilson] a lot of clues in it that you don't normally get, you know, normally you use your imagination or whatever, you get some clues in the script, of course, but yeah, it was really helpful, and I really like the graphic novel. There's stuff in there, there's a couple things in there I really wanted to use that they couldn't get in the movie, but it's definitely, he's a unique guy, you know, I never read a character like this before.

The work of a director can be summed up in two very simple words. Why and How.

The whole point of making a film is to tell a story. That seems to be forgotten. Many films today just rely on special effects and they have an explosion every five minutes. Who needs it? It's rather repetitious.

In my mind, there isn't as much of a distinction between documentary and fiction as there is between a good movie and a bad one.

When a bunch of stuff is happening on set, you have to remember the grander purpose: you're telling a story, so you have to get to that moment, and that takes supreme focus.