Louis Theroux Quotes

As a documentarian, you think, 'Follow your curiosity.'

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.

All the stories in 'The UnAmericans' required interviews, travel, hours and hours in the archives. All of that stuff is so important in the beginning, but I reach a point where I have to shuck it away.

I mean, journalism is very detailed... you try to get down in the weeds and sort out exactly what happened. And I don't think that a feature film is really a place where that happens.

You know, the process of making a documentary is one of discovery, and like writing a story, you follow a lead and that leads you to something else and then by the time you finish, the story is nothing like you expected.

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

In documentaries, the process is that you film a lot of things, and out of what you've shot, something organically reveals itself, and there's a discovery process.

The kind of in-depth investigative journalism we practice at 'Frontline' is thoughtful, rigorous, and time-intensive. It requires us to constantly seek untold stories and to give our producers and reporters the time and resources to dig into them deeply.

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

I would love to direct a documentary film if any good subject comes my way.

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

Because I found myself telling the story of his family to people without the visual aids that I was able to employ by filming them eventually. But I very much knew exactly what I was going to do.

Great questions make great reporting.

Whenever you can bring your chops in as a reporter to unearth a cool story, that's always a good thing.

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

The thing about documentary is that you don't really choose your subjects: they come and grab you out of your bed.

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.

I think that a great newspaper is one that puts a real premium on digging to get the story behind the story.

For 'Seabiscuit', I interviewed 100 people I never met.

If you're a journalist - and I think, on some level, I'm a journalist, and proud to be a journalist, or a documentarian, however you want to describe it - part of what I do has to be the pursuit of the truth.

You do a film and you know where you're going, you have this material to stretch and play with as much as possible because you know how it ends.

I've got a particular way of writing novels, and that carries over into the way I write comics and games, too. I'm a news journalist by background, so I approach everything as reporting - I treat it as real, I ask the questions I'd ask in a real situation, and I let the characters speak for themselves.

What I love - and I'm a journalist - and what I love is finding hidden patterns; I love being a data detective.

Doing a documentary is about discovering, being open, learning, and following curiosity.

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.