Louis Theroux Quotes

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

I started as a documentary maker, and they're my first love.

I don't want to be on a soapbox, but I feel like a lot of documentary filmmakers are part of the ancient tradition of writing down notes, of saying, 'Hey people, hey people!'

I never got into making documentaries for any kind of success, because documentary careers are generally ones of prolonged failures.

'The Look' is my first documentary, and I enjoyed the freedom of working within a small team.

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.

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 did documentary film for a long time, and I spent a lot of time behind the camera, fervently wishing that the reality I was filming would conform to my narrative propriety. But you can't control it.

I have major credibility as a hip, out-there documentary filmmaker, and I'm not going to say, 'I'm only a drama filmmaker' anymore.

When I started my filmmaking journey 17 years ago, I honestly didn't know what a documentary film was.

As I get older, I'm slowing down and, yes, calming down in my desire to be taken seriously. That I can be entertaining and funny and high nervous energy can work against me as a serious composer, slowly but surely you'll see me be quieter just so that people will listen.

I'm not one of those people who sees documentaries as a stepping stone to doing fiction. I love documentaries and watch tons of documentaries. But, I like fiction films a lot, too.

On 'Senna,' it got to the point where there was so much footage that our first editor had the wild suggestion that we only use the archive.

Reality television hasn't killed documentaries, because there are so many great documentaries still being made, but it certainly has changed the landscape. There is this breed of gimmicky documentary that is basically a reality show.

Documentaries make a difference.

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 think that documentaries are bound by journalistic ethics, and I think they have the pressure of trying to entertain someone for 90 minutes. It's hard, but it's the same question no matter what you're doing. Every film I've done, I've approached it the same way with the same level of respect.

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.

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

It's not easy to go from reality TV to being taken seriously as an artist, so I don't think I'll be doing reality TV again because of that.

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

Brilliant documentaries are about so much more than their subject.

I love Humphrey Jennings. People ask me who my favorite documentary maker is, and he's certainly in the top three.