Ava DuVernay Quotes

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.

In documentary films, you're a storyteller using found objects. You still have to have a story arc and all the elements that make a good story. It really helped me mature as a storyteller.

Documentaries have always inspired me in narrative filmmaking.

There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction; there's only narrative.

I began to feel that the drama of the truth that is in the moment and in the past is richer and more interesting than the drama of Hollywood movies. So I began looking at documentary films.

One of the reasons to do documentaries is that. There's more sense of creating something, more sense of my own soul in the documentaries than in movies, because I don't write the movies I do.

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 believe in broken, fractured, complicated narratives, but I believe in narratives as a vehicle for truth, not simply as a form of entertainment, though I love entertainment, but also a way of conveying what needs to be conveyed about the works that I care about.

I'm a filmmaker. I'm always searching for the truth in everything I do. I demand it from my writing partner and my crew, actors, and so hopefully, we're making people think.

The more I make films, the more I feel less inclined to talk about them and just let people watch them. I feel that the pictures are telling the story, and I can't really add anything except just talking about the technicalities of what happened on the day.

When I'm making documentaries, I think a lot about how fiction films play. I want them to have the pacing, the twists and the character development of fiction films.

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.

All fiction has to have a certain amount of truth in it to be powerful.

I sometimes say that I don't make anything up - obviously that's not true. But I am uninterested in writers who say that everything comes out of the imagination. I would rather be in a room with someone who is telling the story of his life, which may be exaggerated and even have lies in it, but I want to hear the true story, essentially.

I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts.

To make a documentary is one thing, to make a feature film is quite another.

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

It's a very weird thing, making a true story, because you need your freedom, as filmmakers, to do what you need to do.

Every dramatist will tell you that they know deep down what happened in the course of making that film and to what degree they took steps that were convenient and to what degree they took steps in telling their story that were dishonest. You know in your heart of hearts.

It's hard not to want to become Ken Burns at times. I'm interested in being a Ken Burns who reaches that 17-year-old who goes to the multiplex just to see a good story well-told. And if there's history in it, all the better.

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

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.

In documentary, you are sometimes burdened, or you feel very responsible for dealing with - I want to say - more complicated themes. Fiction allows for greater distillation.

I believe every time you film anybody, you create reality with that person - whether it's fiction or nonfiction.

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.