Jean-Pierre Dardenne Quotes

I like documentaries because there's nothing to nitpick or criticize about scenes if they aren't just right. It's about honesty and real-life circumstances coming out. Granted it can be swayed by how people tell that story, but overall, I like it because it is true.

Truth will always be truth, regardless of lack of understanding, disbelief or ignorance.

I never fantasized or invented a thing, not one thing. I knew every single thing I ever wrote about.

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.

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.

Truth is quite constricting, in a way. You endlessly see at the start of a film 'This is a true story'.

Portray the world for what it is, and you will find truth.

In nonfiction, you have that limitation, that constraint, of telling the truth.

I never see myself as writing satire. I think I write about people as they really are, without making them better or worse.

You don't have to sort of enhance reality. There is nothing stranger than truth.

I've always been interested in how to present something that relates to our reality - which is not really... I don't even know if documentary itself does as good a job. It has its own problems in trying to get at the reality of the situation.

I don't want to manipulate actuality; I want to record it.

Documentary is reality. It shows the truth.

The only thing documentary filmmakers have to work with, at least the way I make films, is trust. That's been true of everyone from James Carville and George Stephanopoulos to the kids in 'American High' to the soldiers in 'Military Diaries' to Anna Wintour to Dick Cheney.

I think all of us are looking for that which does not admit of bullshit . . . If you tell me you can bench press 450, hell, we'll load up the bar and put you under it. Either you can do it or you can't do it-you can't bullshit. Ultimately, sports are just about as close to what one would call the truth as it is possible to get in this world.

All I would ask you to be thinking of is the truth and not Socrates.

The writer must not invent. The legend on the license must read: NONE OF THIS WAS MADE UP.

Truth exists independent of style. It involves all kinds of issues. Properly considered, it's a quest, a pursuit. To say that vérité is more truthful than something that is narrated is just misplaced. Completely wrong. And the fact that people still talk about it as though they're really talking about something... it puzzles me greatly. A moment of reflection about it tells you that it makes no sense!

I try to capture reality, nothing else.

I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be.

Truth is not what you want it to be; it is what it is, and you must bend to its power or live a lie.

Granny Weatherwax was firmly against fiction. Life was hard enough without lies floating around and changing the way people thought.

You must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best

I think the reality is important anyway.

With nonfiction, I go in trying to be really honest about what my preconceptions are.