Gaby Hoffmann Quotes

Hollywood has its own way of telling stories. I was just telling stories that I was familiar with. And it's what I want to do in the future: I want to take my audio cinema and put it on the screen.

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'm still auditioning and doing other movie parts, but I really like the developing and the writing. You have more control over your destiny.

I moved to L.A. to write and direct. I had no intentions of being in front of the camera.

I feel as if I became a documentary film-maker only because I had writer's block for four decades. There's no other good reason.

The fact is, I've been releasing records longer than I've been releasing films, or at least exactly as long.

By the time I was 21, I knew what I wanted to do, and that was to direct films.

After college, I did a bunch of different jobs - taught English in Mexico, worked in public radio, worked for a web design company - but there was something about documentaries that really attracted me.

Before I became an actor, I was a visual artist, and I've always hankered for the storytelling behind the camera.

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 have to write for everyone. What really fascinates me is how you make films or make stories that can genuinely be shared by different groups.

I don't think there's so much difference between making documentaries and feature films. I think it's even harder to make documentaries.

I make films about stories that I get interested in.

My first love was always direction; I had worked hard as a film-maker but not as an actor.

I'm not necessarily scanning for clues when I make documentaries.

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.

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 not one of those people who's saying "I'm going to set up a production company", because I like acting and not having to be a business man and do that side of things.

When I watch my early documentaries, they're very eclectic. They don't follow any particular [pattern]. I would have gotten thrown out of film school because I didn't. I was just putting them together somehow as the spirit moved me, following my nose, thinking I was brilliant.

If I had not been successful as a director, then I'm sure I would still be telling stories. I would have continued on 16mm or found a different medium through which to tell them. Maybe they would have been less glamorous than films, but I would continue to tell stories.

I wanted to transfer to an art school, and ended up going to the University of Southern California. They had a cinematography school, and I said "Well, that's sort of like photography, maybe that will be interesting." And once I started in that department, I found what it was that I loved and was good at.

I was always more of a film guy than an athlete guy. I had an art scholarship at Western.

I was always involved in art and when I went under contract at Warner Bros. at 18, it afforded me the possibility of never having to stop painting, never having to stop taking photographs and so on, and to actually live a cultural life.

I'm not an activist at all. I'm a filmmaker, and I wanted the people involved to tell their own story.

If it was a choice between making movies and doing nothing, he'd probably still wish me to make movies, So he made me keep going.