Ben Edwards Quotes

Feature filmmaking is a different kind of complication as documentary comes in the editing room.

That's the only way I can control my movie. If you shoot everything, then everything is liable to end up in the movie. If you have a vision, you don't have to cover every scene.

Of course I know what works for me and what kind of tone I want my films to have.

I got into filmmaking in order to tell very personal stories, and in this day and age, the opportunity seems all the more precious.

When you make a movie, you can only make the movie that you would want to see.

The director is the channel through which a motion picture reaches the screen.

Movies are an editor's medium.

With a film, you try to keep your vision in it. I think with 'The American' and 'Control' I managed to do that.

Everything about filmmaking tries to distract you from that first fine rapturous vision you have of the film.

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.

You have to edit the material. That assumes that some kind of a mind is operating in relation to the material. Not all minds are the same. Every aspect of filmmaking requires choice. The selection of the subject, the shooting, editing and length are all aspects of choice.

We filmmakers are control freaks. For us, it's about bending the elements of a story into existence.

What I want to impart on any movie I work on is I want to make it entertaining. That's what I feel I do.

I had a list of 10 rules when we started 'Strong Island,' and one of them was, 'Yance will never appear on camera with sync sound.'

Cinema is a creative medium. The director has the right to express.

When I do feature films, I usually have a very strong sense of what I want to do. I have topics and subjects, so I go for it. I even know technically what I want to. But in the case of documentary, the story comes to me.

I guess I probably see myself as a director. If I had to choose, I think that that's the aspect of the process that I'm most excited by.

To me, form is not something that you can plan beforehand, especially for a documentary. You can't write it or sketch it. It requires a confrontation with reality, with history, with ethics and morals. After identifying good content, you have to find the right form to express that content.

I'm not a fan of these very cutty, handheld-y kind of films or TV shows, where a cut is just every half second or every two seconds, where you're desensitized to it. To me, a cut should say something and be impactful.

For me, the film-maker is more important than the story.

Vidhu Vinod Chopra is the only man I see around who makes films because he thinks 'this is a story that needs to be told, so let's tell it.'

I make movies to be watched the way I want to watch them, and I want to watch them in movie theatres.

Sometimes the theme of the film is something that comes down to the way you designed the film - that you're saying something about the world. And it's one of the things that I think animation can do, in a way that other forms of filmmaking can't do. Because every single thing you see has got to be designed and created.

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.

The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world.