Derek Cianfrance Quotes

But one of the amazing things about documentary is that you can remake it every time you make one. There is no rule about how a documentary film has to be made.

Generally in my films like 'Hearts of Darkness' or 'Picture This,' I try not to make myself a presence in the film.

With the dramatic canvas, I found you could still operate with the documentarist's observational eye.

I started in documentaries. I started alone with a camera. Alone. Totally alone. Shooting, editing short documentaries for a French-Canadian part of CBC. So to deal with the camera alone, to approach reality alone, meant so much. I made a few dozen small documentaries, and that was the birth of a way to approach reality with a camera.

The only obligation you have as a film-maker is to tell your version of the truth and to use your film to illuminate reality. Whatever that means.

My interpretation of a strong director is someone who knows their story. That's what directors are, they're storytellers because they're directing where your focus is going to be as an audience.

I'm a documentary filmmaker by training. You got to start with the real people and the real place.

Well, I want to do everything in sort of a documentary style, ever since I started in the '80s.

It is not the voice that commands the story; it is the ear.

I'm not the kind of director who aims to send a message out.

In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director.

You can be a smarty-pants director, but that won't matter if the movie doesn't work emotionally as well as intellectually.

I've always been a bit of a documentarian.

As a director, you never think about how an audience would respond. You can think about that, but you will never change what you're going to do.

Cinema is not about format, and it's not about venue. Cinema is an approach. Cinema is a state of mind on the part of the filmmaker. I've seen commercials that have cinema in them, and I've seen Oscar-winning movies that don't. I'm fine with this.

You - as a director, you have to do your job, you have to show things, and you don't have to ask the actors to do it, or the dialogue.

I don't write on set. I also - in a funny way, I don't really differentiate between the writing and directing. I think it's all sort of the same thing.

I think, when you're a director, you get sucked into your project whether you like it or not, right?

The most important thing as a filmmaker, the hardest journey you'll have, is to find your point of view.

I get people saying, 'Opera is too large a canvas for me. I don't love it. I love movies that feel almost like documentaries,' in terms of artistic vocabularies of storytelling. I totally get that discussion; that makes sense to me.

Yes, I do bring something of my own to the plate. But I strongly believe that a film is a director and writer's vision.

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

For my part, as a filmmaker, I've never been a fly-on-the-wall documentarian. I have no commitment to that method. I believe it's a lie.

My style of cinema is different and I always look at my films as the audience would.

There's more to directing than plotting scenes out.