Jon Richardson Quotes

With documentaries, what's beautiful about them is that you capture something unique in a shot, something that will never repeat itself.

Many people have this memory of traditional TV documentary-making that aims to portray pure reality, and I just don't see that as the only option.

I don't think the subject of a documentary film should be producers on it.

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.

I don't know if I'd mastered that documentary format, but I wanted to move on from it.

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

Hitchcock makes it very clear to us. There's an objective and a subjective camera, like there's a third- and a first-person narrator in literature.

You should bear in mind that almost all my documentaries are feature films in disguise.

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

I don't normally make documentaries. I'm a drama director. I've made a few short docs, but I don't like talking heads or 'voice of God' narrators.

When I started my filmmaking journey 17 years ago, I honestly didn't know what a documentary film was.

I like the boundaries, the kinds of conventions of a documentary and having to work within that.

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

If you acknowledge that filming is an occasion where people express things they might not otherwise express, that offers a much more insightful analysis of why documentaries - even of the fly-on-the-wall variety - are powerful.

I really admire Werner Herzog and Spike Lee. They're amazing documentarians. If you took away all the narratives, they'd just be amazing documentarians.

The key fact missed most often by social scientists utilizing documentary films for data, is this: documentary films are not found or reported things; they're made things.

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.

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.

I have major credibility as a hip, out-there documentary filmmaker, and I'm not going to say, 'I'm only a drama filmmaker' anymore.

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

The message films that try to be message films always fail. Likewise with documentaries. The documentaries that work best are the ones that eschew a simple message for an odd angle. I found that one of the most spectacular films about the Middle East was 'Waltz With Bashir,' or 'The Gatekeepers,' or '5 Broken Cameras.'

My team and I used the actual footage to create a three-act story of the life of Ayrton Senna. There are no talking heads and no voiceover. Senna narrates his own epic, dramatic, thrilling journey.

With portable cameras and affordable data and non-linear digital editing, I think this is a golden age of documentary filmmaking. These new technologies mean we can make complicated, beautifully crafted and cinematic films about real-life stories.

My background is sociology. Combined with my graphic approach, if I could do some film projects, I think I'd be very good at making documentaries eventually, but people don't think of me for that, of course. But dialogue is something I know I can be good at.

I love the idea of documentaries. I love seeing documentaries, and I love making them. Documentaries are incredibly easy to shoot. The ease with which you can hear something's going on, somebody's going to be somewhere: That sounds so interesting. Pick up your camera and go.