Paul Greengrass Quotes

Raman Raghav' was shot on location, but there are many stylistic things in it. I like this mixture of documentary and extreme stylization.

Critics can say what they like about the films, but very often, there's a certain expectation of documentaries that they're supposed to be like PowerPoint presentations. I see documentaries as movies. So when I see some critics writing that we could have done without the recreations altogether - well, perhaps.

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

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.

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.'

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 don't need the 'voice of God' commentary. Instead, by juxtaposing contradictory or confirmatory witnesses and archive material, your point of view becomes obvious.

My background is in filmmaking, and my mentor is Dusan Makavejev, who combined fiction and documentary.

What I like to do with every film is to bring a form, like a cinematographic proposal. If you watch 'S21,' it's a form; 'Duch, Master of the Gates of Hell' is a different proposal.

Film in many ways is very literal.

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

I really wanted to write the way Kubrick makes films - 'Strangelove,' '2001', 'Clockwork Orange', 'Barry Lyndon' - they're all so different.

The great film editor is not a cutter, he's a storyteller, right?

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.

The big influence on me was Robert Altman, who, especially in 'Nashville,' transformed my sense of dramatic structure and showed how you could handle overlapping stories.

I don't approach films purely in context of genre.

Film has to describe and show.

I hope this doesn't sound pretentious, but I very often like the way Europeans make movies. I think sometimes that don't they care about having to clean certain things.

The beauty of a Tarantino film is that the visuals match the rhythm of the words. That's his goal. And that's my goal.

My films start with images, a few images and a few feelings, and I try to edit them together to see the correspondence between these images and these feelings.

I'm very attracted to directors who want to experiment. The thing that attracts me the most are people who are trying find a language that is correct for their film, for that specific film.

In documentary films, the most difficult thing to achieve is to make something complex appear simple.

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.

With 'Mask,' 'Smooth Talk' and 'Blue Velvet,' I loved the specific experiences so much. Each one was a specific filmmaker with a specific vision.

'Barton Fink' owed something to Roman Polanski. As a director, he always goes beyond the obvious narrative drift.