D. A. Pennebaker Quotes

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.

A documentary film-maker can't help but use poetry to tell the story. I bring truth to my fiction. These things go hand in hand.

Of course, when you're making a documentary, you don't have actors, but nonetheless, there is a writing process that does take place in the editing room.

When you make a film that is based in reality, reality will come up all around it.

I began to feel that the drama of the truth that is in the moment and in the past is richer and more interesting than the drama of Hollywood movies. So I began looking at documentary films.

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

All the great novels, all the great films, all the great dramas are fictions that actually tell us the truth about us or about human nature or about human situations without being tied into the minutia of documentary events. Otherwise we might as well just make documentaries.

I love documentary because it's alive.

I'll write about myself, or people I know, or archetypal characters, but the goal is to get at some truth, not to necessarily convey my own experience as an individual to the world.

Good fiction is made of that which is real, and reality is difficult to come by.

What's great about documentary, it seems to me, is that it can be experimental filmmaking. You have a license to do a lot of diverse things under the umbrella of 'documentary.'

I like documentaries because there's nothing to nitpick or criticize about scenes if they aren't just right. It's about honesty and real-life circumstances coming out. Granted it can be swayed by how people tell that story, but overall, I like it because it is true.

I've always been a bit of a documentarian.

I came from a background of directing behind-the-scenes documentaries.

People want real-life stories.

Over the years, I have come to realize that no matter how satisfying fiction is, it becomes that much better when it actually happened.

Writing about conflict has provided these dramatic opportunities to talk about really substantial moments in a person's life. I'm not writing about superheroes; I'm writing about ordinary people.

Documentary is reality. It shows the truth.

I love documentaries. I love the format. I've been doing them for a long time.

My first camera job was filming workplace safety videos, which involved months of watching and videotaping people doing their jobs. I was hooked - from there, I wanted to know where they lived and the rest of their habits and desires.

I don't watch like Sci-fi or things like that, I'm always more like real life is so endlessly fascinating to me.

I'm a moviemaker, not a documentarian. I try to hit the truth.

Human lives seldom conform to the conventions of fiction. Chekhov says that it is in the beginnings and endings of stories that we are most tempted to lie. I know what he means, and I agree.

Rule one of reading other people's stories is that whenever you say 'well that's not convincing' the author tells you that's the bit that wasn't made up. This is because real life is under no obligation to be convincing.

The best stories are often true...The narrative of human life is most beautiful when told truthfully and without boundaries.