William Shatner Quotes

You write a book, and after 50 pages you think it's about one thing, and then you write another hundred and you realize it's about something else, and then by the time you're done, you can look back and say, 'Oh, this is what it's about.'

Most times when I do a film, it starts out with one idea and ends up not being what I thought it was going to be.

It's weird writing for a documentary because I have all these ideas for what I want to happen, but what actually happens is obviously completely different.

I think all my films have a different journey. Therefore, I take it as it comes.

I'm not necessarily scanning for clues when I make documentaries.

Movies, to a large extent, stand or fall on the strength of their scripts. But a documentary is a collection of found objects: fragments you've collected, accidents of interview and happenstance, pieces of stock footage that surface in the course of six to nine months of research and production.

Research for fiction is a funny thing: you go looking for one piece of information, and find something altogether different.

Free time keeps me going. It's just something that's always been a part of my life. I was originally a painter, and I made films sort of as an extension of that, and then I started to try to make dramatic films because the early films were experimental films.

I didn't realize that, in doing a documentary, there is this process of discovery. It's not like a film or a play with a set script. It sort of reveals itself.

Writing a novel is an act of self-annihilation as much as self-discovery. You can kill whole appetites and flood whole depths while plumbing them, but if you are serious about it you also get to put something into the world that wasn't quite there before.

I have a pretty positive view of environmental activism, but I didn't know much about the ELF. A lot of people make documentaries because they have something they want to say, but I make them because there's something I want to explore.

I get a very vague idea and - perhaps because I once was a journalist, or perhaps because that's what made me want to be a journalist - I go off and explore it for a bit, rather than mapping out a plot and then filling in the research.

My stuff always starts with interviews. I start interviewing people, and then slowly but surely, a movie insinuates itself.

There is some reason, obviously, that you are drawn to your material, but the way in which you explore it might come to be quite different from what you would expect.

The idea led me into the research, which continues to give me more ideas for the story.

'Rocket Science' is really where I fell in love with filmmaking, I think 'Camp' was incredible, but it was so bizarre, and I was trying to find my footing in this world where you don't have an audience for immediate validation.

We ended up with 19 hours of footage and had to narrow it down to an hour and a half. Our instructions were to film everything that came up, including the more mundane moments.

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.

Creating and producing creative work, to me, those are all happy accidents.

I think the greatest thing about making a documentary is your ability to just follow the story and the subject.

In any great art, you create a world, and you invite people into that world, and hopefully, it's fleshed out enough and you've explained it well enough.

My senior thesis was a documentary. By the time I graduated from college, I thought I was going to make films, and my interest in acting was there but kind of confused.

When I start a picture, I always have a script, but I change it every day. I put in what occurs to me that day out of my imagination. You start on a voyage; you know where you will end up but not what will occur along the way. You want to be surprised.

The stuff that I learned on 'Sons,' the education of how to tell stories, was part of that mythology. It's hard to look at it and go, 'Oh, if I knew this, I would have done it this way,' because the fact is I like to think that all that sort of unraveled as it was supposed to.

I started in documentaries, and that was a great help to me with improvisation, because with documentaries, you're handed a big lump of footage, and you have to shape it and make it into a story - which I love doing.