Werner Herzog Quotes

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.

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

In documentary films, you're a storyteller using found objects. You still have to have a story arc and all the elements that make a good story. It really helped me mature as a storyteller.

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

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

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.

So I do tend to do documentaries where I can move in and out of them.

I'm a big fan of documentaries. I've always loved them, and I've just never had the opportunity or the time to make a feature.

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.

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

When I'm making documentaries, I think a lot about how fiction films play. I want them to have the pacing, the twists and the character development of fiction films.

Unlike fiction, which you create before you go into production, with reality you kind of create it after everything is produced. The drama and the storytelling is really done in post.

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.

It's hard not to want to become Ken Burns at times. I'm interested in being a Ken Burns who reaches that 17-year-old who goes to the multiplex just to see a good story well-told. And if there's history in it, all the better.

My time in documentaries was very educating, in terms of life experience as well as the filmmaking side of it.

I don't think there's so much difference between making documentaries and feature films. I think it's even harder to make documentaries.

I'm a documentary filmmaker, I know what it means to craft a story, especially when you've shot a lot of material.

I always thought that life is full of stories and characters that feel like literary stories and characters. So when I started making documentaries, they weren't humble empirical things, just following people around. I was always trying to impose a story.

I started as a documentary maker, and they're my first love.

There is a porous membrane between a documentary that doesn't use interviews and what you would call a neorealist hybrid film.

Documentaries are inherently instinctual; you're constantly moment to moment, determining what the best place for the camera is to tell the story, usually in service of natural lighting.

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.

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