I think all documentaries leave out areas of people's lives. Which is good. There are areas that need not be explored.
I don't think a camera and a cameraman can destroy a family.
Documentaries deal with people who live real, everyday lives. But if these people trusted us and told us the truth about their lives, it could be used against them - which sometimes happened.
I don't think the subject of a documentary film should be producers on it.
Now and then, someone would accuse me of being evil - of letting people destroy themselves while I watched, just so I could film them and tape-record them. But I didn't think of myself as evil - just realistic.
For my part, as a filmmaker, I've never been a fly-on-the-wall documentarian. I have no commitment to that method. I believe it's a lie.
Is Michael Moore an honest documentarian? Honestly? I don't think he is... The real discussion gets left behind the entertainment value.
I don't know the facts surrounding Andrew Jarecki's work. I think it's a triumph of television. But it does raise troubling issues that I think we as a documentary community, you know, need to address.
I feel that a documentarian has an obligation to tell the truth as he or she interprets it. And what I mean by that is that documentarians don't necessarily have the same sort of obligations that a journalist might have. A journalist might be called upon to be objective, whereas a documentarian is sort of forced to take sides.
Direct cinema is about simulating a reality in which you're not having the overwhelming influence that you really are having.
I think that the whole voyeuristic attitude of filmmakers or of me personally - of shooting documentaries and so forth - is an important issue.
