Documentary Filmmaking Quotes

I spent my 20s making film after film, often in very adverse conditions. You'd fly back from somewhere - Beirut, the Falklands, South Africa - on Saturday, and you'd have 24 hours to cut your film, and it would go out on Monday night.

I would love to have been a documentary filmmaker; I just didn't have the resources to do that.

I have a company where I'm trying to get projects off the ground. Me and my partner Madeleine Sackler, we just shot our first feature in a maximum security prison where about 95% of the cast were incarcerated men. We're editing that and there's a doc going with it.

I was very impressed with Davis Guggenheim's 'An Inconvenient Truth.' He's inspired me as one of the newer, cutting-edge documentary filmmakers. I see those films, and I'm just instinctively drawn to them.

If we have anything to offer, as filmmakers and as TV makers now, it's this ability to feel as close to a documentary as you can get in a narrative form.

It's all movies for me. And besides, when you say documentaries, in my case, in most of these cases, means "feature film" in disguise.

As a documentarian, you think, 'Follow your curiosity.'

For 'City of Ghosts,' I really didn't speak any Arabic. It obviously made it more difficult, but I also found it to be an advantage while shooting. It allowed me to focus on the emotion of the scene as opposed to just chasing dialogue.

If a director takes the time to document - to step back to observe - I think it I more honest. Because it has to be the public that makes the conclusions and who, possibly, resolves the situation.

One of my fantasies in my life has been that I was granted access with a camera to go back in time, and to film the actual campaign of Alexander crossing into India through Iran and Persia.

Jon Ronson makes me laugh. I've read all of his books.

We all had to learn Southern accents. It wasn't a big research show. With the 'Wounded Knee' project, I locked myself in my apartment with history books so I would know what we're talking about.

I'm still hesitant to call myself a journalist. I see myself as a documentary maker who is trusted with hard-hitting current affairs issues.

I never saw myself as a director. It's certainly a second language but making movies for 40 years, you pick stuff up. However, this style of making movies, this documentary style, is easier for me because I gather a lot of material and with an editor, write it on screen. You try to write based on what you shot.

The first night I met Yo-Yo Ma, I found him the most charming person I had ever met, and I was willing to follow him with the camera anywhere.

If I were just curious, it would be very hard to say to someone, I want to come to your house and have you talk to me and tell me the story of your life. I mean people are going to say, You're crazy. Plus they're going to keep mighty guarded. But the camera is a kind of license. A lot of people, they want to be paid that much attention and that's a reasonable kind of attention to be paid.

From film to film, even documentaries, I was learning the medium and learning how to bring form into some kind of relationship with the content, how to work it, and above all, how to create some kind of order out of chaos.

I once did a film in Russia because I wanted to see what the hell was going on there.

I'm very influenced by documentary filmmaking and independent filmmaking, by a lot of noir and films from the '40s. Those are my favorite. And then, filmmaking from the '70s is a big influence for me.

When you make feature films, you have a script, which is a bible. The final result should be as it was written down on paper. And in documentary, you can write whatever you want, but life brings you situations where you have to be fast thinking, fast moving.

When I did 'Don't Look Back,' I no longer had Time-Life looking over my shoulder, so I could kind of do it as I wanted, and it was like I was really correcting 'Jane.'

There's a tradition of reenactment in documentary which is about sort of illustrating what the past might have been like.

I was a journalist and wrote about filmmakers, but I didn't review movies per se.

It was interesting to shoot history as it happens, without anyone demanding a huge story.

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.