Documentary Realism Quotes

Mass entertainment in America has been dominated for a long time by the mode of documentary realism.

It struck me that working digitally with a small crew, I could lay out a general plan for Famous and hope for mistakes which would create something more than satire and something less than truthful reality.

A mockumentary is supposed to be real, and we were frustrated with mockumentaries on TV, which are so rampant because of the success of 'The Office.' It's not real. You watch and ask why is there even a crew there. They never set it up in the narrative. You have a documentary crew following families for reasons we don't understand.

In documentaries, there's a truth that unfolds unnaturally, and you get to chronicle it. In narratives, you have to create the situations so that the truth will come out.

When I think about the new film, I think I can do whatever I want with fiction, but the more documentary it is, the better it will be because that's what I'm good at. I'm good at observing people's behavior and putting these unspoken things into movie contexts in ways that other people can sometimes miss.

In documentary, you are sometimes burdened, or you feel very responsible for dealing with - I want to say - more complicated themes. Fiction allows for greater distillation.

For some reason or other there was in me the desire to see the world clean and fresh and alive, as primitive things are clean and fresh and alive. The so-called documentary picture left me wanting something.

In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director.

It's so easy to disappear into your character because there isn't all this fuss around you, and we keep a closed set, and closed off to all crew members, even, unless we're cut. A lot of times, you're doing a scene in a movie and there are literally 35 people standing behind the camera all waiting to do their job, but here they have to be off the stage. On The Office, it is very much just the actors, a cameraman and a boom operator, like a real documentary, like we really are being documented.

I like the rock documentaries that make it seem real. Some rock documentaries are meant to make the bands look larger than life.