Documentary Technique Quotes

With documentaries, what's beautiful about them is that you capture something unique in a shot, something that will never repeat itself.

When I'm filming a documentary, I feel like I should be the straight man, watching with a raised eyebrow.

But one of the amazing things about documentary is that you can remake it every time you make one. There is no rule about how a documentary film has to be made.

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.

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

In my early career as a documentarian, I suppose I was trying to make films which - where it was all about making a big cinematic statement, and I think with 'Marley,' I slightly changed my direction and adopted a more mellow approach.

Many people have this memory of traditional TV documentary-making that aims to portray pure reality, and I just don't see that as the only option.

There's a real difference between a documentary that was all about facts and history and information. People just don't get as engaged in that kind of documentary - they don't fall in love, they don't cry, they don't forget who they are, they don't ride with you. As we realized we had richer, vérité kind of people, what we wanted to do is focus in on the vérité story.

With the dramatic canvas, I found you could still operate with the documentarist's observational eye.

If you acknowledge that filming is an occasion where people express things they might not otherwise express, that offers a much more insightful analysis of why documentaries - even of the fly-on-the-wall variety - are powerful.