I like documentaries because there's nothing to nitpick or criticize about scenes if they aren't just right. It's about honesty and real-life circumstances coming out. Granted it can be swayed by how people tell that story, but overall, I like it because it is true.
The most important thing about my profession is finding the truth, finding the reality of these shows.
In many ways, it is very real, because I sat there for 9 days, and it was constantly happening, and that was the 9 days of making the film. But you can't say that it's 100% true, because there are places where I've been intrusive and interfered.
Any documentary; any capturing of a non-fiction event, is a hyper-realistic condensation of reality that hopefully reveals an emotional truth. It's never the actual literal truth of an event.
A documentary film-maker can't help but use poetry to tell the story. I bring truth to my fiction. These things go hand in hand.
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.
Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real.
In terms of so-called fly-on-the-wall documentaries, there's a claim that the camera is a transparent window into a pre-existing reality. What really is happening is that the film crew and the subjects are collaborating to simulate a reality in which they pretend the camera is not present.
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.
The reality in which a camera turns up is always posed, e.g., the moon landing.
You can construct whatever story you want to. Documentaries are constructions, as is all journalism.
Every fact in my films is true. And yet how often do I have to read over and over again about supposed falsehoods?
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.
What I find most satisfying about photography is the way in which it allows me to document 'reality' while at the same time creating my own version thereof; in other words, the reality I present is a reality based upon what I choose to include in the frame and what I choose to leave out.
Everybody was apprehensive about a documentary. When we're all dead and gone, we don't want to leave something that is not going to be representing the band in a true and honest way that shows everything that's important.
In documentaries, you're confronted with reality; you can not manipulate or move it.
When 'The Thin Blue Line' came out, I was criticized by many people for using reenactments, as if I wasn't dedicated to the truth because I filmed these scenes. That always and still seems to be nonsensical.
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.
Every time you are getting ready to make a shot in a documentary film, you are asking yourself questions about your cinematographic approach. You are approaching the truth, but the image is never the truth itself.
Once you recognize that all documentaries are performance, it's not a matter of 'if' they should be performance. They are performance, and they are performance precisely where people are playing themselves.
