Narrative Filmmaking Quotes

I really admire Werner Herzog and Spike Lee. They're amazing documentarians. If you took away all the narratives, they'd just be amazing documentarians.

I stopped making videos and commercials for a few months before I started films just to reset my clock because so much narrative filmmaking is a sense of tempo and rhythm.

I'm interested in directing movies about situations that I've lived, so they are almost a personal essay about what I've come to believe in.

I'm a filmmaker. I'm not a politician.

I felt like I was a writer, and I just thought filmmaking was the best way for me to express that, because it allows me to embrace the visual world that I love. It's allows me to interact with people, to be more social than fiction or poetry, and it felt like the right way for me to tell the stories that felt pressing to me.

To make movies you just have to want it enough. You have to have the passion for telling stories. You have to get by the love-of-movies aspect. You can't just be a movie fan.

For seven years, I made films in the cinema verite tradition - photographing what was happening without manipulating it. Then I realised I wanted to make things happen for myself, through feature films.

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.

If you're a great documentary filmmaker, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're a great narrative filmmaker. There are fantastic documentary filmmakers that can't direct actors. You don't have to do that in a documentary, if it's a real documentary.

My god is narrative filmmaking.

Whatever storytelling muscles you've developed as a documentary filmmaker will be extremely helpful as a narrative filmmaker.

I'm Godless. And so I've had to make my God, and my God is narrative filmmaking, which is -- ultimately what my God becomes, which is what my mantra becomes, is the theme.

A long-playing full shot is what always separates the men from the boys. Anybody can make movies with a pair of scissors and a two-inch lens.

The whole point of making a film is to tell a story.

I've always been a fiction filmmaker and I've been heading in the direction of fiction filmmaking, doing documentaries along the way.

I just like documentaries.

Documentaries have always inspired me in narrative filmmaking.

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.

From making documentaries all these years, it doesn't feel right to lead someone. In narratives, I'm always trying to shoot as though it's really happening, and I trust my actors are going to make decisions that I'm going to be following. I want to follow them.

I think that narrative, fiction filmmaking is the culmination of several art forms: theater, art history, architecture. Whereas doc filmmaking is more pure cinema, like cinema verite is film in its purest form.

I'm not a politician; I'm lucky to be a filmmaker and to be able to express myself through the films I make.

One of the reasons to do documentaries is that. There's more sense of creating something, more sense of my own soul in the documentaries than in movies, because I don't write the movies I do.

The holy trifecta of directing and filmmaking is character emotion, camera movement and music. When you hit those three, that's magical. That's what I'm trying to do.

In December 2011, I will be opening up my production house, Sharmeen Obaid Films, and aspire to change the way Pakistanis approach nonfiction storytelling. There are thousands of stories to be found here.

I would definitely like to direct at some point. I've been very fortunate to work with some amazing talent and study them. But when the right time and the right story arrives, and I feel like I'm compelled to tell it, then I'll do that.