Non-Fiction Storytelling Quotes

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.

When I'm making documentaries, I think a lot about how fiction films play. I want them to have the pacing, the twists and the character development of fiction films.

I came from the school of cinema verite documentaries, which was: Do not manipulate reality as it was happening but create a narrative in the editing room.

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.

I'm always trying to look for how I can find human stories that aren't just dramas.

I think it's a great pity in the Anglophone world that we conflate cinema verite and Direct Cinema; they're, in fact, ontological opposites. In Direct Cinema, we create a fictional reality with characters and pretend we're not that.

You should bear in mind that almost all my documentaries are feature films in disguise.

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.

So I do tend to do documentaries where I can move in and out of them.

I'm fascinated by documentaries, to begin with. Because of the nature of television, as opposed to theatrical, documentaries can be in this long form and take you on a journey.

I honestly believe that everything I know about the writing of non-fiction (or writing) could be engraved on the head of a pin with a garden hoe.

The nice thing about a documentary, I think, is that so much of it is editing, too. You sort of get to keep making decisions. It's not as much like when you do a narrative, fictional piece, and you have a certain number of shooting days, and you're like, "Well, that's what it is." You can continue to seek out more photographs or try to find more footage. The genre gives you the ability to keep working on it, which is great for a first-time director.

There's a line I love in Conan The Barbarian where someone says, "That used to be another snake cult, now I see it everywhere." That's certainly true of documentaries. I wouldn't say it's ubiquitous, but it's become close to ubiquitous. It's everywhere.

In documentary films, you're a storyteller using found objects. You still have to have a story arc and all the elements that make a good story. It really helped me mature as a storyteller.

I film normal-life subjects in natural settings that some people would consider uncinematic. But what I want to show is nature itself, as the truth of life.

I love the idea of documentaries. I love seeing documentaries, and I love making them. Documentaries are incredibly easy to shoot. The ease with which you can hear something's going on, somebody's going to be somewhere: That sounds so interesting. Pick up your camera and go.

Of course, when you're making a documentary, you don't have actors, but nonetheless, there is a writing process that does take place in the editing room.

I don't think there's so much difference between making documentaries and feature films. I think it's even harder to make documentaries.

I think when I write movies and plays and books and magazine articles, they're all storytelling, and reality is the common denominator that binds them.

If I could make a decent living doing documentaries, I would. I don't really care about [the other] stuff so much. But you can't make a living doing documentaries. Although it has affected my work, at least in that I think I make fairly realistic-looking pictures.

That's what happens in feature docs. The more time you spend, the more nuance emerges, the more a story evolves - but it's different than fiction, where you can reshoot something.

A lot of the distinctions that we make between drama and documentary are spurious. We're deeply confused about these issues. About the difference between the two, about where documentary ends and drama begins.

Well, I want to do everything in sort of a documentary style, ever since I started in the '80s.

I always thought that life is full of stories and characters that feel like literary stories and characters. So when I started making documentaries, they weren't humble empirical things, just following people around. I was always trying to impose a story.

Brilliant documentaries are about so much more than their subject.