Brian Lindstrom Quotes

#1. Documentary filmmaking has all the challenges and hardships of narrative filmmaking without any of the infrastructure or support. That's both a blessing and a curse.

Brian Lindstrom

#2. I think that every film should have its own structure, and that's the beauty of film language - is that we get to express that deeply individualistic side of ourselves.

Brian Lindstrom

#3. If the subject is no longer living, the immediate question is do you have enough first-person material to really get that story across. You'd like to avoid it just being other people's memories and interpretations.

Brian Lindstrom

#4. We all use dishwashers every day and yet none of us would say that we're experts on dishwashers, but somehow we all think we're experts on movies.

Brian Lindstrom

#5. I think that most of us instinctively avoid people with mental illness.

Brian Lindstrom

#6. I felt like any individual's recovery was more important than the film I was making. And I actually felt that my presence was a form of witness that communicated to the people I was following that their lives mattered.

Brian Lindstrom

#7. The visual quality of the cameras now is such that you can shoot with available light, and if people are willing to mount a microphone on the camera and maybe even on the subject, then you're good to go.

Brian Lindstrom

#8. I've been very lucky in my life to have some great teachers.

Brian Lindstrom

#9. Mental health treatment is most likely available to the officers, but they may be reluctant to access it due to cultural beliefs within the force, fear of stigma, etc.

Brian Lindstrom

#10. If you just think about the difficulty you'll never get anywhere.

Brian Lindstrom

#11. We don't see many films in which someone with schizophrenia is the main character.

Brian Lindstrom

#12. One thing people often forget when making a documentary is that, in a sense, you still have to cast, find a star, and it has all of those built-in challenges.

Brian Lindstrom

#13. I think it would be really hypocritical of me to make the films I make, where I delve into people's lives, to say that my life can't be looked at or that I have to be this pristine, isolated figure.

Brian Lindstrom

#14. In documentary you sometimes see the tyranny of the linear, but what I've noticed in the last ten years in narrative film is the tyranny of the non-linear.

Brian Lindstrom

#15. I think in many ways what my films are about is that search for my grandpa's dentures: for that humanizing narrative that bridges the gap between "us" and "them" to arrive at a "we."

Brian Lindstrom

#16. You can just imagine the restrictions of shooting in a prison, but I just decided I'm going to embrace those restrictions sometimes when you don't have many choices you can make the best choices.

Brian Lindstrom

#17. I don't think that there is any hard and fast rule that says that documentary has to be linear at all.

Brian Lindstrom

#18. In the same way that we want to expand mental health service for people with mental illness, we also need to make sure that our police officers are getting the mental health help they need.

Brian Lindstrom

#19. If I weren't making documentary films, I suppose I'd be teaching.

Brian Lindstrom