Documentary Filmmaker Quotes

#1. I live in Tuxedo Park, N.Y. and spend time in the West Village, where my wife Elizabeth Cotnoir, a writer-producer and documentary filmmaker, has an office.

Howard Shore

#2. As a documentary filmmaker, I'm very respectful, and my interview style is not intrusive. I don't really have an agenda. I just go in there, I mumble something or other, I wait for them to speak, and I wait for them to stop.

Tony Kaye

#3. When the American documentary filmmaker Donn Alan Pennebaker wanted to do a film on Dylan, Dylan asked him what he'd already done, and Pennebaker answered, Nothing except shots in the street. Dylan asked to see them, and he agreed to let him do the film.

Raymond Depardon

#4. When a documentary filmmaker, working in the style that I do, suggests that there has been a shooting ratio of 40 hours to every one hour of finished film, that doesn't mean that the other 39 are bad.

Ken Burns

#5. The main reason why I'm a documentary filmmaker is the power of the medium. The most powerful films I've seen have been documentaries. Of course, there are some narrative films that I could never forget, but there are more documentaries that have had that impact on me.

Richard Ray Perez

#6. Witnessing is the essence of being a documentary filmmaker. Capturing moments in time; never knowing how history will judge them.

Pamela Yates

#7. I started to do theater when I was a little boy at school, and then, I think because my father was a documentary filmmaker and worked for German television, I was of course fascinated by what he did.

Daniel Bruhl

#8. I'm a documentary filmmaker by training. You got to start with the real people and the real place.

Simon Beaufoy

#9. For a documentary filmmaker, I do very well.

Michael Moore

#10. I have major credibility as a hip, out-there documentary filmmaker, and I'm not going to say, 'I'm only a drama filmmaker' anymore.

Gillian Armstrong

#11. I've never seen myself as a documentary filmmaker. I see myself as a filmmaker, period, and I am interested in drama as well as in documentary.

Errol Morris

#12. It's a privilege to have the career I have, to love every day and be following my passion, the stories that interest me, to remote locations and people. So nothing stops me from that - but yes, it seems redundant in documentary-filmmaker circles today to say the biggest struggle was financing.

Pietra Brettkelly

#13. I would love to have been a documentary filmmaker; I just didn't have the resources to do that.

Anna Deavere Smith

#14. My interest in painting is recording things. I think of myself as almost a documentary filmmaker ... I've gotten into some curious situations ...

Jamie Wyeth

#15. I never intended to be a documentary filmmaker. I think I became a documentary filmmaker because I had trouble writing, and I had trouble finishing things.

Errol Morris

#16. 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.

Alexander Skarsgard

#17. I became a documentary filmmaker because I wanted to make socially conscious films. I never studied filmmaking - everything I have learned has been on the field.

Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy

#18. Most of the younger people I knew didn't seem to have a handle on things; they hadn't found their place, they didn't understand how the world works, they didn't understand how to treat other people, and they didn't know how to stop thinking about themselves.

Kristin Hersh

#19. Whether you CAN forgive and whether you SHOULD trust.

Emily Giffin

#20. I never uttered a word about things, but with my age now, I've completely lost all reservations. In more ways than one. I was never in front of the camera, for example, but now I've been in films and documentaries.

Giovanna Cau

#21. I realize that I will either allow my view of evil to determine my view of God and will cut him down accordingly, or I will allow my view of God to determine my view of the evil and will elevate him accordingly, accepting that nothing is beyond his power for good.

Dallas Willard

#22. Kevin's eyes shot open to complete darkness. What'd happened? His memory was returning slowly. He was now remembering. An ambush outside his apartment in the Vatican.

Peter J. Tanous

#23. Even a documentary portrait of a person that tries to be very accurate is shaped by the filmmaker in so many ways.

Dana Spiotta

#24. Jesus is a great divider of life. One must walk parallel with Him or directly across His way.

Charles M. Sheldon

#25. And you can tell the writers who do it - Robert Stone, for example, who with each new novel is doing something new. I appreciate that in other writers.

Tobias Wolff

#26. When I was growing up listening to music, it was 2004, when The Starting Line and Finch and The Used were kind of my favorite bands.

Kellin Quinn

#27. LEARN TO LOVE YOUR failures, Marcus, because it is your failures that will make you who you are. It is your failures that will give meaning to your victories.

Joel Dicker

#28. I will respect the limits of my experience but that won't stop me from trying to lead by example of my work. Being a good teammate and picking them up on and off the field is a simple goal of mine.

Anthony Rizzo

#29. I've been a documentary photographer for much longer than I have been a filmmaker.

Lauren Greenfield

#30. The government could take away all the drugs in the world and people would spin around on their lawns until they fell down and saw God.

Dennis Miller