Top 100 Documentary's Quotes
#1. For a documentary it's so important to find the characters and to find people who will give you access to film
Adam McKay
#2. Everybody should have a documentary made about themselves. It's amazing what you see and what you learn.
Bela Fleck
#3. I watched Ricki Lake's documentary, 'The Business of Being Born,' and that led me to call a midwife, and not an ob-gyn, when I found out I had conceived. My delivery was not easy - they call it 'labor,' not 'a vacation!' - but I was incredibly grateful that I did it that way.
Sarah Wayne Callies
#4. The video for 'Whatever' is kind of a documentary in a way. It's showing that love can last. Not just in your early 20s or your late 30s, but in your 50s, 60s and 70s. There's an awful myth out there that when you get married, love and lovemaking fade. It's not true.
Jill Scott
#5. 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
#6. Documentary: That's a sophisticated and misleading word. And not really clear ... The term should be documentary style ... You see, a document has use, whereas art is really useless.
Walker Evans
#7. 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
#8. The great thing about 'The Office' and it being single-camera and the documentary style is that it's mostly a comedy, but 10 percent of it is, we get to show the existential angst that exists in the American workplace.
Rainn Wilson
#9. She once watched a documentary and learned that the brain was 2 percent of a human's body weight, and it was a testament to the neck and the spinal cord that it managed to hold the whole thing upright.
Tracy Ewens
#10. Spitz and Michael Wadleigh's documentary film Woodstock
Andrew Gentes
#11. Miramax didn't introduce the actors at any of the screenings. That's why a lot of people thought 'Kids' was a documentary. I still meet people who think it was real.
Leo Fitzpatrick
#12. Reality TV has ruined people's ability to watch documentary.
David Farrier
#13. Joe Berlinger's documentary 'Whitey' is so hard-hitting and compelling, you can't take your eyes off the screen.
Leonard Maltin
#14. I personally can watch an eight-hour documentary on Woody Allen because I'm fascinated by him. But, an audience can't really sit through more than two and a half hours on any movie. It doesn't matter if Marlon Brando came back from the dead. It's just impossible.
Brett Ratner
#15. The worst thing that can happen to a comedian is to do a documentary on your life and you're watching it with an audience and there's not a laugh.
David Steinberg
#16. You know, a documentary is only interesting once in a while. If you look at a whole book of Dorothea [Lange]'s where she has row after row of people bending over and digging out carrots - that can be very tedious. And so it's only once in a while that something happens that is worth doing.
Imogen Cunningham
#17. Other people's creativity inspires me. Seeing great art, or reading a fab book or watching an interesting documentary or an exciting film - these things make me want to let my own imagination fly.
Kate Cary
#18. It would be pretty shabby to appear flippant around a documentary that's about how much I love my fans.
Rick Springfield
#19. I want to do a documentary about strippers, 'cause it's a moneymaker.
Method Man
#20. I'm not a fan of the Eagles, but I've watched their documentary numerous times and everyone who's watched it with me has sung along to the songs, much to my dismay.
Bill Hader
#21. There's nothing attractive about doing a documentary. Nothing. It's hard, hard work, and I find having all the attention of the day on me a very unattractive proposition.
Elaine Stritch
#22. We have a documentary film festival in Mexico. It's really original. It's called Ambulante, and it's a film festival that travels around several cities in Mexico.
Gael Garcia Bernal
#23. I read slave narratives, books like Bullwhip Days, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. [The Root's chairman] Henry Louis Gates has an amazing documentary called Many Rivers to Cross - really, his whole writings; he's such a wealth of knowledge.
Jurnee Smollett
#24. There's a tradition of reenactment in documentary which is about sort of illustrating what the past might have been like.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#25. 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
#26. If we have anything to offer, as filmmakers and as TV makers now, it's this ability to feel as close to a documentary as you can get in a narrative form.
Mark Duplass
#27. Bizarrely funny ... Rarely is a documentary as well attuned to its subject as Howard Brookner's BURROUGHS, which captures as much about the life, work and sensibility of its subject as its 86 minute format allows.
Janet Maslin
#28. There are a lot of female directors in documentary, very talented. But it's always lower budget.
Patricia Riggen
#29. Q: Are you guys shooting a movie?
A: No. We're opening a mid-priced Italian restaurant.
Q: Huh?
A: Yes of course we're shooting a movie.
Q: What's the movie about?
A: It's a documentary about human stupidity.
Q: Can I be in your movie?
A: We'd be stupid not to put you in it.
Jesse Andrews
#30. I feel as if I became a documentary film-maker only because I had writer's block for four decades. There's no other good reason.
Errol Morris
#31. Celebrate your victories and mark your defeats. Ultimately documentary filmmaking is not a job, it's a calling.
Pamela Yates
#32. Well, like any time you're shooting documentary stuff, you've got to be in the moment, and you've got to be able to be in control enough to capture what's happening.
Brian De Palma
#33. There's a great documentary on Tupac called 'Resurrection' about the last few years of Tupac's life and how he transformed. And, ironically, how this East Coast rapper became this West Coast icon, back when all that Death Row/Sean Combs stuff was going on.
Marco Rubio
#34. I directed 24's pilot. I felt we should follow the characters around as if we were a documentary crew, using available light, hand-held cameras, split screens, sound that isn't always what it should be, to suit the reality of the premise.
Stephen Hopkins
#35. I'm not somebody who comes in with a whole outline, and says, "Here's the movie we're going to make." That's not what a documentary is for me. I think a documentary is about capturing events as they unfold in real time.
Morgan Spurlock
#36. My instinct was that it was Sidney's childhood in the Bahamas that gave him the fearlessness to fight racism. So this documentary was a kind of rounding out of what had begun in that scene in In the Heat of the Night.
Lee Grant
#37. I think documentary filmmakers need as much protection as possible under journalist's privilege. How else is the public to know what is going on?
Robert Redford
#38. It's a funny thing with documentary films - you want them to feel as entertaining and as gripping as a fictional film. With a fictional film you want it to feel as realistic as a documentary film.
Jonathan Demme
#39. I use people's real voices because I want realism. So often I mention the actors' physicality because I want it to be like a real documentary.
Ricky Gervais
#40. There's an amazing documentary, 'The Day After Trinity,' which is crazy good.
John Benjamin Hickey
#41. Depression is a real demon in the woods for a lot of creative people, you know? It's part of what the documentary is trying to be about for me, finding balance, where the beauty that is attainable in the creative arts can be matched with the scratchy roughness of regular life.
Ethan Hawke
#42. Making an independent documentary film is so hard that usually, the usual model is that your film becomes a model for advocacy, so you can enlist that support group and get as much juice out of your film as possible. That's just practically, financially, what you need to do.
Tim Hetherington
#43. Director Ken Burns revealed that his next documentary is about Franklin Roosevelt, and it's fourteen hours long ... which sounds like too much, until you realize there's been over thirty hours of TV dedicated to Honey Boo Boo.
Jimmy Fallon
#44. I was so used to documentary filming, where it's one take. You can't really say, 'Make that elephant charge again!' And you talk to the camera. With movie filming, you're talking to someone else.
Bindi Irwin
#45. Because 'Call The Midwife' is a gentle drama, not a documentary, it's not appropriate to portray Sister Monica Joan's condition in all its brutal reality.
Judy Parfitt
#46. In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director.
Alfred Hitchcock
#47. I love 'Robot Chicken,' 'The Boondocks' and 'America's Funniest Home Videos.' Then there's this show called 'The First 48.' It's a documentary about killings where they try and find murderers. They interrogate people and they tell on each other - it's hilarious.
ASAP Rocky
#48. It's said that if two documentary filmmakers meet they talk about the world, if two fiction filmmakers meet they talk about the million that they don't have to make their film.
Pirjo Honkasalo
#49. I like to turn on the TV and watch whatever's on. Nick Kroll does that a lot. He doesn't watch important shows. He'll just turn on a documentary on Mia Hamm and watch it for an hour. Whatever's on, we watch.
John Mulaney
#50. When was the last time you saw a documentary that fundamentally changed the way you think? ... Pandora's Promise is built around what should be the real liberal agenda: looking at an issue not with orthodoxy, but with open eyes.
Owen Gleiberman
#51. I would encourage people that, if you are waiting for the end of 'The Office,' to re-tune in right away. It is the beginning of the end, where we start to break down what's going on with this documentary and see behind the scenes with who is involved.
Greg Daniels
#52. I'm so proud of Jason's [Benjamin] work. I can say this and he can't, but there's no group of documentary subjects more devoted to their documentarian. The vibes are really positive, and I feel so lucky.
Lena Dunham
#53. When I graduated from Brown after majoring in women's studies, I made my first PBS documentary, 'Women of Substance.' My first feature documentary was called 'American Hollow,' which I did for HBO and was at the Sundance Film Festival.
Rory Kennedy
#54. And in reality, I don't think it's a real documentary. It's more a story of her life. It's a story of survival. It's a story of the time in which she lived. The story of success and failure.
Maximilian Schell
#55. Immigration is not an issue that I read about in the newspaper or watch a documentary on PBS or CNN. It's an issues I've lived around my whole life. My family are immigrants. My wife's family are immigrants. All of my neighbors are immigrants.
Marco Rubio
#56. There's a documentary film-maker called Werner Herzog, who's a German film-maker. I really dig his stuff, I'd love to chat with him.
Finn Jones
#57. Two remarkable men
one young, one old
fuel each other's spirits in the beautiful documentary Keep On Keepin' On.
Leonard Maltin
#58. I didn't realize that, in doing a documentary, there is this process of discovery. It's not like a film or a play with a set script. It sort of reveals itself.
William Shatner
#59. It's impossible for one or two people to go out and shoot a narrative film; you need to have a cast, the person shooting sound, whatever. But you can legitimately have a couple people and go and do a documentary.
Jeremy Coon
#60. I love the unexpected and I think that's why documentary is an attractive genre to me because you don't know where it's going to go, so I tend to involve that as much as possible in the production process.
Seth Gordon
#61. What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men's existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history.
Joseph Conrad
#62. I think the reality-show format is brilliant, has endless possibilities. It's documentary! But unfortunately, it's rarely executed well. So it becomes just a scripted show, but without actors.
Justin Kirk
#63. You can always go back and reconstruct stuff in a documentary, but it's so much cooler when you're there as it happens.
Ed Cunningham
#64. Did you know, and this is a fact here, did you know that most spiders are ugly? It's true. The woman spiders have it really hard time of it. I saw it on a documentary. Why do you think the Black Widow kills the guy she mates with? Shame, that's why - Tanith Low
Derek Landy
#65. The camera cannot leave the man, but the man can leave the camera. It's in the style of documentary where you make an agreement between a camera and a man and say, "I'm going to film you now."
Tobias Lindholm
#66. I don't see how a woman in documentary photography could have children. I think it's a very difficult thing to do to raise a family, and I have enormous respect for people who do it. I'd hate to do something like that and not be good at it.
Mary Ellen Mark
#67. What's great about documentary, it seems to me, is that it can be experimental filmmaking. You have a license to do a lot of diverse things under the umbrella of 'documentary.'
Errol Morris
#68. That's my idea of what a portrait ought to be, anonymous and documentary and a straightforward picture of mankind.
Walker Evans
#69. I love documentary because it's alive.
Josh Fox
#70. We cannot have a society in which some dictator some place can start imposing censorship here in the United States. If somebody is able to intimidate folks out of releasing a satirical movie, imagine what's going to happen when they see a documentary they don't like or news reports they don't like.
Barack Obama
#71. It's such a rich experience when you enter into a subject from a documentary point of view. It's hard for fiction to compete with that.
Jonathan Demme
#72. I like the idea of the documentary as a portrait. There's not a chronological beginning, middle, and end structure. You build something in the editing room that's shaped by getting to know the person and digging deeper, unpeeling the layers of them as you get to know them.
Spike Jonze
#73. On telly, there's been a move towards entertainment - with some very high-powered, fast-moving dramas. Then we have the Internet, where we get our information but it's all in bite-size pieces. I think the documentary, as a form, actually speaks to what's missing.
Beeban Kidron
#74. Every documentary is subjective. It's a total lie to say there are objective documentaries.
Pirjo Honkasalo
#75. I'm Ready to Die without a Reasonable Doubt
Smoke Chronic and hit it Doggystyle before I go out.
Until they sign my Death Certificate, All Eyez on Me
I'm still at it, Illmatic, and that's The Documentary.
Jayceon Terrell Taylor
#76. If you merely focus on what we already know, then it's not revelatory. You may as well just go and watch a documentary or a few videos on Youtube, and you're good.
David Oyelowo
#77. After I got kicked out of CalArts, I moved to Lawrence Kansas where my sister lived. I began working on A William S. Burroughs documentary. I had no idea it would turn into such a big film.
Yony Leyser
#78. I think documentary filmmaking is a braver way to make films because it's real, and you're really there.
Jamie Bell
#79. Maybe if I found something I was really passionate about, which is entirely possible, I would make another documentary, but it's not a good career choice for anybody. I don't recommend it.
Terry Zwigoff
#80. When I'm able to bring together the two worlds that I love so much - film and TV - is a documentary feature, it's nirvana!
Dori Berinstein
#81. It's supposed to be entertainment. It's not supposed to be a documentary.
Jeri Ryan
#82. Bob Weir calls me a saint, but I'm 'Saint Misbehavin'.' They're making a documentary about my life, and that's the current shooting title. I can roll with that, but otherwise the s-word makes me really paranoid.
Wavy Gravy
#83. I personally just want to do as many different things as I can do, whether it's comedy, drama, science fiction, horror, narrator ... You've got a documentary, I've got a voice. Animated films. Big films, small films.
Colin Farrell
#84. The work of WikiLeaks is with principal documentary evidence; that's where the truth lies. It gets to the heart of the matter. It educates people and in turn empowers them.
Sara Harrison
#85. I'm a huge fan of the Ken Burns documentary style, big time. I love documentaries full stop. I'm a big documentary fan. That's my reality. I don't like reality TV. I like it like that.
Phil Morris
#86. The picture is not a documentary, ... It's a drama that has to be crafted. Reality is not art. You have to make choices when you're trying to make something work. And the choices we make I think are accurate. There aren't any lies in it. There are assumpt
Mark Rydell
#87. Even if it's a "talking head documentary" about a social movement or something along those lines, I've always thought of editing the timing and the sense of the piece for the theatrical experience.
Robert Greene
#88. Comics shouldn't be 'tools' for anyone's agenda except for the characters. And I am speaking only of super hero action comics. I love many of the alternative comics that are like journalistic stories. Documentary comics, a mix of reportage and fiction. Those are just great.
Ann Nocenti
#89. As I get older it gets harder and harder to hold on to the ephemeral excitement. When a documentary, or a screenplay, or even just a brainstorming session is going well I get to experience sense of hope, and expansiveness, even if it's just for a moment.
Andrew Neel
#90. I always remember what Bob Dylan said in that [Martin] Scorsese documentary on him. When he was asked about Joan Baez's complaints about the way he treated her when they were together, Dylan laughed and said, "It's impossible to be in love and wise at the same time."
Richard Gere
#91. Michael Moore announced that his next documentary film will attack the health care industry in America. He's not out to get the pharmaceutical companies. He's just looking for something to relieve the redness in the center of the country.
Argus Hamilton
#92. I'm a documentary photographer. That's what I've always wanted to be; that's where my heart and soul is.
Mary Ellen Mark
#93. We exaggerate the difference between documentary and fiction. I think that on some level a fiction film is also a documentary on the actors. You can't wash away your life's history, which is written on your face, unless you get a facelift.
Pirjo Honkasalo
#94. Why movie and dance critics are taking 'The Company' seriously, I can't imagine. Are they impressed by Altman's reputation and naive sincerity? By the fluid semi-documentary approach?
Robert Gottlieb
#95. A film is not a documentary. And what's wonderful about film is that it's a real provocation for people. I never, ever see film as being an absolute version of the truth.
Cate Blanchett
#96. With everything that I've done with YouTube and podcasts for so many years, it's been: you can record it, edit, and then upload that day. With the book and documentary, it's been such a longer process.
Tyler Oakley
#97. Documentary is, therefore, an approach, which makes use of the artistic faculties to give vivification to fact - to use Walt Whitman's definition of the place of poetry in the modern world.
Beaumont Newhall
#98. In the U.S., the '50s and '60s marked the documentary's golden age, especially at CBS, where pioneering television journalist Edward R. Murrow, immortalised in George Clooney's 'Good Night, and Good Luck,' produced such landmark investigations as the CBS Reports programme 'Hunger in America.'
Naomi Wolf
#99. In documentary filmmaking, there's a tradition of telling stories about victims. We often do that from a very patronizing place, but mostly we do it from a very selfish place, to reassure ourselves that our lives are in sympathy and solidarity with the victims.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#100. A remarkable documentary that's also one of the most beautiful nature films I've seen.
Roger Ebert
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