I Am Documentary Quotes

#1. Reality TV has ruined people's ability to watch documentary.

David Farrier

#2. Theatre is filled w/ passion, risk and drama (as much behind-the-curtain as on stage), perfect ingredients for documentary storytelling.

Dori Berinstein

#3. Spitz and Michael Wadleigh's documentary film Woodstock

Andrew Gentes

#4. I did documentary film for a long time, and I spent a lot of time behind the camera, fervently wishing that the reality I was filming would conform to my narrative propriety. But you can't control it.

Ruth Ozeki

#5. I've always been interested in how to present something that relates to our reality - which is not really ... I don't even know if documentary itself does as good a job. It has its own problems in trying to get at the reality of the situation.

Gus Van Sant

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

Gus Van Sant

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

Lauren Greenfield

#8. Documentary is thought to be art when it transcends its reference to the world, when the work can be regarded, first and foremost, as an act of self-expression on the part of the artist.

Allan Sekula

#9. I made three short films of my own which I wrote, produced, directed ... you did everything in those days. My favourite one was something I shot on VHS ... a little documentary.

Asif Kapadia

#10. 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

#11. People outside the documentary world don't realize how time-consuming making a documentary film is there is a lot of responsibility, and in order to make something good you need time.

Alex Hammond

#12. When I was at Stratford, the very first thing that I was commissioned to work on was trying to make a musical out of the documentary material about the General Strike, which was the next big historical event in England, after the First World War.

Trevor Nunn

#13. Stories have a special way of putting us inside the people, inside the boots of the soldiers. You're absorbed in a way a documentary or nonfiction can't do for you.

Tim O'Brien

#14. NO greater love has a husband for his wife than to watch a 2hr documentary on an elite ballet competition.

Mark Venturini

#15. Especially when you talk about the power of documentary filmmaking, you can't really have a slant; financially, you can't have a slant on the end goals.

Amy J. Berg

#16. You can start a documentary with just a camera, as opposed to a fiction film where you need actors, a crew, a script, a lot more start-up resources. It may be self-perpetuating.

Thom Powers

#17. In a way then, the Divine Principle, this new revelation, is the documentary of my life. It is my own life experience. The Divine Principle is in me, and I am in the Divine Principle.

Sun Myung Moon

#18. I don't see myself as a documentary photographer. I am more drawn to the image itself, rather than to the description of a scene. And, anyway, every image only halfway represents reality, whereas the other half is rather, more or less, fulfilling our imagination.

Beat Streuli

#19. 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

#20. I have a great career, and no matter what I am doing, a big blockbuster movie ... or my small documentary, David Letterman will call and say I would like you to sit on my couch.

Rosie Perez

#21. I am deeply honored to be making 'Life Itself,' a documentary on the life of Roger Ebert, and to have had the full cooperation and enthusiasm of Roger and his wife, Chaz.

Steve James

#22. 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

#23. I'm still producing scripted features, and I am already working on a new documentary project with Norman Lear and Lara Bergthold. It is about the Declaration of Independence and the relevance of the document today. And it will be fun and engaging - I promise!

Linda Goldstein Knowlton

#24. In a way my work is documentary. But I am also a photographer who has a distinct style. My photographs are a companion to the reality of the situation.

Graciela Iturbide

#25. I didn't really know what to expect, but I thought there aren't a lot of rap groups that can say they have a documentary done about them, so my attitude was like, 'Shoot, why not?' I'm sure there are a lot of people that would like to take our place. I felt like we should all embrace it.

Phife Dawg

#26. Everybody should have a documentary made about themselves. It's amazing what you see and what you learn.

Bela Fleck

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. It can be challenge enough to have to eat with myself.

Jonathan Safran Foer

#30. Idea For A Short Documentary Film
Representatives of different food products manufacturers try to open their own packaging.

Lydia Davis

#31. I agreed to film after my rookie year in Golden State. I was more used to cameras and felt that my journey to the NBA was a story worth sharing. Little did we know how much bigger the platform and documentary would become after Linsanity.

Jeremy Lin

#32. At times doc filmmaking feels more rewarding creatively. Because you are creating something out of pure cinema - instead of narrative cinema, where you've got a script and a cast and you build from your foundation, whereas in documentary, you're building out of chaos.

George Hickenlooper

#33. 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

#34. We need to find another way or another shape or an allegory or something that tells us more. Even Vagabond - it was a fiction but it was really a documentary. I mean, it has the texture of documentary. Even if I made up every line, it has the texture of being true.

Agnes Varda

#35. I may be wrong, but the essential illustrative nature of most documentary photography, and the worship of the object per se, in our best nature photography, is not enough to satisfy the man of today, compounded as he is of Christ, Freud, and Marx.

Aaron Siskind

#36. I heard a quote once in a documentary about a band that said you're better off owning everything 100 percent and selling 20,000 copies of an album than signing with a record company and selling a million copies. There has never been a truer statement about show business than that.

Bill Burr

#37. For a documentary it's so important to find the characters and to find people who will give you access to film

Adam McKay

#38. Thirteen years have past since 1993, and I still have not seen one single book, documentary or anything to the biggest epidemic in Scottish, British prison history. I would go as far and say, no other prison in the world had fourteen men catching the HIV virus at the same time.

Stephen Richards

#39. 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

#40. In my mind, there isn't as much of a distinction between documentary and fiction as there is between a good movie and a bad one.

Abbas Kiarostami

#41. Feature filmmaking is a different kind of complication as documentary comes in the editing room.

Nicholas Jarecki

#42. Films are always a fiction, not documentary. Even a documentary is a kind of fiction.

Philip Seymour Hoffman

#43. My photography changed from being more documentary-like to arranging things more, and that came into being partly because I started doing music videos, and I incorporated some things from the music videos into my photography again, by arranging things more.

Anton Corbijn

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. I am a Beyonce fan. I'm gonna watch her upcoming documentary because fortunately one of the TVs in our kitchen has closed captioning so I'll be able to understand what she says. You know Beyonce can't talk. She sounds like she has a fifth grade education.

Wendy Williams

#48. I don't have a horror film in me just because I don't like to be scared. But I definitely have a documentary in me, and I certainly have dramas.

Todd Phillips