Top 100 Quotes About Documentaries
#1. My father was an amateur filmmaker who shot 8mm color documentaries.
Lasse Hallstrom
#2. Everybody should have a documentary made about themselves. It's amazing what you see and what you learn.
Bela Fleck
#3. I like independent movies, documentaries. There's not a lot of movies that are commercially made that I dig.
Jeff Garlin
#4. You can't be serious," Eve said. "Guys. People get eaten in places like this. At the very least, we get locked in a room and terrible, evil things get done to us and put on the Internet. I've seen the movies."
"Eve," Michael said. "Horror movies are not documentaries.
Rachel Caine
#5. I really like 'The Three Kings' DVD. I love that movie and all the extra footage and documentaries.
A. J. Cook
#6. If you acknowledge that filming is an occasion where people express things they might not otherwise express, that offers a much more insightful analysis of why documentaries - even of the fly-on-the-wall variety - are powerful.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#7. I'm an eclectic and avid filmgoer. I try to see everything from romantic comedies to blockbusters to art house films, world cinema and documentaries.
Pamela Yates
#8. I feel like a lot of funders of documentaries today want to fund films that have a social message that is going to yield results.
Marshall Curry
#9. You should bear in mind that almost all my documentaries are feature films in disguise.
Werner Herzog
#10. 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
#11. We've never had a situation where mass media has been so censored, at least in my lifetime. When I was younger, networks like NBC, CBS, were independently owned, and took their jobs as journalists seriously. There used to be documentaries like "The Selling of the Pentagon."
Jello Biafra
#12. I make a rod for my own back because people see my novels as quasi documentaries. But it is never history that's the main event of my books. It's my characters.
Christopher Koch
#13. Ten years ago I was not heavily involved in the film world but on reflection it was a boom time with the mineral boom happening, so there was immense growth for industrial training films, documentaries to do with the mining, and the outback world.
Ann Macbeth
#14. 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
#15. I saw 'The Grand Budapest Hotel.' I liked it. I saw 'The Fault in Our Stars,' and I could see why young girls like it. But it dropped off like crazy in the second weekend. I liked 'Fed Up' - I love documentaries. I go to a lot of documentaries.
Rob Reiner
#16. When I'm actually making a film and trying to find solutions, I like to watch making-of documentaries about huge films, like 'Gladiator.' That couldn't be more apart from what I'm doing, but you see Ridley Scott facing huge problems and fixing them.
Philippe Falardeau
#17. Documentaries deal with people who live real, everyday lives. But if these people trusted us and told us the truth about their lives, it could be used against them - which sometimes happened.
Krzysztof Kieslowski
#18. Right now I'm taking a break from hip-hop documentaries. But I would do it if things lined up.
Michael Rapaport
#19. I love documentaries, I like observing real people.
Tracey Ullman
#20. Stories, as we're taught in journalism school early on, are told through people. Those stories make our documentaries powerful. You can explore someone's culture, you can explore their experience, you can explore an issue through human beings who are going through it.
Soledad O'Brien
#21. My compulsion to always be working has become less strong and my current business is purely down to this enormous alimony. If I wasn't doing this I'd be making documentaries about wildlife and other subjects that interest me.
John Cleese
#22. 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
#23. My background is sociology. Combined with my graphic approach, if I could do some film projects, I think I'd be very good at making documentaries eventually, but people don't think of me for that, of course. But dialogue is something I know I can be good at.
David Carson
#24. Saying that all documentaries are the same is like saying all foreign films are the same.
Terry Zwigoff
#25. I like documentaries; I watch the Soccer Channel; I like the Military Channel.
Steve Jones
#26. I travel because I want to know. Books and documentaries will only get you so far. If you want to know, you will have to go.
Henry Rollins
#27. I've always intended to eventually make films. I've always been very aware of tone and shots. But documentaries are a great proving ground for me.
George Ratliff
#28. I think that the whole voyeuristic attitude of filmmakers or of me personally - of shooting documentaries and so forth - is an important issue.
Haskell Wexler
#29. After college, I did a bunch of different jobs - taught English in Mexico, worked in public radio, worked for a web design company - but there was something about documentaries that really attracted me.
Marshall Curry
#30. I have tried reading the Bible but that's a tough read there. I watch a lot of religious documentaries. I have a keen interest in religion for someone who's not religious.
Jim Jefferies
#31. 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.
Jonathan Demme
#32. I love not serious documentaries, too, but I love seeing people at their wits' end, I guess.
Maria Thayer
#33. Joe Berlinger's documentary 'Whitey' is so hard-hitting and compelling, you can't take your eyes off the screen.
Leonard Maltin
#34. People in general have a preconceived idea of what prison is, from seeing documentaries or whatever.
Laura Prepon
#35. I wouldn't call myself a geek, but I do sometimes teach Mommy and Daddy stuff about computers. And I do watch TV, but only informative programmes like the news and documentaries.
Adora Svitak
#36. Well, I've been in several films including documentaries, but the big blockbuster, I was hired as advisor to the actors, I was trying to make Jesuits out of them.
Daniel Berrigan
#37. Television has its own award. It's called the Emmy. It's a good award. I like it. I have one. But you don't see movies like 'The King's Speech' win Oscars and then go to TV and qualify for Emmys. In documentaries, some networks have been able to game the system.
Michael Moore
#38. I love documentaries and I watch documentaries to no end.
Michael Pena
#39. I had worked in fiction a lot before I started making documentaries, but when I was around 32 or 33-years-old I suddenly got so fed up with the world of fiction, which is so money-centered.
Pirjo Honkasalo
#40. There's so many documentaries out there right now and everything's exposing wrestling.
Owen Hart
#41. I have a pretty positive view of environmental activism, but I didn't know much about the ELF. A lot of people make documentaries because they have something they want to say, but I make them because there's something I want to explore.
Marshall Curry
#42. 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
#43. Every time I see documentaries or infomercials about little kids with cancer, I just freak out. It affects me on the highest emotional level ... Anytime I think about it, it makes me sadder than anything I can think of.
Kurt Cobain
#44. When you make documentaries or short films, you have to have eyes and ears in the back of your head and on the sides and all around you. I like that in my films.
Bruce Weber
#45. Documentaries can embrace contradictions in a way that journalism can't.
Alex Gibney
#46. Contrary to popular opinion, 'Leave it to Beaver' was not a documentary.
Stephanie Coontz
#47. 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
#48. Post-war filmmakers gave us the documentary, Rob Reiner gave us the mockumentary and Moore initiated a third genre, the crockumentary.
Michael Moore
#49. In the documentary the basic material has been created by God, whereas in the fiction film the director is a God; he must create life.
Alfred Hitchcock
#50. I watch 'Al Jazeera.' They have news that you can't find anywhere else. They do great documentaries, too.
Dick Van Dyke
#51. Most of my films have been documentaries, but I'm also very interested in narrative filmmaking.
Barbara Kopple
#52. Documentary filmmaking ruins you for real life, because you learn to be extremely attentive.
Frederick Wiseman
#53. 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
#55. I wasn't really that informed about the two-year-old. Oh, I'd read about them, and occasionally I'd see documentaries on the Discovery Channel showing two-year-olds in the wild, where they belong..
Ray Romano
#56. Every year, I'm depressed that so few of the documentaries I've loved break through.
David Edelstein
#57. By showing hunger, deprivation, starvation and brutality, as well as endurance and nobility, documentaries inform, prod our memories, even stir us to action. Such films do battle for our very soul.
Theodore Bikel
#58. There's a tradition of reenactment in documentary which is about sort of illustrating what the past might have been like.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#59. I like documentaries because there's nothing to nitpick or criticize about scenes if they aren't just right. It's about honesty and real-life circumstances coming out. Granted it can be swayed by how people tell that story, but overall, I like it because it is true.
Steven Yeun
#60. In terms of so-called fly-on-the-wall documentaries, there's a claim that the camera is a transparent window into a pre-existing reality. What really is happening is that the film crew and the subjects are collaborating to simulate a reality in which they pretend the camera is not present.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#61. You see reality TV and it's not reality TV. It's contrived and everything is plotted and scripted nearly. Documentaries are the same and just as bad.
Ricky Gervais
#62. I think there have been so many documentaries about pop stars, made by pop stars. It's a new phenomenon. People making these movies where they praise themselves and show their own weaknesses. it's all designed to make you love them even more.
Judd Apatow
#63. Fear is not a word in my football documentary.
Jose Mourinho
#64. News makes things black and white. Documentary filmmaking should do the opposite.
Robert Greene
#65. One of the common themes you will read in interview after interview is the call to keep fighting for your vision. This is a message to women directors, producers, writers - anyone who wants to work in the business. Your voice counts. Your vision matters.
Melissa Silverstein
#66. Documentaries for me always felt kind of limiting. I wanted to go bigger. And I also love actors, and I love performance. So feature filmmaking was always the intent.
Peter Landesman
#67. I'd love to direct commercials on Caribbean beacheswith luscious women rubbing on suntan lotion, but all I get arethese documentary-type things.
Michael Apted
#68. 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
#69. You can write when you're dyslexic, you just can't read it. But I started writing short stories as a child and I found the short story format a real nice one. I love short stories and I love short documentaries or short films of any kind.
Billy Bob Thornton
#70. Documentaries are the first line of education, and the second line of education is dramatization, such as 'The Pacific'.
Steven Spielberg
#71. 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
#72. I never really had any intention of getting involved in documentaries until the opportunity came around. I always thought much more in classic fiction cinema terms and I think I tried to apply those ideas to documentaries and not vice versa.
John Hyams
#73. I'm strictly a movie person. I mean, I watch the HBO documentaries and Netflix.
Maria Thayer
#74. Did a man really walk on the moon? I saw plenty of documentaries on it, and I really wondered.
Marion Cotillard
#75. I've long been a fan of IMAX nature documentaries, but Humpback Whales, directed by Greg MacGillivray, is something special.
Joe Morgenstern
#76. I like giving music-themed gifts. I've given a couple of music documentaries to boys. Especially if they don't have the same taste as me, I try to infiltrate their mind with my favourite bands.
Bella Heathcote
#77. I make films about people with disabilities as well and I think this question is more relevant in regards to these documentaries where the actual person appears on film. I know these people are proud of who they are and what they are doing with their lives.
Arthur Bradford
#78. I have made more documentaries in my time than I think I care to remember, though I am immensely proud of all my work.
Charles Guggenheim
#79. I watch movies occasionally, and I watch documentaries. Virtually nothing else.
Don DeLillo
#80. In documentaries, there's a truth that unfolds unnaturally, and you get to chronicle it. In narratives, you have to create the situations so that the truth will come out.
Ava DuVernay
#81. 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
#82. I wanted to make a film that wouldn't just appeal to Formula One fans. That's what the great sports documentaries do - 'Hoop Dreams,' 'When We Were Kings' - they're human dramas first, sport second, if at all.
Asif Kapadia
#83. I dont see why people are so snooty about Channel Five. It has some respectable documentaries about the Second World War. It also devotes considerable airtime to investigations into lap-dancing, and other related and vital subjects
Boris Johnson
#84. Some documentaries are made by people who are driven more by one particular story, or have different backgrounds or ambitions, but I'm always looking for projects that let me be the best filmmaker I can be, and to be stretched and grow further.
Lucy Walker
#85. I think all documentaries leave out areas of people's lives. Which is good. There are areas that need not be explored.
Alice Walker
#86. I'm a huge 'Game of Thrones' fan. I'm really into the 'Colbert Report' and 'Last Week Tonight.' And I really like to get on Netflix and watch, like, TV documentaries about: What happened to the mastodon? Or who was Jack the Ripper?
Scott Michael Foster
#87. I left the golden age of documentaries to go into the golden days of the 'CBS Evening News.' You could see that the audiences were eroding.
Howard Stringer
#88. Along with the rest of the establishment, the BBC which, to be fair, can make superb documentaries has swallowed wholesale the lies and distortions about domestic violence promoted by extreme, man-hating feminism through the vehicle of deeply dodgy 'research'.
Melanie Phillips
#90. I don't normally make documentaries. I'm a drama director. I've made a few short docs, but I don't like talking heads or 'voice of God' narrators.
Asif Kapadia
#91. 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.
Marshall Curry
#93. I studied directing prior to acting and I've done music videos and documentaries and things that were sort of well-received.
Matthew Gray Gubler
#94. I love these sort of documentaries, which you might turn on late on a Saturday night - like, say, 'The Alma Cogan Story.' But they are ripe for spoofing, because the presenters are always so serious and anxious to make themselves look like rather attractive and interesting people.
Peter Capaldi
#95. When I took a couple of years to do the documentaries after I left 'American Morning' - what was I gone for, five years? - I didn't feel that I was floating under the radar.
Soledad O'Brien
#96. I had a very short time on that film [The Possibilities Are Endless] and it was quite strange because the process was kind of like a documentary, which was different for me. The way everything was filmed was very casual.
Yasmin Paige
#97. You can construct whatever story you want to. Documentaries are constructions, as is all journalism.
Tim Hetherington
#98. I have always felt that documentaries are an opportunity for me to witness a world that I know nothing about.
Chris Hegedus
#99. I'm kind of a twisted social documentary photographer.
Catherine Opie
#100. It's all movies for me. And besides, when you say documentaries, in my case, in most of these cases, means "feature film" in disguise.
Werner Herzog
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