Top 100 Quotes About Documentary
#1. If you care about the 2012 election and value the voices of regular Americans who lost hope in their hope and change candidate, this is one documentary you won't want to miss.
Jedediah Bila
#2. It had an enormous impact to the point of the United Nations passing a resolution against the killing and hunting of these whales as they are an endangered species. This was a documentary on the plight of the whales.
Wavy Gravy
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. At the beginning of my career, I shot a lot more documentaries because I liked the adventure, and probably also because it was easier, and still is easier, for women DPs to shoot documentary than it is to shoot fiction.
Maryse Alberti
#6. I want a documentary to crest by being voted on by 6000 people who are in the business of telling stories.
Sheila Nevins
#7. 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
#8. I'm myself - knowing I'm doing a documentary and speaking with the people, telling them I have a bed, that I can eat every day, but I would like to speak to you. And they really gave me wonderful answers. We got along very well without trying to make me look like I'm what I'm not.
Agnes Varda
#9. 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
#10. I regard sports first and foremost as entertainment, so dry documentary narration is not for me.
Jack Brickhouse
#11. 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
#12. You kind of form a bond with your subjects, in a way. You're in it together. To a degree that people don't realize, documentary films - or at least the kind of documentary films I'm interested in - are a collaborative undertaking with the subjects.
Steve James
#13. I've been wanting to do a documentary on the true heart of the groupie ever since I was one. The groupie is just a girl who loves music and loves to be around the people who make it. She is the fan that takes it to the next level to experience the whole shebang,
Pamela Des Barres
#14. I was watching a Storyville documentary called 'Blackfish' about killer whales in captivity. I was emotionally drained by the end. It revealed a real behind-the-scenes truth on what we do with animals.
Rupert Evans
#15. Everything I've made - it doesn't mean they've all been good - but everything I've made so far, big or little, fiction or documentary, has been something that I've been really enthusiastic about.
Jonathan Demme
#16. For me, every film is actually a form of documentary.
Ira Sachs
#17. It is clear from both documentary and archaeological sources that conspicuous display and consumption of wealth was fundamental for an elite male to maintain power and position in society.
Sally Crawford
#18. Documentary film without nuanced journalistic sourcing risks being sensational, tendentious or broad-brushed.
Naomi Wolf
#19. A good documentary or educational film is not raw experience. The material has passed the mill of reason, it has been sifted and interpreted.
Rudolf Arnheim
#20. Yeah I'm telling real stories, but if you pick up a documentary on strippers, you're going to want to see some stripping, so we definitely got that in there.
Method Man
#21. 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
#22. When I look back at the way that I was in that documentary I cringe.
Benjamin Cohen
#24. 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
#25. I need there to be documentary photographers, because my work is meta-documentary; it is a commentary about the documentary use of photography.
Joan Fontcuberta
#26. Two remarkable men
one young, one old
fuel each other's spirits in the beautiful documentary Keep On Keepin' On.
Leonard Maltin
#27. People may assume 'The Act of Killing' is a historical documentary about what happened in 1965. But our purpose was to expose a present-day regime of fear for what it is.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#28. And he saw the studio he was about to abandon for his bed as it might have appeared in a documentary film about himself that would reveal to a curious world how a masterpiece was born.
Ian McEwan
#29. I think what I love about the documentary process is that you bring yourself to the documentary. And hopefully that makes you ask good questions, and hopefully that makes you reveal a little bit about yourself as well.
Soledad O'Brien
#30. 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
#31. I think the documentary is something that people are hungry for, that it embodies careful thought, nuance.
Beeban Kidron
#32. I left acting for a couple of years to found my company, Wayfarer, and the first project I did was this documentary series I created called 'My Last Days' to remind us that our time is limited and to inspire us to do more and to be the best selves that we can be.
Justin Baldoni
#33. 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
#34. Documentary films are created in an inverted funnel of declining possibility.
Bruce Jackson
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. When you make a documentary film, after many years the only thing you remember is what you put into the film, not what you took out.
Pamela Yates
#39. 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
#40. Right after I did 'The Fountain,' I wanted to go make a documentary or something that was less constructed - more natural. I was searching for a project, and sniffing around, 'The Wrestler' fit right in.
Darren Aronofsky
#41. I have tried to bring about better communication between people. I believe that humanitarian photography is like economics. Economy is a kind of sociology, as is documentary photography.
Sebastiao Salgado
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. A lot of the commercials that I was doing were very slice-of-life, emotional, documentary-style, not big and cinematic and ultimately like the kind of movie I wanted to make.
Dan Trachtenberg
#45. I think photojournalism is documentary photography with a purpose.
W. Eugene Smith
#46. I've often thought even ragtag gatherings of documentary filmmakers are more fun than gatherings of fiction filmmakers.
Marshall Curry
#47. Like my father and grandfather, Philippe and Jacques-Yves Cousteau, I've dedicated my life to exploring and protecting our seas, in large part through documentary film.
Philippe Cousteau Jr.
#48. You made a point about proof. In this sort of history we do nt have proof ... Yet ... the incontrovertibility of the evidence can be plain even when it is not documentary or complete.
Robert Conquest
#49. Well, this week for example, I was just in Los Angeles making a documentary for German television on whales. They had tried to get me in England where they missed me.
Wavy Gravy
#50. Most of the photographs people take with their cameraphones are of little value in terms of documentary.
Martin Parr
#51. I'm a documentary filmmaker by training. You got to start with the real people and the real place.
Simon Beaufoy
#52. I'm organizing documentary films, and whenever scriptwriting gets too tedious I go to my editing room and start to edit the documentary, even if I don't have the full funding yet. So you have to keep yourself busy, you have to like the subject matter.
Haile Gerima
#53. Thhe essence of documentary filmmaking is how you manipulate the material to create an emotional impact, as opposed to just delivering information.
Richard Ray Perez
#54. The existing documentary makers still believe that it is impossible to produce drama material in this State, otherwise they would be doing it, they say.
Ann Macbeth
#55. To make a documentary is one thing, to make a feature film is quite another.
Dennis Hopper
#56. I like to tell people that I have the best job in the media. All I do is hang around with heroes. I do that every week for my 'War Stories' documentary series - and when FOX News wants - I go off and cover the young Americans we send to places like Afghanistan or Iraq.
Oliver North
#57. I just watched this documentary on the mating habits of whiptail lizards and trust me, if those things can make it happen, you can too, my friend.
Robin Bielman
#58. My books are based 98 percent on documentary evidence.
Irving Stone
#59. With any rock documentary or band documentary you always recognize things that you've experienced some version of.
Chris Shiflett
#60. I have seen the Gore documentary 'An Inconvenient Truth,' just released in the States, and admired the acutely revolutionary delivery of the slideshow assisted talk he has now been giving for some 16 years.
Saffron Burrows
#61. If you had the opportunity and some talent, there was no way you couldn't progress, because it was an open market. There was the advertising world, and there was the documentary world.
Richard Donner
#62. Regardless of the medium, be it television or feature or documentary, I'm not gonna distinguish and worry about my particular canon, whatever that means.
Joe Carnahan
#63. 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
#64. In the spring of 1984, I went to the northwest of France, to Normandy, to prepare an NBC documentary on the 40th anniversary of D-Day.
Tom Brokaw
#65. I don't really believe that documentary is objective reality and fiction is all illusion.
Mike Mills
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. Whenever I'm making a feature film, I wish I were filming a documentary, because making feature films is so stressful. It happens every time.
Fatih Akin
#70. Like theatre, crafting a documentary film takes tremendous commitment, patience and passion.
Dori Berinstein
#71. A lot of the distinctions that we make between drama and documentary are spurious. We're deeply confused about these issues. About the difference between the two, about where documentary ends and drama begins.
Errol Morris
#72. We'll be back to our nature documentary, 'Baggy the Anorexic Elephant' in just a second.
Colin Mochrie
#73. 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
#74. Photography has always been about documentary, the depiction of the instant, a moment, sometimes a place. Each project is somehow an experimentation of a specific context or a character.
Hedi Slimane
#75. I don't think that there is any hard and fast rule that says that documentary has to be linear at all.
Brian Lindstrom
#76. With documentary-film projects, you hope you highlight an area of concern people haven't thought about before. A lot of times, I'm asking myself - 'This seems to be a significant problem. What can be done that hasn't been done?'
Paul Allen
#77. My friends adore 'TOWIE' - the TV documentary series, 'The Only Way is Essex.' They like it, I'm afraid, for the most unworthy of reasons: class mockery. They tune in to wonder in a 'can you believe those people?' way at the natives of Brentwood and Buckhurst Hill.
Peter York
#78. Witnessing is the essence of being a documentary filmmaker. Capturing moments in time; never knowing how history will judge them.
Pamela Yates
#79. I'm so proud of myself. I thought, 'I've got to learn about American history.' I literally took two months off and watched every documentary known to man. I really didn't know Benjamin Franklin was so cool.
Rene Russo
#80. Whenever I watch a documentary about the space, I find the news in the world very funny and dull!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#81. My advice to emerging documentary filmmakers would be: try to find other people, a group, a cooperative that you can work with. Filmmaking is hard and lonely and decidedly unglamorous. Find like-minded souls and share the joy and the misery.
Pamela Yates
#82. That's my idea of what a portrait ought to be, anonymous and documentary and a straightforward picture of mankind.
Walker Evans
#83. I'd rather lose the small part of the audience that is going to be insulted because a documentary shouldn't have music than the big part of the audience that kind of gives itself over to the scene.
Daniel Stamm
#84. A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph.
Dorothea Lange
#85. 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
#86. Even a fiction film is hard to end. You can going on shooting and editing a documentary forever.
Leos Carax
#87. I love documentary because it's alive.
Josh Fox
#88. I've been called a spy of Israel since 1996, and since I made my documentary film in 2000 the FBI has investigated me as an agent of Iraq. The FBI has also opened up an investigation into my wife calling her a KGB spy.
Scott Ritter
#89. 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
#90. Maybe every two films you need to do documentary to tell what you really want to tell and not be limited by the medium. With documentary you don't create the reality you have to hunt the reality.
Fatih Akin
#91. Most of my life, I thought that I would end up a novelist. But then, in New York City, after college, I started a company with a college friend where we made documentary video for museums. In that capacity, I shot, directed, edited and began to learn the vocabulary of film.
Jon Spaihts
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. [Documentary photography] is unwittingly literary, because it is nothing other than an observation of contemporary life apprehended at the right moment by an artist capable of seizing it. (1928)
Pierre Mac Orlan
#95. 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
#96. The power of the documentary film, when done well, I think is usually more impacting than a narrative, at least for me. Documentaries are also cheaper, they are more accessible to make.
Richard Ray Perez
#97. 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
#98. I don't think you make documentary films to get your country house. If you're trying to gamble on that, you've very foolish.
Liz Garbus
#99. Both those taking snaps and documentary photographers, however, have not understood 'information.' What they produce are camera memories, not information, and the better they do it, the more they prove the victory of the camera over the human being.
Vilem Flusser
#100. I had long been resistant to doing a documentary about my mother for personal reasons. And I thought there was no way she'd want to, but then I asked her and she said 'yes.'
Rory Kennedy
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