Quotes About Documentary

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

Jonathan Safran Foer

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

Lydia Davis

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

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

Nicholas Jarecki

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

Philip Seymour Hoffman

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

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

Dori Berinstein

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

Andrew Gentes

#28. 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

#29. 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

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

Gus Van Sant

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

Lauren Greenfield

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

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

David Farrier

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

Mark Venturini

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. As far as the balance between being a journalist, being an artist, being a storyteller - documentary filmmakers are all three of those things. The balance between them is affected by the film itself, the topic of the film.

Marshall Curry

#42. We all need to be huge supporters of the theatrical documentary.

Michael Moore

#43. Well it has been very exciting and very changing as well. Celebrating the 40th year and having the album out and the Channel 4 documentary and I resigned from Blind Date.

Cilla Black

#44. Joe Berlinger's documentary 'Whitey' is so hard-hitting and compelling, you can't take your eyes off the screen.

Leonard Maltin

#45. 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

#46. When I was at graduate school in London, I began working at NBC News, which had a thriving documentary unit.

Leslie Cockburn

#47. 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

#48. The last reunion was a bit of a rushed job, we had to do a gig and documentary.

Brian Harvey

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. If everyone knows so much about it, why do they need to make a documentary?

Brigid Pasulka

#52. I'd like to leave you with a bit of wisdom I picked up from a documentary I saw this weekend: Mad Max: Fury Road. All you young people really need to succeed in the future is a reliable source of fuel and a fanatical cadre of psychopathic motorcycle killers.

Stephen Colbert

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. But if anyone
so much as threatened them because of what Kaia
had once done, she would turn the Slumber Party
Massacre into Blood, Bath and Beyond, a
documentary by Kaia Skyhawk.

Gena Showalter

#56. These people [the Christians] watched the Flintstones as if it were a documentary.

Lewis Black

#57. It would be pretty shabby to appear flippant around a documentary that's about how much I love my fans.

Rick Springfield

#58. I don't think the subject of a documentary film should be producers on it.

Michael Rapaport

#59. I want to do a documentary about strippers, 'cause it's a moneymaker.

Method Man

#60. For years my only purpose was to do documentary photos for magazines, without any idea that they were part of a larger project. It was as if I were carried along by a stream - even though I believed that the current was taking me in the right direction.

Hiroshi Hamaya

#61. I think the greatest thing about making a documentary is your ability to just follow the story and the subject.

Leslie Cockburn

#62. I certainly don't believe you documentary filmmakers. Like me, you are involved in making fiction, and your fiction is just as well organized and just as well predicated, but the big difference between me and you is that I'm honest and you're dishonest. I know I'm telling you lies.

Peter Greenaway

#63. The thing about documentary is that you don't really choose your subjects: they come and grab you out of your bed.

Beeban Kidron

#64. Contrary to popular opinion, 'Leave it to Beaver' was not a documentary.

Stephanie Coontz

#65. As I've grown older, the simple pleasure of sitting on the couch with someone you love and watching a documentary is about as good as it gets for me.

Paul Wesley

#66. 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

#67. Post-war filmmakers gave us the documentary, Rob Reiner gave us the mockumentary and Moore initiated a third genre, the crockumentary.

Michael Moore

#68. People aren't familiar with wheelchair sports. The only film crew in Athens for the Paralympics was the documentary crew.

Mark Zupan

#69. We know fun. Like two weekends ago we stayed up all night watching a documentary marathon on the brain." She rolled her eyes toward Erin. "We're positively wild.

Jenny B. Jones

#70. 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

#71. I wouldn't do nudity in films. For me, personally ... To act with my clothes on is a performance; to act with my clothes off is a documentary.

Julia Roberts

#72. Until I was 16 or 17, I had heard practically nothing about the history that preceded 1945. Only when we were 17 were we confronted with a documentary film of the opening of the Belsen camp.

W.G. Sebald

#73. Documentary filmmaking ruins you for real life, because you learn to be extremely attentive.

Frederick Wiseman

#74. 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

#75. With portable cameras and affordable data and non-linear digital editing, I think this is a golden age of documentary filmmaking. These new technologies mean we can make complicated, beautifully crafted and cinematic films about real-life stories.

Lucy Walker

#76. Last year, I reviewed a nine-hour documentary about the lives of Mongolian yak herdsmen, and I would rather see it again than sit through The Frighteners.

Roger Ebert

#77. When I started my filmmaking journey 17 years ago, I honestly didn't know what a documentary film was.

Tony Kaye

#78. 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

#79. 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

#80. I really loved working on 'Laguna Beach,' and I'd do it all over again. I'm one of the luckiest kids in the world, but I thought it was going to be a documentary about kids in high school, and they exaggerated all this drama. When it came out, it was this weird thing. People feel that they know you.

Stephen Colletti

#81. My background was art school, documentary director and surfer with a keen interest in thrilling acts of life threatening stupidity.

Yahoo Serious

#82. 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

#83. The best films of any kind, narrative or documentary, provoke questions.

Edward Norton

#84. When I make a documentary I shoot very little but I hang around with my camera for a long time. I look at the people for a long time through the loop and then when I see something interested then I shoot. I think that I have become very sensitive to these things.

Pirjo Honkasalo

#85. There's a tradition of reenactment in documentary which is about sort of illustrating what the past might have been like.

Joshua Oppenheimer

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

Anna Deavere Smith

#87. 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

#88. My feeling is, when you are writing an essay, you don't make anything up. This may be a very Protestant notion, and I'm aware of the fact that memory is fallible, that if I had access to films or some absolute documentary evidence of what happened, it might look different; we get confused and fuzzy.

Siri Hustvedt

#89. I want to see that 'Anita' documentary. I want to see 'Lovelace'; I want to see 'After Midnight,' because I saw the other two and I loved them. I thought the last one was great.

George Tillman Jr.

#90. 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

#91. Fear is not a word in my football documentary.

Jose Mourinho

#92. I want to communicate through my music. If you want to know Geri Halliwell listen to my album: it tells you more about me than a documentary ever could.

Geri Halliwell

#93. The Highlander was a documentary, and events happened in real time.

Dana Snyder

#94. If you want to make a documentary you should automatically go to the fiction, and if you want to nourish your fiction you have to come back to reality.

Jean-Luc Godard

#95. Are there other people who, when watching a documentary set in a prison, secretly think, as I have, 'Wish I had all that time to read'?

Zadie Smith

#96. News makes things black and white. Documentary filmmaking should do the opposite.

Robert Greene

#97. If my courage was a man, I imagined that he would be big, scarred, and wear a kilt. I'd seen a documentary once

Elizabeth A. Reeves

#98. 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

#99. 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

#100. Documentary evidence says where there is smoke there is fire, be it holy smoke or otherwise.

Christina Engela