Quotes About Documentary Film

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

Andrew Gentes

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

Lydia Davis

#3. In fiction film, there are so many trappings - money, glory, champagne and supermodels - that attract the wolves. But in documentary film, there's none of that, so the wolves stay away. The only people who make docs are people who are curious about other people and just like making documentaries.

Marshall Curry

#4. 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

#5. Rape culture is a concept of unknown origin and of uncertain definition; yet it has made its way into everyday vocabulary and is assumed to be commonly understood. The award-winning documentary film Rape Culture made by Margaret Lazarus in 1975 takes credit for first defining the concept

Joyce E. Williams

#6. So much of art-making is about reducing things to the essentials, so I don't feel particularly crippled by this. I don't want it to look natural because then I would be making a documentary film.

Jenny Holzer

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. Like theatre, crafting a documentary film takes tremendous commitment, patience and passion.

Dori Berinstein

#11. 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.

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. Documentary film without nuanced journalistic sourcing risks being sensational, tendentious or broad-brushed.

Naomi Wolf

#16. I'm pretty interested in documentary film, and I'd watch almost anything. At some point, I stumbled upon 'shoot interviews' and found out that wrestlers were now talking openly about things that were going on in wrestling that we as viewers were not privy to. This fascinated me.

Box Brown

#17. When I left university I was working for a documentary film company for six or seven years to the great relief of my father whose greatest waking fear was that I would become an actor.

Sam Neill

#18. 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

#19. 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

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

Michael Rapaport

#21. 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

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

Tony Kaye

#23. 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

#24. I got five kids, and my oldest is a documentary film maker and camera man, and still photographer.

Beau Bridges

#25. But one of the amazing things about documentary is that you can remake it every time you make one. There is no rule about how a documentary film has to be made.

Errol Morris

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. Of course no documentary is completely 'objective.' Every decision you make - who to interview, how to edit, where to hold the camera - imposes a point of view on the film.

Marshall Curry

#30. I want to venture into film more, and I think that a nice way to transition into doing that would be a documentary. I think it would be interesting to find one person that really fascinated me or maybe a band and travel with them, but I don't think I could do it like I used to do it.

Ryan McGinley

#31. 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

#32. documentary The Invisible War (which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and

Nancy Sherman

#33. I remember when I took Quentin Tarantino with me to a very private screening of the documentary 'Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,' which shows some of the legal irregularities of his case. I was involved by the film, and it was an amazing experience to see people weep at the end of it.

Harvey Weinstein

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. Even a fiction film is hard to end. You can going on shooting and editing a documentary forever.

Leos Carax

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. To make a documentary is one thing, to make a feature film is quite another.

Dennis Hopper

#40. 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

#41. You can't tell by looking at a film-clip whether it is a drama or a documentary without knowing how it was produced.

Errol Morris

#42. When the American documentary filmmaker Donn Alan Pennebaker wanted to do a film on Dylan, Dylan asked him what he'd already done, and Pennebaker answered, Nothing except shots in the street. Dylan asked to see them, and he agreed to let him do the film.

Raymond Depardon

#43. This is indeed not only relevant to Documentary but is evident is most type of film making. The film often mirrors the experience, understanding and politics of the director.

Ben Edwards

#44. The problem is we are not eating food anymore, we are eating food like products. (Hungry For Change Film)

Alejandro Junger

#45. Unlike the book, with a documentary, you get a chance to show much more texture and color. Film gives you get a chance to focus on much more individuals who are pivotal in changing the landscape of American culture.

Steve Stoute

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. A remarkable documentary that's also one of the most beautiful nature films I've seen.

Roger Ebert

#49. The thing about making a documentary in Las Vegas is there isn't much to film apart from other people making documentaries about Las Vegas.

Clive James

#50. You're making a movie, not a documentary. If you made a film like the historians would like you to make, you're not going to go and see it. I'd rather see paint dry.

Dougray Scott

#51. 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

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

Adam McKay

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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

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

Brigid Pasulka

#58. 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

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

Mark Zupan

#60. 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

#61. I take care to only teach courses about fiction film. I believe that this balances and broadens my documentary work.

Arnon Goldfinger

#62. THE MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA(1929) the 'honesty' of documentary as compared with fiction film, the 'perfection' of the cinematic eye compared with human eye.

Steven Jay Schneider

#63. A good film is also a documentary

Eric Rohmer

#64. 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

#65. If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you're dumb and blind.

Salman Rushdie

#66. Is this film more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?

Gene Siskel

#67. 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

#68. 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

#69. For me, every film is actually a form of documentary.

Ira Sachs

#70. 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

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. 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