Quotes About Documentary Filmmaking

#1. 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

#2. 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

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

Nicholas Jarecki

#4. 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

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

Frederick Wiseman

#6. 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

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

Tony Kaye

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

Robert Greene

#9. In the Indian film industry, especially those of us who are in mainstream cinema, we invariably play a typical hero's role. More often than not, we cater to the public perception. However, there is a latent desire in most actors to do a role where you can go all out and experiment.

Abhishek Bachchan

#10. I battered the cordons around me
And cradled my wings on the breeze,
Then soared to the uttermost reaches
With rapture, with power, with ease!

Georgia Douglas Johnson

#11. Celebrate your victories and mark your defeats. Ultimately documentary filmmaking is not a job, it's a calling.

Pamela Yates

#12. I began filmmaking in high school, at the Chicago Academy for the Arts. My first documentary was about a dysfunctional obese middle-aged carpet cleaner named Bill, who lived with his Mom, and his love affair with Anna, a drug-addicted prostitute. I made that when I was 16.

Yony Leyser

#13. My background is in filmmaking, and my mentor is Dusan Makavejev, who combined fiction and documentary.

Joshua Oppenheimer

#14. Nature has an economy, an elegance, a style, that if we could but emulate it we could rise out of the rubble we are making out of the planet

Terence McKenna

#15. 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

#16. Regardless of how or what anyone thinks about you it does not rob or cancel your assignment

J. Wilson

#17. No matter how far life pushes you down, no matter how much you hurt, you can always bounce back.

Sheryl Swoopes

#18. The best documentaries are independent. They don't exist to serve interests, philanthropic or otherwise.

Nick Fraser

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. It is hardly possible to suspect another without having in one's self the seeds of baseness the party is accused of.

Stanislaw Leszczynski

#23. I wanted to describe the world at the same time, through image, express what I felt. It was the time of the great documentary filmmakers: Richard Leacock, Joris Ivens. Today, television has put an end to this type of filmmaking.

Krzysztof Kieslowski

#24. I think documentary filmmaking is a braver way to make films because it's real, and you're really there.

Jamie Bell

#25. For every man who has learned to fight in arms will desire to learn the proper arrangement of an army, which is the sequel of the lesson.

Plato

#26. There is always a way to solve a problem,
and even though I can't see it sometimes,
I choose to believe that a solution always exists.

Jose N. Harris

#27. Ridiculous. You guys are going to have the most boring documentary on earth," I said and stormed inside.
"Could you walk in the building again, but slower and don't slam the door," Hugo called after me.

Heather O'Neill

#28. Investigative journalism has been relegated to a very, very tiny space in America. We don't really have much investigative journalism left. And the last refuge for it is documentary filmmaking.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

#29. In documentary filmmaking, there's a tradition of telling stories about victims. We often do that from a very patronizing place, but mostly we do it from a very selfish place, to reassure ourselves that our lives are in sympathy and solidarity with the victims.

Joshua Oppenheimer