Quotes About Documentary Films

#1. So it is that one side effect of the HD revolution has been the gratifying and edifying return of the nature documentary - films about the hugely varied forms of life that eat, sleep, stalk, mate, fight, thrive, suffer and struggle on our dear and embattled old Earth.

Tom Shales

#2. In 2008, A.J. Schnack recruited Thom Powers to start the Cinema Eye Honors to recognize the artistry and craft that go into making documentary films.

Marshall Curry

#3. In documentary films, the most difficult thing to achieve is to make something complex appear simple.

Leslie Cockburn

#4. If I weren't making documentary films, I suppose I'd be teaching.

Brian Lindstrom

#5. I began to feel that the drama of the truth that is in the moment and in the past is richer and more interesting than the drama of Hollywood movies. So I began looking at documentary films.

Ken Burns

#6. Ever since the robot was first invented, there have been people who swear up and down that this marks the first step towards the fall of man ... To be fair, their arguments are backed with scientific fact taken from documentary films such as The Terminator, The Matrix, and RoboCop.

Wes Locher

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. Documentary films are created in an inverted funnel of declining possibility.

Bruce Jackson

#10. 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

#11. In documentary films, you're a storyteller using found objects. You still have to have a story arc and all the elements that make a good story. It really helped me mature as a storyteller.

Garth Stein

#12. In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director.

Alfred Hitchcock

#13. The key fact missed most often by social scientists utilizing documentary films for data, is this: documentary films are not found or reported things; they're made things.

Bruce Jackson

#14. 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

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

Roger Ebert

#16. 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

#17. I personally just want to do as many different things as I can do, whether it's comedy, drama, science fiction, horror, narrator ... You've got a documentary, I've got a voice. Animated films. Big films, small films.

Colin Farrell

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

Jamie Bell

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. A good film is also a documentary

Eric Rohmer

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. All the great novels, all the great films, all the great dramas are fictions that actually tell us the truth about us or about human nature or about human situations without being tied into the minutia of documentary events. Otherwise we might as well just make documentaries.

Jeremy Northam

#28. As for documentary, it was a natural progression from my earlier career in journalism. The two media are connected, but of course making films is much more complicated, because you have image, sound and music to work with, not simply words.

Nancy Kates

#29. 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

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

Edward Norton

#31. 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

#32. 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

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

Philip Seymour Hoffman