Quotes from D. A. Pennebaker

You don't necessarily need a script or actors to tell a compelling tale. Finding a person at a key moment in his life and rendering the truth as you see it - that's the truest form of drama.

Before the camera, you only had secondhand takes - someone had to tell you what they saw or draw a picture of it or sing a song. Because of the camera, sometimes to our horror, we now know everything that happens in the world - things that before we were sheltered from.

Albert Grossman called my office and spoke with my partner Richard Leacock and asked if we'd be interested in making a film with his client, Bob Dylan.

When you're editing, you're putting it together in a way that makes sense metaphysically. You're not inventing it, but you're finding the story that's there. You're making a play that's eventually going to go on stage and present itself to an audience. You want to show what happened, not exactly what you have evidence of happening.

I kind of liked the idea of filming musicians. I could like a musician and know, at the same time, maybe nobody else maybe liked them much or appreciated them.

We're a family operation. There's not many of us. We have a couple people who come from time to time who work with us. Two of my sons are themselves filmmakers, and we can't afford them nor they us.

If you're setting up lights and tripods, and you've got three assistants running around, people will want to get you out as fast as they can. But if you go the opposite way, if you make the camera the least important thing in the room, then it's different.

I think the films we see, the Hollywood films, which are basically entertainment, will still be there, but they'll be in a totally different category. People won't take them seriously. They'll kind of end up the way comic books have. A side view of things.