Quotes About Documentary

I'm gonna film my entire life and watch it later!

I think, if you put a camera in anyone's life and document it daily from the age of 21 to 27, there are going to be things that aren't always pretty.

Of course Moana, being a visual account of events in the daily life of a Polynesian youth and his family, has documentary value.

I came through the ranks of the BBC documentary department. I was lucky working during this drama doc era, where they did reconstructions, basically like cheap drama made by the factual department.

Documentary makers use other people's lives as their raw material, and that is morally indefensible.

We all identify with the people we see, and in a good documentary, we are not just reading an account of the world, we're seeing and hearing our world.

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

I'm a documentary filmmaker by training. You got to start with the real people and the real place.

I realise that I had the best of serious picture journalism. There was an innocence in our approach, especially in the 1950s and 1960s when we naively believed that by holding a mirror up to the world we could help - no matter how little - to make people aware of the human condition.

When you see how people in the developing world react and how they use a camera, you realise how narcissistic we are and how the filming of ourselves and thinking that we're interesting enough to care about is odd.

Social realism takes research.

I began my filmmaking career by shooting a feature length documentary in China in 2004, the year I graduated from film school.

I don't think it's a coincidence that 'The War Room' and 'A Perfect Candidate' are films that have been consistently shown and available for rental for 20 years. These are films that are more about the moment in which they were filmed: they also have a great deal to say about larger issues about who we are as a country.

The great thing about 'The Exorcist' is it's dead serious horror. No comedy, no self-reference, it's a documentary style.

I made 'Bowling for Columbine' in the hope the school shootings would stop and that we would address the issue of how easy it is to get a gun in the United States, and tragically, those school shootings continue.

I sometimes wonder, with the Oxbridge comics, the broadcasters seem to say, at some point, now I trust you to do a documentary, you can be the voice for a maths show, or whatever. I don't think we're ever considered in that way.

My friends adore 'TOWIE' - the TV documentary series, 'The Only Way is Essex.' They like it, I'm afraid, for the most unworthy of reasons: class mockery. They tune in to wonder in a 'can you believe those people?' way at the natives of Brentwood and Buckhurst Hill.

A bad historian is even more dangerous than dead documentary wood.

After months of playing air guitar to 'Free Bird', what really got me into guitar was watching a documentary about Jimi Hendrix and picking up the Woodstock soundtrack. Listening to his version of 'Star Spangled Banner' and 'Purple Haze.' My brother played acoustic guitar and, idolising him, I thought, 'I'm going to get a guitar.'

It took me little more than two years to complete my film, 'Woody Allen: A Documentary.' I conducted hours of filmed interviews with Woody, who put forward no ground rules about questions I could ask, or topics to avoid.

Working on 'The War Room' was a thrill, not only because we were given such exquisite access to the nerve center of Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign, but for me personally, it was so exciting to be producing my first film and working with documentary filmmaking legends D.A. Pannebaker and Chris Hegedus, who were the film's directors.

I always tell aspiring documentary filmmakers, 'You have to go into it because you love it; if you go into it for the money, you're an idiot.' The number one prerequisite is you have to be intensely curious. If you love learning and trying to make people figure out what makes people tick, it's the best job in the world.

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.

Well, like any time you're shooting documentary stuff, you've got to be in the moment, and you've got to be able to be in control enough to capture what's happening