Quotes About Documentary

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

For my part, as a filmmaker, I've never been a fly-on-the-wall documentarian. I have no commitment to that method. I believe it's a lie.

I want to see that 'Anita' documentary. I want to see 'Lovelace'; I want to see 'After Midnight,' because I saw the other two and I loved them. I thought the last one was great.

I always wanted to be in movies, but I never thought that in a million years there would be a documentary about my life.

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.

But if anyone so much as threatened them because of what Kaia had once done, she would turn the Slumber Party Massacre into Blood, Bath and Beyond, a documentary by Kaia Skyhawk.

The paradox is that some of the most artistically valuable contemporary photographs are content with being photographs, are not under the same compulsion to pass themselves off - or pimp themselves out - as art. The simple truth is that the best exponents of the art of contemporary photography continue to produce work that fits broadly within the tradition of what Evans termed 'documentary style'.

If you've got a camera, go to a war zone and tell a story.

I investigated post-traumatic stress disorder. I've been to a unit where people are suffering from it, and I read a lot of literature. I looked at footage of soldiers in the combat zone. I found 'Restrepo' to be unbelievably useful.

Photographer James Nachtwey has spent his professional life in the places people most want to avoid: war zones and refugee camps, the city flattened by an earthquake, the village swallowed by a flood, the farm hollowed out by famine.

Many people have this memory of traditional TV documentary-making that aims to portray pure reality, and I just don't see that as the only option.

A mockumentary is supposed to be real, and we were frustrated with mockumentaries on TV, which are so rampant because of the success of 'The Office.' It's not real. You watch and ask why is there even a crew there. They never set it up in the narrative. You have a documentary crew following families for reasons we don't understand.

Any nature documentary or TV show will always make you start thinking differently about what surrounds us and how to take care of it.

If you care about the 2012 election and value the voices of regular Americans who lost hope in their hope and change candidate, this is one documentary you won't want to miss.

I use people's real voices because I want realism. So often I mention the actors' physicality because I want it to be like a real documentary.

You don't have to pose your camera. The pictures are there, and you just take them. The truth is the best picture, the best propaganda. (On the Spanish Civil War, 1937)

For me, the strength of photography lies in its ability to evoke humanity. If war is an attempt to negate humanity, then photography can be perceived as the opposite of war.

The desire of any war photographer is to be put out of business.

If you make an honest picture of war, it will be an antiwar photograph.

I would that my photographs might be, not the coverage of a news event, but an indictment of war.

Even in the most authentic documentary there is always a fictional person—the person telling the story. I have never created a more fictional character than the researching "I" in my doctorate, a self that begins in pretended ignorance and then slowly arrives at knowledge, not at all in the fitful, chancy way I myself arrived at it, but step by step, proof by proof, according to the rules.

We have this film that we hope to finance, it's called 'Southern Rights.' It's a documentary about segregated proms that are still happening in the South of America. So there's a black prom and a white prom, so we hope to finance a film soon about that.

I feel like we're going to see a lot more movies that mix documentary style with fiction, more along the lines of 'District 9.'

I really like and admire Michael Moore.