Quotes About Documentary

Is Michael Moore an honest documentarian? Honestly? I don't think he is... The real discussion gets left behind the entertainment value.

What is interesting to me about film, and documentary film in particular, is that I can write about these people, and you trust my judgment, more or less, but when you're confronted yourself with humans who are right there on the screen telling you their story, you make a judgment yourself that is conclusive.

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

Timothy B. Tyson

In the spring of 1984, I went to the northwest of France, to Normandy, to prepare an NBC documentary on the fortieth anniversary of D-Day, the massive and daring Allied invasion of Europe that marked the beginning of the

I could get my camera and point it at two people and not point it at the homeless third person to the right of the frame, or not include the murder that's going on to the left of the frame.

'Strong Island' is not your typical true-crime film. It's not actually about the uncovering of evidence or following leads that hadn't been seen before or any of that stuff.

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.'

It's not always easy to stand aside and be unable to do anything except record the sufferings around one.

Magnum photographers were meant to go out as a crusade ... to places like famine and war and ... I went out and went round the corner to the local supermarket because this to me is the front line.

I wanted to go amongst gangbangers, to understand this war they were fighting amongst each other. I wanted to document it, [also] to show the human side of it.

Sixty years ago this week Hitler invaded Poland. This led to the creation of The History Channel.

Post-war filmmakers gave us the documentary, Rob Reiner gave us the mockumentary and Moore initiated a third genre, the crockumentary.

I was driven to give the best possible performance I could based on the material that was given to me and that material was documentary footage of the President speaking to people.

Photography has always been about documentary, the depiction of the instant, a moment, sometimes a place. Each project is somehow an experimentation of a specific context or a character.

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.

I spoke to my father about making a documentary on him. I have been seriously contemplating that.

I did a film on Muhammad Ali before he was champion. I was there when he became champion in 1964. I was happy to be able to document the development of a real American hero.

The narrator of a documentary often comes in at the last minute and takes some of the glory they don't deserve.

We ended up with 19 hours of footage and had to narrow it down to an hour and a half. Our instructions were to film everything that came up, including the more mundane moments.

National Geographic has awesome stuff. I like Court TV. Sometimes I'll watch Reality Mix because they have some interesting stuff on that.

Edward had a personal horror of violence and never endorsed or excused it, though in a documentary he made about the conflict he said that actions like the bombing of pilgrims at Tel Aviv airport 'did more harm than good,' which I remember thinking was (a) euphemistic and (b) a slipshod expression unworthy of a professor of English.

I have spent a great deal of time seeking documentary evidence which would support or contradict the Stangls' story of how they, and others like them, escaped from Europe; and the real facts, it turns out, are neither dramatic nor unequivocal; they are complex, ambiguous and merely prove again that in the final analysis, history is not made by organizations, but by individual men, with individual failings, and individual responsibilities

With a free afternoon, I'd probably put on a onesie, find something like a really dark, uncomfortable documentary on Netflix, and order pizza with a lot of ranch on the side.