Quotes About Documentaries

As far as documentaries, 'Man on Wire,' 'Atomic Cafe,' 'Waltz With Bashir,' and 'Thin Blue Line' all offered me different perspectives to consider as we were designing the structure and approach to 'Tower.'

Even though I was making documentaries, my films had fictional elements to them. I think I like blurring those distinctions because so much of what we see on television purports to be the truth, but it's often largely imaginary - or wishful thinking, or any number of less honorable things.

You can talk to someone relatively famous, and they say, 'What do you do? What do you do for a job?' and I say, 'I make documentaries for the BBC,' and you see their eyes just glaze over.

I took a job teaching private-school white teenagers how to edit video. They used their newly developed skills to make documentaries about poor brown people in other countries. It's not oil that runs the world, it's shame.

I mostly like documentaries, so I always think things that happened in real life are so astounding that why would you make a movie about something fake.

I love to see the rarest movies, the most talked-about movies and documentaries. I read all the reviews and compare them to see if it's worth going! I have a secret movie critic blog I have shown no one or promoted, and I intend to keep it that way.

My dad had a dream of his kids reaching the NFL. My older brother was actually the first to make it. His career didn't really last too long, but he always had more passion for documentaries.

Documentaries require an enormous amount of grit and empathy - and that is something women are incredibly strong at.

Did a man really walk on the moon? I saw plenty of documentaries on it, and I really wondered.

I had seen some films made about the underground music world in Tehran, and most of them were short documentaries about 30 or 40 minutes long. And I always wondered why they weren't publicized more. Really, their only flaw was they were short documentaries.

I was a TV producer at a noncommercial station, and we were producing some good documentaries - on Head Start, on poverty. But I was struck by the children, and the damage that poverty was doing to them. I didn't think filming them was helping much, so I wondered how we could use TV for them, to teach them.

I really like 'The Three Kings' DVD. I love that movie and all the extra footage and documentaries.

Reality television hasn't killed documentaries, because there are so many great documentaries still being made, but it certainly has changed the landscape. There is this breed of gimmicky documentary that is basically a reality show.

One of the differences between real documentaries and reality television, besides the artificial construct of reality television, is that the people who are recruited to be on those shows, and the people who are interested in going on those shows, basically want to be famous. Or maybe they can win a million dollars or something.

One of the reasons to do documentaries is that. There's more sense of creating something, more sense of my own soul in the documentaries than in movies, because I don't write the movies I do.

I've always been a fiction filmmaker and I've been heading in the direction of fiction filmmaking, doing documentaries along the way.

I love documentaries and the computer. I am a little addicted to the computer, and that relaxes me. I find information, I shop, and I look up people I worked with to find out if they're dead or alive.

I make documentaries from time to time to remind myself of reality. It's like musicians doing scales to keep their fingers working: when you're in the street, listening to people, you're forced to be in the service of your subject.

I think documentaries are the greatest way to educate an entire generation that doesn't often look back to learn anything about the history that provided a safe haven for so many of us today.

Documentaries are unpredictable. You never know what will turn up, and the drama occurs in real time. But if you listen to people, a narrative always emerges.

I coauthored my first nonfiction book by the time I was 25. I have been involved in nonfiction documentaries, newspapers, TV and internet since that time.

I loved watching documentaries and had wanted to try making one for years - I'd just put it off as other opportunities arose. But I felt like time was running out for me if I wanted to do it.

Three of the top six documentaries of all time, grossing, are made by me.

Documentaries shouldn't just reflect the world: they should try and explain why reality is like it is.