Quotes About Documentaries

From making documentaries all these years, it doesn't feel right to lead someone. In narratives, I'm always trying to shoot as though it's really happening, and I trust my actors are going to make decisions that I'm going to be following. I want to follow them.

I always thought of documentaries as films through which you find your voice as a narrator.

In documentaries, there's a truth that unfolds unnaturally, and you get to chronicle it. In narratives, you have to create the situations so that the truth will come out.

People look to cinema to spread the word and to tell these wonderful, outrageous stories or true-to-life documentaries.

When you come to documentaries, the stakes are too low for it to be cutthroat. You're all doing it for the right reasons.

By showing hunger, deprivation, starvation and brutality, as well as endurance and nobility, documentaries inform, prod our memories, even stir us to action. Such films do battle for our very soul.

With Netflix, I browse; I watch documentaries about things I'd never dream of, but I think, 'I might as well.'

I don't tend to watch TV. I'm like a Netflix junkie. I watch a lot of documentaries and movies on Netflix. I like 'Downton Abbey.'

I watch 'Al Jazeera.' They have news that you can't find anywhere else. They do great documentaries, too.

We didn't really have television when I was a kid. Around 30, I discovered films and started systematically catching up. I collect interesting documentaries and films, and watch a few nights a week.

In the 1980s, I had a lot of films, documentaries for television, which were about why the trade unions had failed to organize resistance to Margaret Thatcher's plans. And they were banned. I had to fight for those films.

I am mostly at home and I do my housework, I read and I love watching documentaries. In short, I love staying at home.

My paid gigs allow me to pay for my documentaries, like a drug habit, I suppose. If I'm lucky enough to be working steady, however, it leaves little time for the documentary hobby.

I don't like music docs, usually. There's nothing to really say. What can you say about music? Normally, you can't say too much. There are a few really good ones, but the majorities are boring, I think.

People have said to me, 'Oh, you are much nicer making documentaries than you were in politics.' So I should be. If you are making a documentary, you are having fun. You are not under any pressure, normally.

I make a rod for my own back because people see my novels as quasi documentaries. But it is never history that's the main event of my books. It's my characters.

When making documentaries, the most important thing I learned was to listen, observe gestures and facial expressions.

Rome is a very loony city in every respect. One needs but spend an hour or two there to realize that Fellini makes documentaries.

Those few textbooks that do discuss Wilson's racism and other shortcomings have to battle uphill, for they struggle against the archetypal Woodrow Wilson commemorated in so many history museums, public television documentaries, and historical novels.

We never see any journalism or documentaries on the oceans and what we're doing on this Earth and how it affects the oceans and how important they are. I'm intrigued by it. It's almost an untold story.

We struck an unusual deal. I'll get to leave CNN with my catalog and documentaries. We were able to create a brand at CNN - 'Black in America' - that I now own. I can take that brand and extend it in any way I want.

I have made more documentaries in my time than I think I care to remember, though I am immensely proud of all my work.

I started in documentaries, and that was a great help to me with improvisation, because with documentaries, you're handed a big lump of footage, and you have to shape it and make it into a story - which I love doing.

I get people saying, 'Opera is too large a canvas for me. I don't love it. I love movies that feel almost like documentaries,' in terms of artistic vocabularies of storytelling. I totally get that discussion; that makes sense to me.