Quotes & Sayings About Documentary Films

I spent my childhood and youth on the outskirts of the Alps, in a region that was largely spared the immediate effects of the so-called hostilities. At the end of the war I was just one year old, so I can hardly have any impressions of that period of destruction based on personal experience. Yet to this day, when I see photographs or documentary films dating from the war I feel as if I were its child, so to speak, as if those horrors I did not experience cast a shadow over me ... I see pictures merging before my mind's eye - paths through the fields, river meadows, and mountain pastures mingling with images of destruction - and oddly enough, it is the latter, not the now entirely unreal idylls of my early childhood, that make me feel rather as if I were coming home ... — W.G. Sebald

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. — Jeremy Northam

When you make a documentary film, after many years the only thing you remember is what you put into the film, not what you took out. — Pamela Yates

There is so much investment in it of people's labor time that it will never make money. But there are other documentaries that you might make that are sort of on assignment for television that turn around in three to six months. Then the margin can be much be better for you because you're not spending three-and-a-half years on it. So I think if you're doing documentary films, that's sort of the way to look at it. — Liz Garbus

There's a documentary film-maker called Werner Herzog, who's a German film-maker. I really dig his stuff, I'd love to chat with him. — Finn Jones

A good film is also a documentary — Eric Rohmer

I made three short films of my own which I wrote, produced, directed ... you did everything in those days. My favourite one was something I shot on VHS ... a little documentary. — Asif Kapadia

Maybe every two films you need to do documentary to tell what you really want to tell and not be limited by the medium. With documentary you don't create the reality you have to hunt the reality. — Fatih Akin

If I weren't making documentary films, I suppose I'd be teaching. — Brian Lindstrom

In 2008, A.J. Schnack recruited Thom Powers to start the Cinema Eye Honors to recognize the artistry and craft that go into making documentary films. — Marshall Curry

I personally just want to do as many different things as I can do, whether it's comedy, drama, science fiction, horror, narrator ... You've got a documentary, I've got a voice. Animated films. Big films, small films. — Colin Farrell

I'm organizing documentary films, and whenever scriptwriting gets too tedious I go to my editing room and start to edit the documentary, even if I don't have the full funding yet. So you have to keep yourself busy, you have to like the subject matter. — Haile Gerima

As for documentary, it was a natural progression from my earlier career in journalism. The two media are connected, but of course making films is much more complicated, because you have image, sound and music to work with, not simply words. — Nancy Kates

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. — Ken Burns

The power of the documentary film, when done well, I think is usually more impacting than a narrative, at least for me. Documentaries are also cheaper, they are more accessible to make. — Richard Ray Perez

Michael Moore announced that his next documentary film will attack the health care industry in America. He's not out to get the pharmaceutical companies. He's just looking for something to relieve the redness in the center of the country. — Argus Hamilton

I wouldn't do nudity in films. For me, personally ... To act with my clothes on is a performance; to act with my clothes off is a documentary. — Julia Roberts

I don't think you make documentary films to get your country house. If you're trying to gamble on that, you've very foolish. — Liz Garbus

The documentary we are working on is about my mother, Bev Umehara, for whom our film company, Bev's Girl Films, is named after. It is a passion project that I have wanted to make since her unexpected passing in 1999. The film is about my mother's calling which came late in life, at 47, when she made the sudden transformation from a humble hardworking secretary and mother of four, into a labor activist, a respected union leader, and a role model for rank-and-file workers, women of color, and for all Asian Pacific Americans. — Garth Kravits

electrical wires dragged down by the weight of the ice and flickering balefully, a row of sleet-covered planes stranded in an airport, a huge truck that's jackknifed and tipped over and is lying on its side with smoke coming out. An ambulance is on the scene, a fire truck, a huddle of raingear-clad operatives: someone's been injured, always a sight to make the heart beat faster. A policeman appears, crystals of ice whitening his moustache; he pleads sternly with people to stay inside. It's no joke, he tells the viewers. Don't think you can brave the elements! His frowning, frosted eyebrows are noble, like those on the wartime bond-drive posters from the 1940s. Constance remembers those, or believes she does. But she may just be remembering history books or museum displays or documentary films: so hard, sometimes, to tag those memories accurately. Finally, a minor touch of pathos: a stray dog is displayed, semi-frozen, wrapped in a child's pink nap blanket. A gelid baby — Margaret Atwood

You kind of form a bond with your subjects, in a way. You're in it together. To a degree that people don't realize, documentary films - or at least the kind of documentary films I'm interested in - are a collaborative undertaking with the subjects. — Steve James

The key fact missed most often by social scientists utilizing documentary films for data, is this: documentary films are not found or reported things; they're made things. — Bruce Jackson

Whenever I'm making a feature film, I wish I were filming a documentary, because making feature films is so stressful. It happens every time. — Fatih Akin

It's a funny thing with documentary films - you want them to feel as entertaining and as gripping as a fictional film. With a fictional film you want it to feel as realistic as a documentary film. — Jonathan Demme

I became a documentary filmmaker because I wanted to make socially conscious films. I never studied filmmaking - everything I have learned has been on the field. — Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy

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

In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director. — Alfred Hitchcock

Ever since the robot was first invented, there have been people who swear up and down that this marks the first step towards the fall of man ... To be fair, their arguments are backed with scientific fact taken from documentary films such as The Terminator, The Matrix, and RoboCop. — Wes Locher

Films are always a fiction, not documentary. Even a documentary is a kind of fiction. — Philip Seymour Hoffman

With portable cameras and affordable data and non-linear digital editing, I think this is a golden age of documentary filmmaking. These new technologies mean we can make complicated, beautifully crafted and cinematic films about real-life stories. — Lucy Walker

Ignore the glass ceiling and do your work. If you're focusing on the glass ceiling, focusing on what you don't have, focusing on the limitations, then you will be limited. My way was to work, make my short ... make my documentary ... make my small films ... use my own money ... raise money myself ... and stay shooting and focused on each project. — Ava DuVernay

Documentary films are created in an inverted funnel of declining possibility. — Bruce Jackson

The best films of any kind, narrative or documentary, provoke questions. — Edward Norton

A remarkable documentary that's also one of the most beautiful nature films I've seen. — Roger Ebert

The main reason why I'm a documentary filmmaker is the power of the medium. The most powerful films I've seen have been documentaries. Of course, there are some narrative films that I could never forget, but there are more documentaries that have had that impact on me. — Richard Ray Perez

In documentary films, you're a storyteller using found objects. You still have to have a story arc and all the elements that make a good story. It really helped me mature as a storyteller. — Garth Stein

There is a documentary element in my films, a very strong documentary element, but by documentary element, I mean an element that's out of control, that's not controlled by me. And that element is the words, the language that people use, what they say in an interview. They're not written, not rehearsed. It's spontaneous, extemporaneous material. People — Errol Morris

While it is increasingly possible for filmmakers to find an audience on their own (something that is particularly popular amongst documentary filmmakers) I'm still a believer in the "specialist". By this I mean, I back myself as a filmmaker, but I leave the marketing and distribution of my films to the experts. — Leanne Pooley

My feeling is, when you are writing an essay, you don't make anything up. This may be a very Protestant notion, and I'm aware of the fact that memory is fallible, that if I had access to films or some absolute documentary evidence of what happened, it might look different; we get confused and fuzzy. — Siri Hustvedt

So it is that one side effect of the HD revolution has been the gratifying and edifying return of the nature documentary - films about the hugely varied forms of life that eat, sleep, stalk, mate, fight, thrive, suffer and struggle on our dear and embattled old Earth. — Tom Shales

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