Pennebaker Quotes & Sayings

I think the process is one of using the camera and sound in the way a detective uses a magnifying glass: to find the clues. They're discovery devices, not performance devices - you're watching things the way a cat does. You're not judging. You're there to witness something. — D. A. Pennebaker

When the fearsome foursome of rock music, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis, decided to show up in Toronto for a rock and roll festival, I knew we had to go there to try to get them all on film. — D. A. Pennebaker

I wanted James Carville to never die. I wanted Dylan, the poet, to not die. I wanted to put these people in a place where they would be inviolate. It wasn't enough to have a still life of them. I wanted to surround them with the lives they led. — D. A. Pennebaker

Who, for example, would have ever predicted that the high school student who uses too many verbs in her college admissions essay is likely to make lower grades in college? Or that the poet who overuses the word I in his poetry is at higher risk of suicide? Or that a certain world leader's use of pronouns could reliably presage whether he'd lead his country into war? By looking more carefully at the ways people convey their thoughts in language we can begin to get a sense of their personalities, emotions, and connections with others. — James W. Pennebaker

The emotional findings, then, suggest that to gain the most benefit from writing about life's traumas, acknowledge the negative but celebrate the positive. — James W. Pennebaker

I think, in general, independents don't have a lot of access to really good scriptwriters or actors or actresses, so they're very limited in what they can do. — D. A. Pennebaker

The answer, usually, is no. Wisdom is a quality that defies easy definition but psychologists who study aging have found that some of its components - judgment, emotional regulation - do improve with age in most people, consciously or not. Of course there is a subset of people out there who are sitting in their rocking chairs, spewing hate, but my guess is that these people weren't very pleasant to begin with, ... The reality is that the data are fairly convincing that people as they get older become more positive and less self-absorbed. — James W. Pennebaker

Human relationships are not rocket science
the are far, far more complicated — James W. Pennebaker

We're actually thinking about distributing 'Moon Over Broadway' on-line. It's tempting, because when you go to a major studio, it's sort of like a farm, you know? They make all the money, since it's kind of a buyer's market. — D. A. Pennebaker

It was interesting to shoot history as it happens, without anyone demanding a huge story. — D. A. Pennebaker

Early 1990s, Deborah Tannen, a linguist at Georgetown University, attracted international notice with her book You Just Don't Understand. Her book, which was on the New York Times bestseller list for over four years, argued that men and women often talk past each other without appreciating that the other sex is almost another culture. Women, for example, are highly attentive to the thoughts and feelings of others; men are less so. Women view men's speaking styles as blunt and uncaring; men view women's as indirect and obscure. — James W. Pennebaker

Letting off steam makes people angrier, not calmer. Pennebaker discovered that it's not about steam; it's about sense making. The people in his studies who used their writing time to vent got no benefit. The people who showed deep insight into the causes and consequences of the event on their first day of writing got no benefit, either: They had already made sense of things. It was the people who made progress across the four days, who showed increasing insight; they were the ones whose health improved over the next year. — Jonathan Haidt

Pennebaker began his studies in the 1980s when he asked students to write about traumatic, stressful or emotional events for twenty minutes over three consecutive days. His results found improvements in both physical and psychological health. People were happier and healthier when they wrote, including reduced visits to doctors, positive effects on blood pressure, improved liver and immune system functioning and less use of pain medication. Writing also had beneficial effects on emotional health and enhanced social relationships. — Patricia McAdoo

Over the next four days, I want you to write about your deepest emotions and thoughts about the most upsetting experience in your life. Really let go and explore your feelings and thoughts about it. In your writing, you might tie this experience to your childhood, your relationship with your parents, people you have loved or love now or even your career. How is this experience related to who you would like to become, who you have been in the past, or who you are now?. — James W. Pennebaker

After I published a paper showing that suicidal poets used pronouns differently from non-suicidal poets, a slightly inebriated poet threatened me with a butter knife at a party in my own home. — James W. Pennebaker

Holding back our thoughts, feelings and behaviors can place people at risk for minor and major diseases. — James W. Pennebaker

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. — D. A. Pennebaker

I kind of liked the idea of filming musicians. I could like a musician and know, at the same time, maybe nobody else maybe liked them much or appreciated them. — D. A. Pennebaker

A film is made in somebody's head - out of their determination to do it at all. — D. A. Pennebaker

To make theater out of real life, you need to catch dialogue when it happens. — D. A. Pennebaker

I think nowadays people are so used taking the camera to the family picnic - so people are less surprised by films made of them, like home movies. — D. A. Pennebaker

I think of all my movies as home movies! It's just that some are more expensive than others. — D. A. Pennebaker

I had maybe heard 'The Times Are A-Changing' on the radio, but I had no idea who Dylan was. No idea. — D. A. Pennebaker

Function words behave differently than you might think. For example, the most commonly used word in spoken English, I, is used at far higher rates by followers than by leaders, truth-tellers than liars. People who use high rates of articles - a, an, the - do better in college than low users. And if you want to find your true love, compare the ways you use function words with that of your prospective partners. — James W. Pennebaker

Males categorize their worlds by counting, naming, and organizing the objects they confront. Women, in addition to personalizing their topics, talk in a more dynamic way, focusing on how their topics change. Discussions of change require more verbs. — James W. Pennebaker

Conversations are like dances. Two people effortlessly move in step with one another, usually anticipating the other person's next move. If one of the dancers moves in an unexpected direction, the other typically adapts and builds on the new approach. As with dancing, it is often difficult to tell who is leading and who is following in that the two people are constantly affecting each other. And once the dance begins, it is almost impossible for one person to singly dictate the couple's movement. — James W. Pennebaker

If you're setting up lights and tripods, and you've got three assistants running around, people will want to get you out as fast as they can. But if you go the opposite way, if you make the camera the least important thing in the room, then it's different. — D. A. Pennebaker

The main thing known about secrets is that keeping them is unhealthy for the brain.46 Psychologist James Pennebaker and his colleagues studied what — David Eagleman

If you're filming somebody doing something they really want to do, you're probably not very high on their list of problems to deal with. You see James Carville on the phone - he's like that whether you have a camera or not. He isn't doing it just for you, and that's hard to explain. — D. A. Pennebaker

When I did 'Don't Look Back,' I no longer had Time-Life looking over my shoulder, so I could kind of do it as I wanted, and it was like I was really correcting 'Jane.' — D. A. Pennebaker

I think the films we see, the Hollywood films, which are basically entertainment, will still be there, but they'll be in a totally different category. People won't take them seriously. They'll kind of end up the way comic books have. A side view of things. — D. A. Pennebaker

You don't necessarily need a script or actors to tell a compelling tale. Finding a person at a key moment in his life and rendering the truth as you see it - that's the truest form of drama. — D. A. Pennebaker

People don't really want reality. They want theater, and that's different. — D. A. Pennebaker

After love, the most sacred gift you can give is your labor. — D. A. Pennebaker

I've since learned that when someone changes the conversational direction, it serves as a powerful marker of what is on his or her mind. — James W. Pennebaker

One of the most interesting results was part of a study my students and I conducted dealing with status in email correspondence. Basically, we discovered that in any interaction, the person with the higher status uses I-words less (yes, less) than people who are low in status. — James W. Pennebaker

I would never say no to anything that sounded interesting! The thing I like about making films is that the adventure just begins when you pick up the camera. — D. A. Pennebaker

The very first thing I ever did, I was doing some work for the French Cultural Center. They wanted a little recording set up. And I got wire. A wire recorder. The wire came off spools, and to cut and edit, you tied it together in little square knots. Can you imagine? — D. A. Pennebaker

Logically, learning about the people around you should depend on listening. The less you talk, the more you should discover about the group. But Pennebaker found the opposite: the more you talk, the more you think you've learned about the group. By talking like a taker and dominating the conversation, you believe you've actually come to know the people around you, even though they barely spoke. In Opening Up, Pennebaker muses, "Most of us find that communicating our thoughts is a supremely enjoyable learning experience. — Adam M. Grant

Younger people could dredge up an impressive number of dark words to express their pain. As writers got older and older, their negative emotion vocabulary diminished and their positive emotion word count skyrocketed. As — James W. Pennebaker

Nobody would let us do 'Crisis' again. — D. A. Pennebaker

We need to take out the trash. As it happens, I have no intention of actually analyzing that data. Nor am I proposing to my son that we take a family outing to the trash bin. In many situations, people use the word we when they mean you. It serves as a polite form to order others around. — James W. Pennebaker

When the American documentary filmmaker Donn Alan Pennebaker wanted to do a film on Dylan, Dylan asked him what he'd already done, and Pennebaker answered, Nothing except shots in the street. Dylan asked to see them, and he agreed to let him do the film. — Raymond Depardon

When you're editing, you're putting it together in a way that makes sense metaphysically. You're not inventing it, but you're finding the story that's there. You're making a play that's eventually going to go on stage and present itself to an audience. You want to show what happened, not exactly what you have evidence of happening. — D. A. Pennebaker

I was inspired by Maya Deren because she was the first woman filmmaker whose films I saw. I also loved Fellini and Goddard because they were so different from Hollywood films. But when I saw the cinema verite films that were made by Drew Associates with Leacock and Pennebaker I found my passion. — Chris Hegedus

Filming is a witnessing process. You don't try to control it, even though sometimes you wish you could because it can go really, really wrong for you. — D. A. Pennebaker

Somebody like Bowie was so interesting because when you got him off stage, he was like a businessman. But on stage, he was just dazzling. It was like watching butterflies grow. — D. A. Pennebaker

As the number of studies increased, it became clear that writing was a far more powerful tool for healing than anyone had ever imagined. — James W. Pennebaker

If you are looking for a lover, a job, a new house, or a serial killer, Snoop is for you. It's great science and a fun read by a world-renowned personality researcher. — James W. Pennebaker

I didn't know Jack Kennedy that well, but Bobby was a hero to me. — D. A. Pennebaker

Well, it is curious what lasts and what doesn't. Publishing empires and whatnot would pay anything to figure it out. But they can't figure it out. — D. A. Pennebaker

Theater is where you go to find out something new that you don't know. It goes through somebody's brain and comes out in a comprehensible way that is beautiful, that's really interesting. — D. A. Pennebaker

I heard the new film, 'Tangerine,' was filmed entirely on iPhones. No cameras were involved! — D. A. Pennebaker

One of the things we found out as we filmed with people who dealt with chimps, and with all animals, and it's really incredible, is their levels of intelligence that we don't recognize right away. — D. A. Pennebaker

Before the camera, you only had secondhand takes - someone had to tell you what they saw or draw a picture of it or sing a song. Because of the camera, sometimes to our horror, we now know everything that happens in the world - things that before we were sheltered from. — D. A. Pennebaker

Candid still photography had taken over ... What was interesting was that the photographs came without any intention of instructing you ... You're like a cat looking out the window. You don't have to even know what you're watching, but you're watching it, and you're watching it very accurately. — D. A. Pennebaker

Animals are companions on this planet, not necessarily our feedbags. — D. A. Pennebaker

I guess I think that films have to be made totally by fascists
there's no room for democracy in making film. — D. A. Pennebaker

James W. Pennebaker and his associates at the University of Texas have conducted extensive research on the benefits of journaling. His findings: if you want relief, write about your most upsetting experiences, write through the pain, and connect painful events with your life story. — Laurie A. Helgoe

You can't point a camera at someone and find out what's in their head. But it does the next best thing - it lets you speculate. — D. A. Pennebaker

Two of my sons are themselves filmmakers, and we can't afford them nor they us. They work in the real world and earn money and are pretty good at it. — D. A. Pennebaker