Documentaries Quotes

• In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director.

  Alfred Hitchcock

  Film Directing, Directors, Documentary Films

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Doing a documentary is about discovering, being open, learning, and following curiosity.

  Spike Jonze

  Curiosity, Discovering, Following

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• 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.

  Theodore Bikel

  Memories, Soul, Battle

  "Citizen-Soldier Handbook: 101 Ways Every American Can Fight Terrorism". Book by Michael Mandaville, 2009.

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• Documentaries have always inspired me in narrative filmmaking.

  Griffin Dunne

  Movie, Inspiring, Narrative

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• The best films of any kind, narrative or documentary, provoke questions.

  Edward Norton

  Narrative, Kind, Film

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• In documentary films, being able to be a storytelling and embrace film as an art form - while being very clearly connected in trying to help make the world a better place - is really important to me.

  James Redford

  Art, Important, Trying

  Source: www.hollywoodchicago.com

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• News makes things black and white. Documentary filmmaking should do the opposite.

  Robert Greene

  Black And White, Opposites, News

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• Every documentary is subjective. It's a total lie to say there are objective documentaries.

  Pirjo Honkasalo

  Lying, Subjective, Objectives

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• 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

  Drama, Past, Interesting

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• Documentary film is the one place that our people can speak for themselves. I feel that the documentaries that I've been working on have been very valuable for the people, for our people to look at ourselves, at the situations, really facing it, and through that being able to make changes that really count for the future of our children to come.

  Alanis Obomsawin

  Children, People, Looks

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• How useful are documentary photographs if there is no follow up, no way of knowing what happened next in the story?

  Martha Rosler

  Knowing, Stories, Way

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• It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.

  Rod Serling

  Funny, Dance, Humor

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• When a documentary filmmaker, working in the style that I do, suggests that there has been a shooting ratio of 40 hours to every one hour of finished film, that doesn't mean that the other 39 are bad.

  Ken Burns

  Mean, Style, Shooting

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• Well, like any time you're shooting documentary stuff, you've got to be in the moment, and you've got to be able to be in control enough to capture what's happening

  Brian De Palma

  Shooting, Able, Stuff

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• The testimony and the documentary evidence produced by the Government demonstrate that the Bell System had violated the antitrust laws in a number of ways over a lengthy period of time.

  Harold H. Greene

  Numbers, Government, Law

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• Well, it was actually - I brought the idea of doing a documentary to HBO back in 2000, when there were some press reports sort of were bandied about that there were going to TV movies based on some of the books that were out.

  Monica Lewinsky

  Book, Hbo, Ideas

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• Is this film more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?

  Gene Siskel

  Lunch, Interesting, Actors

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• My lady, Deborah McNaughton is doing a documentary on me.

  Noel Redding

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• I don't think of Storefront Hitchcock or Stop Making Sense as documentaries, I think of them more as performance films.

  Jonathan Demme

  Thinking, Film, Make Sense

  Interview with Adrian Wootton, www.theguardian.com. October 10, 1998.

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• And in reality, I don't think it's a real documentary. It's more a story of her life. It's a story of survival. It's a story of the time in which she lived. The story of success and failure.

  Maximilian Schell

  Real, Thinking, Survival

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• 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

  Clothes, Film, Nudity

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• When I was at Stratford, the very first thing that I was commissioned to work on was trying to make a musical out of the documentary material about the General Strike, which was the next big historical event in England, after the First World War.

  Trevor Nunn

  War, Historical, Musical

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• This was almost two hours of factual documentary. In our audience ratings, barely no one left the programme. The whole of his life is so fascinating and people kept watching for that reason.

  Martin Bashir

  Two, People, Literature

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• I want to do a documentary about strippers, 'cause it's a moneymaker.

  Method Man

  Want, Causes

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• I've been reading and researching various aspects of history - Dickens' London, Nelson's sea battles, Magellan's nautical explorations, the weapons and battles and key figures of the American Civil War - for most of my life. I pick up a book here or there or see a documentary or talk with an expert in the subject, and my curiosity about the one area of study and discovery always leads to another.

  Gary Paulsen

  War, Book, Reading

  "Author Interview: Gary Paulsen". Interview with Amanda Lynch, www.thechildrensbookreview.com. January 26, 2009.

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