Documentaries Quotes - Page 12

• In a one-hour documentary, you can tell maybe ten stories. That's how the documentary is structured. I wrote to forty of the greatest historians of both African and African-American history, and hired them as consultants. I had them submit what they thought were the indispensable stories, the ones they felt this series absolutely had to include.

  Henry Louis Gates

  African American, Stories, Hours

  Source: pittsburghurbanmedia.com

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• We have two boys. After George Zimmerman was found not guilty of killing Trayvon Martin, we had to explain to our older son, who was 12 at the time, how that could happen. Instead of hugging and consoling him, my husband pulled out a documentary about Emmett Till and showed it to him and started to talk about how the justice system works in this country - and how it often doesn't. From that conversation, our son wrote a short story about Trayvon Martin going to heaven to meet Emmett Till.

  Gina Prince-Bythewood

  Country, Husband, Son

  Source: www.mtv.com

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• I never saw myself as a director. It's certainly a second language but making movies for 40 years, you pick stuff up. However, this style of making movies, this documentary style, is easier for me because I gather a lot of material and with an editor, write it on screen. You try to write based on what you shot.

  Al Pacino

  Writing, Years, Editors

  Source: www.rawkblog.net

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• ["Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas"] is a very hard book to translate to film because there's so much interior monologue. The what if factor. I tried to write it cinematically and let the dialogue carry it but I forgot about the interior monologue. It's kind of hard to show what's going on in the head. I think we should do it like a documentary.

  Hunter S. Thompson

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.fargonebooks.com

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• I'm doing quite a few things now. In one day, I will go to Kassel, Germany, for a documentary project I've been preparing for half a year. I will bring 1,001 Chinese to participate as my artwork there - any Chinese who is a Chinese passport holder and over eighteen years old could apply through my blog. I'm just bringing them to Kassel to see the art show, and pay their room and board.

  Ai Weiwei

  Art, Years, Chinese

  Interview with Claudine Ko, believermag.com. November 1, 2007.

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• Sometimes my fashion pictures can look a little bit like documentary style pictures. So having a camera in my hand was normal.

  Steven Sebring

  Fashion, Hands, Style

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• It's always important to understand as filmmakers that we're not making a documentary and it has to look good. It has to entertain, because otherwise your audience will switch and watch another series. It has to look better and larger than life.

  Michelle Yeoh

  Important, Watches, Looks

  Source: www.dotwnews.com

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• I was watching a documentary that during the Bay of Pigs crisis JFK had about two weeks before anybody reported on it. Imagine that. I think it's fair to say that if something like that happens under a current president, they've got to figure out in about an hour what their response is.

  Barack Obama

  Thinking, Pigs, Two

  Source: time.com

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• The Black Power Mixtape is a documentary, first of all. It brings us closer to the voices we heard at that particular point in time.

  Danny Glover

  Voice, Black, Mixtapes

  Source: progressive.org

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• There are things that make me excited about what I'm doing: Trouble the Water [the 2008 documentary Glover executive produced] on New Orleans, or something like Soundtrack for a Revolution, about the power of the music of the civil rights movement [which he executive produced in 2009]. Or Bamako, about the African debt crisis, a platform to discuss the experience of people who actually live it. All of these are important ways we can use film as a forum inviting people into a dialogue.

  Danny Glover

  New Orleans, Rights, Water

  Source: progressive.org

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• Everybody is doing you a favor when you're doing a documentary. You can't pressure them into it.

  Ice T

  Doing You, Favors, Pressure

  "Interview: Ice-T likes lemonade, loves Coco". Interview with Luis Gomez, articles.chicagotribune.com. June 14, 2012.

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• Any documentary; any capturing of a non-fiction event, is a hyper-realistic condensation of reality that hopefully reveals an emotional truth. It's never the actual literal truth of an event.

  Joe Berlinger

  Reality, Emotional, Events

  Source: povmagazine.com

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• I think that one of the visions that is closest to reality is the cardboard city in the subway station in Tokyo, which is based very closely on a series of documentary photographs of people living like that and of the contents of the boxes. Those are quite haunting because Tokyo homeless people reiterate the whole nature of living in Tokyo in these cardboard boxes, they're only slightly smaller than Tokyo apartments, and they have almost as many consumer goods. It's a nightmare of boxes within boxes.

  William Gibson

  Reality, Thinking, Cities

  Source: craphound.com

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• My documentaries have always been very much constructed in the spirit of dominant cinema. From the time I started making non-fiction, I was mainly interested in designing and creating documentaries like fiction, so it was a natural evolution to try and embark on doing a dramatic narrative.

  Brett Morgen

  Creating, Design, Trying

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I don't like things about serial killers. There's so much serial killer information out there in documentaries constantly. A lot of it's just sort of gratuitous or it's almost like pornographic, really. There's no reason for it being shown.

  Stanley Tucci

  Serial Killer, Information, Killers

  "Death and Afterlife in The Lovely Bones". Relevant Interview, relevantmagazine.com. December 18, 2009.

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• There's nothing attractive about doing a documentary. Nothing. It's hard, hard work, and I find having all the attention of the day on me a very unattractive proposition.

  Elaine Stritch

  Hard Work, Attention, Unattractive

  Source: www.thewrap.com

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• If we have anything to offer, as filmmakers and as TV makers now, it's this ability to feel as close to a documentary as you can get in a narrative form.

  Mark Duplass

  Narrative, Tvs, Makers

  Source: collider.com

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• By calling it a memoir, I meant is as a collection of memories. I thought it was (a more) artful (title) than documentary.

  Natalie Merchant

  Memories, Titles, Calling

  "Paradise is here: an interview with Natalie Merchant". Interview with Gregg Shapiro, livingoutli.org. April 19, 2016.

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• I think that the whole voyeuristic attitude of filmmakers or of me personally - of shooting documentaries and so forth - is an important issue. And it was an important issue to me, personally. And the whole question of when - when do you put the camera down or when do you keep shooting to get the shot. And a number of times in my life I've had that question hit me very hard.

  Haskell Wexler

  Attitude, Thinking, Numbers

  "Remembering Oscar-Winning Cinematographer Haskell Wexler". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. December 29, 2015.

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• He was, as Billy Name said in the acclaimed Ric Burns documentary about Andy Warhol, uninterested in being a second-tier artist. He was uninterested in being a first-tier artist! He wanted to be, you know, a god. Someone who completely changed the...he wanted to be Zeus with the lightning bolt and nothing less would have satisfied him.

  Bob Colacello

  Artist, Names, Lightning

  Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

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• Now documentary evidence is acceptable. What does that mean? If you have documentary evidence that a person served as a guard in one of the death camps and the documents have been authenticated, that is grounds to charge the person with crimes against humanity. And that's why you see the spate of trials previously, for example, in the '70s and the '80s, even in the low '90s. That was not the case until the change in the law.

  Marvin Hier

  Mean, Law, Humanity

  "The Last Of Nazi War Convictions Will Not End Fight Against Anti-Semitism". "Weekend Edition Saturday" With Linda Wertheimer, www.npr.org. February 13, 2016.

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• I read slave narratives, books like Bullwhip Days, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. [The Root's chairman] Henry Louis Gates has an amazing documentary called Many Rivers to Cross - really, his whole writings; he's such a wealth of knowledge.

  Jurnee Smollett

  Girl, Book, Writing

  "Jurnee Smollett-Bell Gets Deep About Underground, a Slave Narrative That Will Make You Proud to Be Black". Interview with Ronda Racha Penrice, www.theroot.com. March 9, 2016.

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• Making an independent documentary film is so hard that usually, the usual model is that your film becomes a model for advocacy, so you can enlist that support group and get as much juice out of your film as possible. That's just practically, financially, what you need to do.

  Tim Hetherington

  Independent, Support, Usual

  Source: www.thewrap.com

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• Even a documentary portrait of a person that tries to be very accurate is shaped by the filmmaker in so many ways.

  Dana Spiotta

  Trying, Portraits, Way

  "Dana Spiotta’s Age of Innocence". Interview with Jeff Vasishta, www.interviewmagazine.com. March 11, 2016.

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• Documentaries are my favorite thing, and the more depressing, the better.

  Maria Thayer

  Depressing, Favorites Things, My Favorite

  Source: www.avclub.com

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