Documentary Films Quotes

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

  Alfred Hitchcock

  Film Directing, Directors, Documentaries

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

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• 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

  Funny Things, Want, Documentaries

  "I'm Carolyn Parker: Filmmaker Interview with Jonathan Demme". "POV", www.pbs.org.

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• Like theatre, crafting a documentary film takes tremendous commitment, patience and passion.

  Dori Berinstein

  Passion, Commitment, Theatre

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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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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• 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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• If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you're dumb and blind.

  Salman Rushdie

  Voice, Giving, Dumb

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• 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

  Found Objects, Documentaries, Stories

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• With documentary-film projects, you hope you highlight an area of concern people haven't thought about before. A lot of times, I'm asking myself - 'This seems to be a significant problem. What can be done that hasn't been done?

  Paul Allen

  People, Asking, Done

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• 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

  Thinking, Done, Narrative

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• If I weren't making documentary films, I suppose I'd be teaching.

  Brian Lindstrom

  Teaching, Documentaries, Ifs

  Source: therumpus.net

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• 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

  Years, Documentaries, Remember

  "LatinoBuzz: Pamela Yates on How Her Documentary Helped Jail a Guatemalan Dictator for Genocide" by Vanessa Erazo, www.indiewire.com. May 22, 2013.

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• Documentary film without nuanced journalistic sourcing risks being sensational, tendentious or broad-brushed.

  Naomi Wolf

  Risk, Documentaries, Broads

  "Smugglers of Truth". www.theguardian.com. January 19, 2009.

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• If you told me thirty years ago that people would be parodying documentary films, I never would have believed it. It wasn't clear that the films themselves even had an audience, let alone an audience for parodies of them.

  Errol Morris

  Years, People, Would Be

  Source: collider.com

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• People outside the documentary world don't realize how time-consuming making a documentary film is there is a lot of responsibility, and in order to make something good you need time.

  Alex Hammond

  Responsibility, Order, People

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• It's rare in a documentary film that you have a repetitive act. So when you do, you can shoot it in different ways so that you have more choices when you're sitting down to edit that sequence six months later.

  Frederick Wiseman

  Choices, Sitting Down, Different

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• 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

  Country, Thinking, House

  Source: www.indiewire.com

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• I am particularly pleased to see that there are so many women working in documentary film.

  Chris Hegedus

  Documentaries, Film

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• 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

  Editing, Matter, Rooms

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• I don't think the subject of a documentary film should be producers on it.

  Michael Rapaport

  Thinking, Documentaries, Should

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• Twenty to thirty years ago, who was making documentary films? Nobody. Well, relatively few people. It was an art form that had limited theatrical distribution, if any at all. Some television distribution, but relatively small audiences regardless. And in the intervening years it's become more and more popular with a lot of people.

  Errol Morris

  Art, Years, People

  Source: collider.com

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• One of the top challenges is the fact that you are dealing with survivors. Every time you deal with a documentary film subject it is fraught with obvious minefields but when you are dealing with a population that is severely traumatized and trying to recover from that trauma there is an extra level of vigilance and care and attention that has to be implemented all the time at every level.

  Amy Ziering

  Challenges, Trying, Population

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• Maybe it's good a thing that people see me this way [in the documentary film]. They expect to see me with the high heels, the glamour looks, but now they will see me running through an airport with flat shoes! Also, they'll discover that stylists with "names" are in general nicer, sweeter, have a heart, have great relationships with family and friends, and that's important. It shows that people in fashion aren't just freaks.

  Carine Roitfeld

  Running, Fashion, Heart

  Source: www.glamour.com

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• 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

  Thinking, Years, People

  Source: www.indiewire.com

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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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