Documentaries quotes
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I would love to have been a documentary filmmaker; I just didn't have the resources to do that.
-- Anna Deavere Smith -
I take care to only teach courses about fiction film. I believe that this balances and broadens my documentary work.
-- Arnon Goldfinger -
In documentaries, there's a truth that unfolds unnaturally, and you get to chronicle it. In narratives, you have to create the situations so that the truth will come out.
-- Ava DuVernay -
Actually, documentary pictures include every subject in the world - good, bad, indifferent. I have yet to see a fine photograph which is not a good document.
-- Berenice Abbott -
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I personally can watch an eight-hour documentary on Woody Allen because I'm fascinated by him. But, an audience can't really sit through more than two and a half hours on any movie. It doesn't matter if Marlon Brando came back from the dead. It's just impossible.
-- Brett Ratner -
I love going on BBC6 and BBC7 and listening to documentaries.
-- Burn Gorman -
The reason I call myself a documentary photographer is the idea of how photographs contain and participate in history.
-- Catherine Opie -
Mostly, what I watch are reality shows and documentaries.
-- Chris Lilley -
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I like the boundaries, the kinds of conventions of a documentary and having to work within that.
-- Chris Lilley -
With any rock documentary or band documentary you always recognize things that you've experienced some version of.
-- Chris Shiflett -
Well it has been very exciting and very changing as well. Celebrating the 40th year and having the album out and the Channel 4 documentary and I resigned from Blind Date.
-- Cilla Black -
The thing about making a documentary in Las Vegas is there isn't much to film apart from other people making documentaries about Las Vegas.
-- Clive James -
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We'll be back to our nature documentary, 'Baggy the Anorexic Elephant' in just a second.
-- Colin Mochrie -
The Highlander was a documentary, and events happened in real time.
-- Dana Snyder -
Well, I've been in several films including documentaries, but the big blockbuster, I was hired as advisor to the actors, I was trying to make Jesuits out of them
-- Daniel Berrigan -
Right after I did 'The Fountain,' I wanted to go make a documentary or something that was less constructed - more natural. I was searching for a project, and sniffing around, 'The Wrestler' fit right in
-- Darren Aronofsky -
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David Irving has consistenly applied an evidential double standard, demanding absolute documentary proof to convict the Germans (as when he sought to show that Hitler was not responsible for the Holocaust), while relying on circumstantial evidence to condemn the British (as in his account of the Allied bombing of Dresden).
-- David Cannadine -
As historians, our training and discipline is based on documentary evidence,.
-- David Dixon -
Mass entertainment in America has been dominated for a long time by the mode of documentary realism.
-- David Riesman -
When I was 16, I made some little 35mm documentaries about the poor in London. I went round Notting Hill, which was a real slum in the 1950s, shooting film.
-- David Suchet -
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To make a documentary is one thing, to make a feature film is quite another.
-- Dennis Hopper -
People say to me, "You make fantastic films" and I say, "No, I make documentaries.
-- Derek Jarman -
A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph.
-- Dorothea Lange -
A remarkable documentary and the first in-depth record of many black women, slave and free.
-- Dorothy B. Porter -
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You're making a movie, not a documentary. If you made a film like the historians would like you to make, you're not going to go and see it. I'd rather see paint dry.
-- Dougray Scott -
The best films of any kind, narrative or documentary, provoke questions.
-- Edward Norton -
Monty Python: A documentary series on everyday life in Great Britain.
-- Frank Portman -
I want to communicate through my music. If you want to know Geri Halliwell listen to my album: it tells you more about me than a documentary ever could.
-- Geri Halliwell -
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Documentaries have always inspired me in narrative filmmaking.
-- Griffin Dunne -
Well, I want to do everything in sort of a documentary style, ever since I started in the '80s.
-- Gus Van Sant -
Photography has always been about documentary, the depiction of the instant, a moment, sometimes a place. Each project is somehow an experimentation of a specific context or a character.
-- Hedi Slimane -
I love documentaries. It's actually my favorite medium of film.
-- Jamie Bell -
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I hate making TV documentaries.
-- Jamie Oliver -
My interest in painting is recording things. I think of myself as almost a documentary filmmaker... I've gotten into some curious situations...
-- Jamie Wyeth -
Bizarrely funny... Rarely is a documentary as well attuned to its subject as Howard Brookner's BURROUGHS, which captures as much about the life, work and sensibility of its subject as its 86 minute format allows.
-- Janet Maslin -
Most people see a documentary about the meat industry and then they become a vegetarian for a week.
-- Jason Reitman -
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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 -
It's such a rich experience when you enter into a subject from a documentary point of view. It's hard for fiction to compete with that.
-- Jonathan Demme -
I love doing fiction. I love doing performance films and I love doing documentaries that don't have music. I love to shoot and I love to shoot things I'm enthusiastic about.
-- Jonathan Demme -
I don't think of Storefront Hitchcock or Stop Making Sense as documentaries, I think of them more as performance films.
-- Jonathan Demme -
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...it is a very risky thing for anyone to go about proclaiming the truth simply because he finds himself in possession of concrete documentary proofs or on the evidence of his own eyes, which is always overestimated.
-- Jorge Amado -
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 -
My father was an amateur filmmaker who shot 8mm color documentaries.
-- Lasse Hallstrom -
I've been a documentary photographer for much longer than I have been a filmmaker.
-- Lauren Greenfield -
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Joe Berlinger's documentary 'Whitey' is so hard-hitting and compelling, you can't take your eyes off the screen.
-- Leonard Maltin -
I've always been a fiction filmmaker and I've been heading in the direction of fiction filmmaking, doing documentaries along the way.
-- Lucy Walker -
Most of the photographs people take with their cameraphones are of little value in terms of documentary.
-- Martin Parr -
I am a big fan of Jim Jarmusch, and I do love big screen documentaries.
-- Martin Parr -
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I'm a documentary photographer. That's what I've always wanted to be; that's where my heart and soul is.
-- Mary Ellen Mark -
I studied directing prior to acting and I've done music videos and documentaries and things that were sort of well-received.
-- Matthew Gray Gubler -
I watch documentaries for information. I watch films to be entertained.
-- Meshell Ndegeocello -
I want to do a documentary about strippers, 'cause it's a moneymaker.
-- Method Man -
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So I do tend to do documentaries where I can move in and out of them.
-- Michael Apted -
Documentaries are a form of journalism.
-- Michael Moore -
I've been encouraging documentary filmmakers to use more and more humor, and they're loath to do that because they think if it's a documentary it has to be deadly serious - it has to be like medicine that you're supposed to take. And I think it's what keeps the mass audience from going to documentaries.
-- Michael Moore -
For a documentary filmmaker, I do very well.
-- Michael Moore -
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And shooting things in a documentary style was a good way to create tension and energy without money.
-- Michael Patrick Jann -
I love documentaries and I watch documentaries to no end.
-- Michael Pena -
Right now I'm taking a break from hip-hop documentaries. But I would do it if things lined up.
-- Michael Rapaport -
I don't think the subject of a documentary film should be producers on it.
-- Michael Rapaport -
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I don't really believe that documentary is objective reality and fiction is all illusion.
-- Mike Mills -
My lady, Deborah McNaughton is doing a documentary on me.
-- Noel Redding -
There's so many documentaries out there right now and everything's exposing wrestling.
-- Owen Hart -
When I hear the word 'documentary,' I don't think certain things should be left out. You've got to keep it 100 percent as much as you can, unless your group has a meeting beforehand and says, 'Yo - don't say this, 'cause boom, boom, boom.' Other than that, it's a documentary so let's document, you know what I mean?
-- Phife Dawg -
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I was painting sets, working in editorial as an assistant, driving their trucks, lying that I knew how to drive a truck, and doing commercials and documentaries.
-- Richard Donner -
It would be pretty shabby to appear flippant around a documentary that's about how much I love my fans.
-- Rick Springfield -
You see reality TV and it's not reality TV. It's contrived and everything is plotted and scripted nearly. Documentaries are the same and just as bad.
-- Ricky Gervais -
You made a point about proof. In this sort of history we do nt have proof... Yet... the incontrovertibility of the evidence can be plain even when it is not documentary or complete.
-- Robert Conquest -
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I think independent filmmakers, documentary filmmakers - they are journalists.
-- Robert Redford -
I'm addicted to documentaries. That's all I watch on television.
-- Robert Zemeckis -
After I read all the medical journals and watched all the documentaries, I still didn't understand the physical sensation of ticking and where it comes from and what it feels like
-- Robin Tunney -
A good documentary or educational film is not raw experience. The material has passed the mill of reason, it has been sifted and interpreted.
-- Rudolf Arnheim -
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All of these years that I have been singing, no one has done a documentary about my music as far as I'm concerned.
-- Ruth Brown -
I think pulling off, pulling off a kind of fake documentary of me being a, you know, actual dictator would have been extremely difficult, if not impossible.
-- Sacha Baron Cohen -
I have seen the Gore documentary 'An Inconvenient Truth,' just released in the States, and admired the acutely revolutionary delivery of the slideshow assisted talk he has now been giving for some 16 years.
-- Saffron Burrows -
I don't think I'll be making documentaries my whole life.
-- Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy -
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Doing a documentary is about discovering, being open, learning, and following curiosity.
-- Spike Jonze -
Contrary to popular opinion, 'Leave it to Beaver' was not a documentary.
-- Stephanie Coontz -
I'm a massive sucker for music documentaries.
-- Stephen Mangan -
I saw a documentary on how ships are kept together. Riveting!
-- Stewart Francis -
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In a way then, the Divine Principle, this new revelation, is the documentary of my life. It is my own life experience. The Divine Principle is in me, and I am in the Divine Principle.
-- Sun Myung Moon -
I want to do more documentaries and travel to places I haven't been. That is where I think I can be fulfilled.
-- Tatjana Patitz -
I love to see the rarest movies, the most talked-about movies and documentaries. I read all the reviews and compare them to see if its worth going! I have a secret movie critic blog I have shown no one or promoted, and I intend to keep it that way.
-- Theophilus London -
I love devastating movies, documentaries and hummingbirds (yes, in that order).
-- Tig Notaro -
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I don't have a horror film in me just because I don't like to be scared. But I definitely have a documentary in me, and I certainly have dramas.
-- Todd Phillips -
If you think that [Yale professor James] Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted.
-- Tom Wigley -
I love documentaries, I like observing real people.
-- Tracey Ullman -
That’s my idea of what a portrait ought to be, anonymous and documentary and a straightforward picture of mankind.
-- Walker Evans -
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Well, this week for example, I was just in Los Angeles making a documentary for German television on whales. They had tried to get me in England where they missed me.
-- Wavy Gravy -
You should bear in mind that almost all my documentaries are feature films in disguise.
-- Werner Herzog -
For me, the distinction between documentaries and feature films is not so clear - my "documentaries" were largely scripted, rehearsed, and repeated, and have a lot of fantasy and concoction in them.
-- Werner Herzog -
No one likes documentaries.
-- Alex Gibney -
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As I get older it gets harder and harder to hold on to the ephemeral excitement. When a documentary, or a screenplay, or even just a brainstorming session is going well I get to experience sense of hope, and expansiveness, even if it's just for a moment.
-- Andrew Neel -
The photographic frame is no longer used as a documentary window into undisturbed private lives, but as a stage on which the subjects consciously direct themselves to bring forward hidden information that is not normally displayed on the surface.
-- Arthur Tress -
I operate the camera, I always do it when I'm the director, and I like to approach it as a documentary, finding the images based on what happens, as it happens.
-- Benjamin Avila -
I am particularly pleased to see that there are so many women working in documentary film.
-- Chris Hegedus -
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I have always felt that documentaries are an opportunity for me to witness a world that I know nothing about.
-- Chris Hegedus -
A lot of the commercials that I was doing were very slice-of-life, emotional, documentary-style, not big and cinematic and ultimately like the kind of movie I wanted to make.
-- Dan Trachtenberg -
I'd rather lose the small part of the audience that is going to be insulted because a documentary shouldn't have music than the big part of the audience that kind of gives itself over to the scene.
-- Daniel Stamm -
Every year, I'm depressed that so few of the documentaries I've loved break through.
-- David Edelstein -
