Documentary Films Quotes:

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

topic: Stories, Elements, Documentary Films, Found Objects

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

source: Source: blogs.indiewire.com

topic: Editing, Matter, Documentary Films, Tedious, Forging Ahead

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

- Michael Rapaport

topic: Thinking, Documentary Films, Documentaries

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

- Chris Hegedus

source: Source: blogs.indiewire.com

topic: Documentary Films, Documentaries, Film

There's a documentary film-maker called Werner Herzog, who's a German film-maker. I really dig his stuff, I'd love to chat with him.

- Finn Jones

source: Source: www.coupdemainmagazine.com

topic: Stuff, Documentary Films, Documentaries

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

topic: Years, Documentary Films, Documentaries

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

- Brian Lindstrom

topic: Teaching, Documentary Films, Documentaries

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

- Alfred Hitchcock

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

topic: Film Directing, Directors, Documentary Films, Film Directors, Directing Film

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

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

topic: Funny Things, Want, Documentary Films, Gripping

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

- Naomi Wolf

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

topic: Risk, Documentary Films, Documentaries

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

- Dori Berinstein

source: Source: blogs.indiewire.com

topic: Passion, Commitment, Theatre, Documentary Films

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

source: Source: www.hollywoodchicago.com

topic: Art, Important, Trying, Documentary Films

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

topic: Drama, Past, Interesting, Documentary Films

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

topic: Children, People, Looks, Documentary Films

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

topic: Voice, Giving, Dumb, Untold Stories, Documentary Films

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

topic: People, Asking, Done, Documentary Films

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

topic: Thinking, Done, Narrative, Documentary Films

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

source: Source: collider.com

topic: Years, People, Would Be, Documentary Films

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

source: Source: blogs.indiewire.com

topic: Responsibility, Order, People, Documentary Films

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

source: Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

topic: Choices, Sitting Down, Different, Edits, Documentary Films

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

source: Source: www.indiewire.com

topic: Country, Thinking, House, Country Houses, Documentary Films

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

source: Source: collider.com

topic: Art, Years, People, Intervening, Documentary Films

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

source: Source: blogs.indiewire.com

topic: Challenges, Trying, Population, Documentary Films, Minefields

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

source: Source: www.glamour.com

topic: Running, Fashion, Heart, Flat Shoes, Documentary Films

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

source: Source: www.indiewire.com

topic: Thinking, Years, People, Documentary Films, Half A Year

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

source: Source: www.thewrap.com

topic: Independent, Support, Usual, Support Groups, Documentary Films

I've been called a spy of Israel since 1996, and since I made my documentary film in 2000 the FBI has investigated me as an agent of Iraq. The FBI has also opened up an investigation into my wife calling her a KGB spy.

- Scott Ritter

source: "Exclusive: Scott Ritter in His Own Words". Interview with Massimo Calabresi, content.time.com. September 14, 2002.

topic: Israel, Kgb, Iraq, Documentary Films

We have a documentary film festival in Mexico. It's really original. It's called Ambulante, and it's a film festival that travels around several cities in Mexico.

- Gael Garcia Bernal

topic: Cities, Mexico, Festivals, Documentary Films

I got five kids, and my oldest is a documentary film maker and camera man, and still photographer.

- Beau Bridges

source: Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

topic: Kids, Men, Cameras, Documentary Films

Michael Moore announced that his next documentary film will attack the health care industry in America. He's not out to get the pharmaceutical companies. He's just looking for something to relieve the redness in the center of the country.

- Argus Hamilton

topic: Country, America, Care, Documentary Films, Pharmaceutical Companies

I spent a year and a half working for an art fair. I worked as a post-production assistant for a documentary film company for a while. Then I worked at the Apple store because I wanted a discount to be able to buy new gear to edit things while I was figuring out whether or not I wanted to go to film school. Those were the main things.

- Meera Menon

topic: Art, School, Years, Documentary Films, Post Production

When I left university I was working for a documentary film company for six or seven years to the great relief of my father whose greatest waking fear was that I would become an actor.

- Sam Neill

topic: Father, Years, Relief, Documentary Films