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

  Spike Jonze

  Curiosity, Discovering, Following

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

  Robert Greene

  Black And White, Opposites, News

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• You know, the process of making a documentary is one of discovery, and like writing a story, you follow a lead and that leads you to something else and then by the time you finish, the story is nothing like you expected.

  William Shatner

  Writing, Discovery, Stories

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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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• 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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• If you want to make a documentary you should automatically go to the fiction, and if you want to nourish your fiction you have to come back to reality.

  Jean-Luc Godard

  Reality, Fiction, Want

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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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• Look, I'm just a storyteller. When I make a film, I never want the film to become a vehicle of social propaganda.

  Norman Jewison

  Looks, Want, Film

  "Profile and Interview: Norman Jewison". Interview with Erika Hernandez, www.aboutfilm.com. January 2004.

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• 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

  Years, Albums, Blind

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• Films are always a fiction, not documentary. Even a documentary is a kind of fiction.

  Philip Seymour Hoffman

  Fiction, Kind, Film

  Interview with Meghan O'Rourke, www.slate.com. January 31, 2006.

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• On 'The Office,' so much of the show is about disguising your true feelings and your romantic feelings because it was a mock documentary.

  Mindy Kaling

  Romantic, Office, Feelings

  "Mindy Kaling Talks Acting in and Producing THE MINDY PROJECT, Returning to THE OFFICE, GAME OF THRONES Obsessions and More". Interview with Christina Radish, collider.com. July 30, 2012.

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• What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow men's existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history.

  Joseph Conrad

  Strong, Pride, Reality

  Joseph Conrad “The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad”, Library of Alexandria

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• We're telling a story. And the demands of that are different from the demands of a documentary. The audience must believe in order to keep faith in the story.

  Bradley Whitford

  Faith, Believe, Order

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• There's no other way to learn about it, except through documentaries. I encourage documentarians to continue telling stories about World War II. I think documentaries are the greatest way to educate an entire generation that doesn't often look back to learn anything about the history that provided a safe haven for so many of us today. Documentaries are the first line of education, and the second line of education is dramatization, such as The Pacific.

  Steven Spielberg

  War, Thinking, Safe Haven

  "Steven Spielberg Interview HBO’s THE PACIFIC". Interview with Sara Wayland, collider.com. February 4, 2010.

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• I watch movies occasionally, and I watch documentaries. Virtually nothing else.

  Don DeLillo

  Watches, Watch Movie

  "Q&A: Don DeLillo / It's not as easy as it looks / DeLillo talks about writing plays, watching sports and movies, and defining love and death". Interview with John Freeman, www.sfgate.com. March 5, 2006.

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• So I do tend to do documentaries where I can move in and out of them.

  Michael Apted

  Moving, I Can

  "Michael Apted Goes from “7 Up” to 007". Interview with Anthony Kaufman, www.indiewire.com. November 18, 1999.

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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

  Style, Energy, Shooting

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• Right now, I'm Writing song lyrics. Experimenting with a play. Toying with an idea for a documentary. I hope one of these will eventually be launched into the light of day.

  Anita Diament

  Song, Writing, Light

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• If you had the opportunity and some talent, there was no way you couldn't progress, because it was an open market. There was the advertising world, and there was the documentary world.

  Richard Donner

  Opportunity, Progress, World

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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

  Dry, Film, Like You

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