Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best Documentary Quotes from famous persons: Gigi Gorgeous, Petra Kvitova, The Iron Sheik, Edward Norton, Gaspar Noe. The wide variety of quotes available makes it possible to find a quote to suit your needs. You’ve likely heard some of the Documentary Quotes before, but that’s because they truly are great.
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I always wanted to be in movies, but I never thought that in a million years there would be a documentary about my life.
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In 1993, my first documentary was about the civil war in Algeria. That was in French and in Arabic. Another short film I did was silent. What I’m trying to say is that, yes, I’m Italian, and yes, I make films with Italian money, but personally, I’ve always been invested in the broader world of film-making.
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I’ve been fairly private about my personal life. I’ve been approached by other companies to do a documentary about cosplay and about my life, but I’ve never felt comfortable.
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There’s a really great documentary called ‘Many Rivers,’ which documents the totality of slavery from its inception, and then it gives you a little history on how America came to prominence. It’s crazy – the first black man to actually step foot in America came as a free man, as an explorer, with the Spaniards.
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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.
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I never said that I was going to do a documentary talking about my experiences of colourism. I think people took it the wrong way with the working title – ‘Leigh-Anne: Race and Colourism.’ That’s not what I was doing, I’m here to amplify the voices of darker-skinned women and hear their experiences.
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In documentary films, the most difficult thing to achieve is to make something complex appear simple.
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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.
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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.
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I want to do a documentary about strippers, ’cause it’s a moneymaker.
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There is a porous membrane between a documentary that doesn’t use interviews and what you would call a neorealist hybrid film.
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I think documentary filmmaking is a braver way to make films because it’s real, and you’re really there.
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‘Panto!’ is basically my life. It’s not a comedy drama; it’s a documentary. I was going to write an autobiography, but I thought I’d write this instead.
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Until I was 16 or 17, I had heard practically nothing about the history that preceded 1945. Only when we were 17 were we confronted with a documentary film of the opening of the Belsen camp.
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My mother and stepfather were documentary filmmakers and, of course, had a very healthy Scandinavian mentality. When it came to cinema, my mother was very obsessed with the French New Wave. That was her generation.
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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.
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What is interesting to me about film, and documentary film in particular, is that I can write about these people, and you trust my judgment, more or less, but when you’re confronted yourself with humans who are right there on the screen telling you their story, you make a judgment yourself that is conclusive.
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As a documentary filmmaker, I couldn’t afford to give my children the lifestyle I had in San Francisco growing up.
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No one has a green light when they start a documentary – not ever.
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If you want to see the real Pablo Escobar, go see a documentary.
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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?
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Feature filmmaking is a different kind of complication as documentary comes in the editing room.
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If you are playing someone living, it is a different type of judgment. However much work you do, it is not a documentary. There will be things you can’t get right, and ultimately, you have to take a leap because – you weren’t there.
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‘Monuments Men’ is not a docudrama. It’s not a documentary.
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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.
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I think you can do a lot with fiction, and in some cases you can say even more in fiction than you can in straight-up documentary journalism.
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I’ve done all sorts of different kinds of action. We did a thing in ‘Blood Diamond,’ the attack on Freetown, where I carefully staged the action but did not show the camera operators what we were going to film – so it has the feel of documentary, trying to capture something, and that gave it a whole different feel.
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In a drama, the camera doesn’t exist. In a documentary, it does.
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I really loved working on ‘Laguna Beach,’ and I’d do it all over again. I’m one of the luckiest kids in the world, but I thought it was going to be a documentary about kids in high school, and they exaggerated all this drama. When it came out, it was this weird thing. People feel that they know you.
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Most women I know are not actresses, but they work for the U.N. or are documentary filmmakers, anthropologists.
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For me, documentary photography has always come with great responsibility. Not just to tell the story honestly and with empathy, but also to make sure the right people hear it. When you photograph somebody who is in pain or discomfort, they trust you to make sure the images will act as their advocate.
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Documentary is reality. It shows the truth.
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Everything I’ve made – it doesn’t mean they’ve all been good – but everything I’ve made so far, big or little, fiction or documentary, has been something that I’ve been really enthusiastic about.
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In documentary, you are sometimes burdened, or you feel very responsible for dealing with – I want to say – more complicated themes. Fiction allows for greater distillation.
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In the spring of 1984, I went to the northwest of France, to Normandy, to prepare an NBC documentary on the 40th anniversary of D-Day.
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I think making a documentary gets you out and about more, with people. With stand-up, you’re talking at people. With documentaries you’re talking with people, and you’re listening a lot more.
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The first time I thought about attempting a body suspension was after watching a documentary on rites-of-passage ceremonies from other cultures. I was completely intrigued by what these people put their bodies through.
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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.
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A documentary film is a great way of helping people understand because, somehow, when one is able to see the people involved, it lends a certain immediacy and understanding that is hard to get on the page.
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What’s great about documentary, it seems to me, is that it can be experimental filmmaking. You have a license to do a lot of diverse things under the umbrella of ‘documentary.’
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I really liked that documentary, ‘Room 237.’
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If you are playing someone living, it is a different type of judgment. However much work you do, it is not a documentary. There will be things you can’t get right, and ultimately, you have to take a leap because – you weren’t there.
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I don’t think the subject of a documentary film should be producers on it.
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I would love to have been a documentary filmmaker; I just didn’t have the resources to do that.
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I watched the ‘Food, Inc.’ documentary and was like, ‘This has opened my eyes to the meat industry – maybe I should go vegetarian.’ And my friend told me, ‘Sadie, you’re not gonna last a week.’ But I’m very competitive.
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Cinema is not truth. Even when you make documentary films, you can choose to show this shot and not the other shot – this side and not the other side. In cinema, there’s one truth – not ‘the truth.’ It’s only ‘my point of view.’ Cinema is powerful because of that.
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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.
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I’m a documentary filmmaker by training. You got to start with the real people and the real place.
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Especially when you talk about the power of documentary filmmaking, you can’t really have a slant; financially, you can’t have a slant on the end goals.
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For someone like me, making a documentary – I don’t kid myself. There’s no influence at all. What I do is entertainment. I would even say much the same about the column I write in ‘The Sunday Times.’
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In Austin, you work in anything that will pay and a lot of things that don’t. The documentary filmmaker may also be a gaffer on a feature and producer for a commercial series and web host. Everyone just does a little bit of everything, and you have to because it’s a secondary market.
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As the documentary ‘True Son’ illustrates, my campaign for city council started really small – with eight mostly political neophytes in my living room and with young people knocking on doors.
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When you make a documentary, you have to adapt to what reality imposes upon you.
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I wasn’t setting out to write a documentary; if I had, I would have done it in a completely different way. I was asked to write a drama that would appeal to a big audience in America that had no knowledge or interest in The Tudors at all.
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My next project is ‘Venus Vs,’ which is a documentary that follows tennis star Venus Williams and her effort to get equal-award pay for women at Wimbledon. Most people don’t realize that Venus fought for years to make sure women and men winners of that tennis championship received the same amount in award money.
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I started to do theater when I was a little boy at school, and then, I think because my father was a documentary filmmaker and worked for German television, I was of course fascinated by what he did.
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Sure, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ was my first documentary. What a wonderful experience. I saw Al Gore doing his slideshow presentation, and had this nutty idea that we had to make a movie out of it.
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The key fact missed most often by social scientists utilizing documentary films for data, is this: documentary films are not found or reported things; they’re made things.
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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.
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For me, documentary photography has always come with great responsibility. Not just to tell the story honestly and with empathy, but also to make sure the right people hear it. When you photograph somebody who is in pain or discomfort, they trust you to make sure the images will act as their advocate.
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I was at the National Film School and was a cinematographer there. I got quite a lot of experience on documentary film-making and with directors who were interesting – maybe they weren’t using scripts or were using non-actors.
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The worst thing that can happen to a comedian is to do a documentary on your life and you’re watching it with an audience and there’s not a laugh.
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A lot of the times, reality shows don’t like people to break the fourth wall. With a docu-series or a documentary, everyone breaks the fourth wall because you’re talking to the camera quite a bit.
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When I look back at the way that I was in that documentary I cringe.
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I had long been resistant to doing a documentary about my mother for personal reasons. And I thought there was no way she’d want to, but then I asked her and she said ‘yes.’
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Reality television hasn’t killed documentaries, because there are so many great documentaries still being made, but it certainly has changed the landscape. There is this breed of gimmicky documentary that is basically a reality show.
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This was almost two hours of factual documentary. In our audience ratings, barely no one left the programme. The whole of his life is so fascinating and people kept watching for that reason.
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The reason I call myself a documentary photographer is the idea of how photographs contain and participate in history.
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You have so much more time to observe and learn with a documentary because of the time between the shoots. You get a much deeper understanding of day-to-day life and its themes. It’s also much more of a mess after three years; you have to comb it out carefully and see what fits together and makes sense.
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People aren’t familiar with wheelchair sports. The only film crew in Athens for the Paralympics was the documentary crew.
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Everybody was apprehensive about a documentary. When we’re all dead and gone, we don’t want to leave something that is not going to be representing the band in a true and honest way that shows everything that’s important.
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Every time you are getting ready to make a shot in a documentary film, you are asking yourself questions about your cinematographic approach. You are approaching the truth, but the image is never the truth itself.
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With everything that I’ve done with YouTube and podcasts for so many years, it’s been: you can record it, edit, and then upload that day. With the book and documentary, it’s been such a longer process.
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I think documentary filmmakers need as much protection as possible under journalist’s privilege. How else is the public to know what is going on?
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There are a lot of female directors in documentary, very talented. But it’s always lower budget.
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To me, form is not something that you can plan beforehand, especially for a documentary. You can’t write it or sketch it. It requires a confrontation with reality, with history, with ethics and morals. After identifying good content, you have to find the right form to express that content.
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In film, I believe things should either be documentary or drama.
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I can’t pick a favorite animal; I love so many! But I guess if I have to choose, I pick bees! There’s this brilliant documentary called ‘Queen of the Sun: What Are the Bees Telling Us?’ I think it’s important for people to be educated about bees – they pollinate almost all the food we eat. They are amazing!
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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.
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Feature filmmaking is a different kind of complication as documentary comes in the editing room.
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The power and appeal of Documentary is the way it alters and plays with the way the viewer relates to and understands the subject.
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I started to do theater when I was a little boy at school, and then, I think because my father was a documentary filmmaker and worked for German television, I was of course fascinated by what he did. Then when I was around 15, I did my first movie.
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I think the reality-show format is brilliant, has endless possibilities. It’s documentary! But unfortunately, it’s rarely executed well. So it becomes just a scripted show, but without actors.
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As far as entertainment, ‘The Right Stuff’ is a good movie. As far as a documentary of the early space days, which they purported it to be, it is not at all.
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The great thing about ‘The Exorcist‘ is it’s dead serious horror. No comedy, no self-reference, it’s a documentary style.
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Well, I want to do everything in sort of a documentary style, ever since I started in the ’80s.
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I’ve often thought even ragtag gatherings of documentary filmmakers are more fun than gatherings of fiction filmmakers.
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People have said to me, ‘Oh, you are much nicer making documentaries than you were in politics.’ So I should be. If you are making a documentary, you are having fun. You are not under any pressure, normally.
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Documentary makers use other people’s lives as their raw material, and that is morally indefensible.
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So much of art-making is about reducing things to the essentials, so I don’t feel particularly crippled by this. I don’t want it to look natural because then I would be making a documentary film.
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I love documentary because it’s alive.
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There’s a really great documentary called ‘Many Rivers,’ which documents the totality of slavery from its inception, and then it gives you a little history on how America came to prominence. It’s crazy – the first black man to actually step foot in America came as a free man, as an explorer, with the Spaniards.
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Ben Affleck exec-produced a documentary for HBO called ‘Reporter‘ about my 2007 win-a-trip journey. I take the trip each year partly to encourage young people to think about global humanitarian issues: I think blogs by a student may be more compelling for that audience than my own work.
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I went on a cross-country trip with three buddies to find out what our generation is about. I bought a video camera, started shooting, learned as I went, and ended up with ‘Our Time,’ a feature-length documentary about what it’s like to be young in America. I was hooked.
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I think independent filmmakers, documentary filmmakers – they are journalists.
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Whatever storytelling muscles you’ve developed as a documentary filmmaker will be extremely helpful as a narrative filmmaker.
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The first thing that I ever made was a documentary that I shot… in downtown L.A. about a group of homeless people.
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We all need to be huge supporters of the theatrical documentary.
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I never wanted to do a documentary or write a book.
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With newspapers cutting foreign bureaus and budgets shrinking for long-form, investigative journalism, documentary filmmakers are often filling a void nowadays in the media landscape with their ability to spend time with their stories and subjects.
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I would do a documentary about Jay-Z. Yes, I would.
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I can do a documentary on myself, and it would be, like, 10 minutes.
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Like my father and grandfather, Philippe and Jacques-Yves Cousteau, I’ve dedicated my life to exploring and protecting our seas, in large part through documentary film.
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If I wanted an open space, I could do a documentary about fishes. Then I would have an open space to play my music. That’s not how I visualize the work I’m doing.
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Those are just some of the people whom we interviewed in the documentary, but that should provide you with a good sense of the credibility of the individuals who bolster the case that this administration lied us into a war.
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You kind of form a bond with your subjects, in a way. You’re in it together. To a degree that people don’t realize, documentary films – or at least the kind of documentary films I’m interested in – are a collaborative undertaking with the subjects.
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We’ll be back to our nature documentary, ‘Baggy the Anorexic Elephant’ in just a second.
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What little return documentary filmmakers get often comes in the form of recognition by their peers and the critics who influence doc audiences around the country.
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There’s an amazing documentary, ‘The Day After Trinity,’ which is crazy good.
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I’ve watched ‘Senna’ – a documentary film about a Formula One driver – three or four times now. I’m not a massive Formula One fan but I watch it and think ‘God, what a waste.’
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Comics shouldn’t be ‘tools’ for anyone‘s agenda except for the characters. And I am speaking only of super hero action comics. I love many of the alternative comics that are like journalistic stories. Documentary comics, a mix of reportage and fiction. Those are just great.
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There was no model how to make a documentary production company work. I figured it out as I went along.
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No one has a green light when they start a documentary – not ever.
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Even a fiction film is hard to end. You can going on shooting and editing a documentary forever.
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Any nature documentary or TV show will always make you start thinking differently about what surrounds us and how to take care of it.
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The reason I call myself a documentary photographer is the idea of how photographs contain and participate in history.
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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.
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I was very impressed with Davis Guggenheim’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth.’ He’s inspired me as one of the newer, cutting-edge documentary filmmakers. I see those films, and I’m just instinctively drawn to them.
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Documentary is reality. It shows the truth.
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I would encourage people that, if you are waiting for the end of ‘The Office,’ to re-tune in right away. It is the beginning of the end, where we start to break down what’s going on with this documentary and see behind the scenes with who is involved.
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In documentary films, the most difficult thing to achieve is to make something complex appear simple.
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For a documentary filmmaker, I do very well.
