D. A. Pennebaker Quotes

I think the films we see, the Hollywood films, which are basically entertainment, will still be there, but they'll be in a totally different category. People won't take them seriously. They'll kind of end up the way comic books have. A side view of things.

People don't really want reality. They want theater, and that's different.

I had maybe heard 'The Times Are A-Changing' on the radio, but I had no idea who Dylan was. No idea.

One of the things we found out as we filmed with people who dealt with chimps, and with all animals, and it's really incredible, is their levels of intelligence that we don't recognize right away.

After love, the most sacred gift you can give is your labor.

Theater is where you go to find out something new that you don't know. It goes through somebody's brain and comes out in a comprehensible way that is beautiful, that's really interesting.

If you're setting up lights and tripods, and you've got three assistants running around, people will want to get you out as fast as they can. But if you go the opposite way, if you make the camera the least important thing in the room, then it's different.

A film is made in somebody's head - out of their determination to do it at all.

To make theater out of real life, you need to catch dialogue when it happens.

I think of all my movies as home movies! It's just that some are more expensive than others.

Filming is a witnessing process. You don't try to control it, even though sometimes you wish you could because it can go really, really wrong for you.

When I did 'Don't Look Back,' I no longer had Time-Life looking over my shoulder, so I could kind of do it as I wanted, and it was like I was really correcting 'Jane.'

Before the camera, you only had secondhand takes - someone had to tell you what they saw or draw a picture of it or sing a song. Because of the camera, sometimes to our horror, we now know everything that happens in the world - things that before we were sheltered from.

I think nowadays people are so used taking the camera to the family picnic - so people are less surprised by films made of them, like home movies.

Albert Grossman called my office and spoke with my partner Richard Leacock and asked if we'd be interested in making a film with his client, Bob Dylan.

I didn't know Jack Kennedy that well, but Bobby was a hero to me.

It was interesting to shoot history as it happens, without anyone demanding a huge story.

The very first thing I ever did, I was doing some work for the French Cultural Center. They wanted a little recording set up. And I got wire. A wire recorder. The wire came off spools, and to cut and edit, you tied it together in little square knots. Can you imagine?

Somebody like Bowie was so interesting because when you got him off stage, he was like a businessman. But on stage, he was just dazzling. It was like watching butterflies grow.

We're actually thinking about distributing 'Moon Over Broadway' on-line. It's tempting, because when you go to a major studio, it's sort of like a farm, you know? They make all the money, since it's kind of a buyer's market.

Animals are companions on this planet, not necessarily our feedbags.

I would never say no to anything that sounded interesting! The thing I like about making films is that the adventure just begins when you pick up the camera.

If you're filming somebody doing something they really want to do, you're probably not very high on their list of problems to deal with. You see James Carville on the phone - he's like that whether you have a camera or not. He isn't doing it just for you, and that's hard to explain.

I think, in general, independents don't have a lot of access to really good scriptwriters or actors or actresses, so they're very limited in what they can do.