Documentary Quotes

I'm Ready to Die without a Reasonable Doubt
Smoke Chronic and hit it Doggystyle before I go out.
Until they sign my Death Certificate, All Eyez on Me
I'm still at it, Illmatic, and that's The Documentary. ~ Jayceon Terrell Taylor

But one of the amazing things about documentary is that you can remake it every time you make one. There is no rule about how a documentary film has to be made. ~ Errol Morris

Spitz and Michael Wadleigh's documentary film Woodstock ~ Andrew Gentes

I don't really believe that documentary is objective reality and fiction is all illusion. ~ Mike Mills

Most people see a documentary about the meat industry and then they become a vegetarian for a week. ~ Jason Reitman

'Under the Skin' is handsome, in a dour way, but inert - a cunning experiment that died in the shooting or on the editing table. You'll want to get the DVD, though, and not just for its study of Scarlett. Odds are that the Making-Of documentary will be far stranger and more fascinating than the movie that was made. ~ Richard Corliss

I'd love to direct commercials on Caribbean beacheswith luscious women rubbing on suntan lotion, but all I get arethese documentary-type things. ~ Michael Apted

Why movie and dance critics are taking 'The Company' seriously, I can't imagine. Are they impressed by Altman's reputation and naive sincerity? By the fluid semi-documentary approach? ~ Robert Gottlieb

And shooting things in a documentary style was a good way to create tension and energy without money. ~ Michael Patrick Jann

Why did you come to the United States? Perhaps no one knows the real answer. I know that migrants, when they are still on their way here, learn the Immigrant's Prayer. A friend who had been aboard La Bestia for a few days, working on a documentary, read it to me once. I didn't learn the entire thing, but I remember these lines: 'Partir es morir un poco / Llegar nunca es llegar' - 'To leave is to die a little / To arrive is never to arrive. ~ Valeria Luiselli

I don't know that there were any rules for documentary photography. As a matter of fact, I don't think the term was even very precise. So as far as I'm concerned, the kind of photography I did in the FSA was the kind of photography I still do today, because it is based on passionate concern for the human condition. That is the basis of all the work that I do. ~ Jack Delano

Depression is a real demon in the woods for a lot of creative people, you know? It's part of what the documentary is trying to be about for me, finding balance, where the beauty that is attainable in the creative arts can be matched with the scratchy roughness of regular life. ~ Ethan Hawke

The documentary we are working on is about my mother, Bev Umehara, for whom our film company, Bev's Girl Films, is named after. It is a passion project that I have wanted to make since her unexpected passing in 1999. The film is about my mother's calling which came late in life, at 47, when she made the sudden transformation from a humble hardworking secretary and mother of four, into a labor activist, a respected union leader, and a role model for rank-and-file workers, women of color, and for all Asian Pacific Americans. ~ Garth Kravits

I remember when I took Quentin Tarantino with me to a very private screening of the documentary 'Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,' which shows some of the legal irregularities of his case. I was involved by the film, and it was an amazing experience to see people weep at the end of it. ~ Harvey Weinstein

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

Documentaries - my God, there is so much going on in our country and in the world today that every time you open the newspaper or turn on the radio or watch the news on TV there is another documentary subject. We're getting the headlines for a second, shaped by corporate delivery most of the time, but what's really the story there? ~ Jonathan Demme

I've had frustrated storytelling juices that have been lying dormant for a long time, and I guess the documentary was a way of me telling a story that I felt most qualified to tell. And I loved it, and I'd love to do something else someday, probably more narrative-based. But I'm in no rush. ~ Eric Bana

As an actor, your text is your bible, so you're not making a documentary, but you still have to follow the choices made by your writer. ~ Natalie Dormer

Immigration is not an issue that I read about in the newspaper or watch a documentary on PBS or CNN. It's an issues I've lived around my whole life. My family are immigrants. My wife's family are immigrants. All of my neighbors are immigrants. ~ Marco Rubio

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.' ~ Errol Morris

When I started my filmmaking journey 17 years ago, I honestly didn't know what a documentary film was. ~ Tony Kaye

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

Thhe essence of documentary filmmaking is how you manipulate the material to create an emotional impact, as opposed to just delivering information. ~ Richard Ray Perez

I left acting for a couple of years to found my company, Wayfarer, and the first project I did was this documentary series I created called 'My Last Days' to remind us that our time is limited and to inspire us to do more and to be the best selves that we can be. ~ Justin Baldoni

But if anyone
so much as threatened them because of what Kaia
had once done, she would turn the Slumber Party
Massacre into Blood, Bath and Beyond, a
documentary by Kaia Skyhawk. ~ Gena Showalter

I would love to have been a documentary filmmaker; I just didn't have the resources to do that. ~ Anna Deavere Smith

I suppose a part of me wished when I put my key in the door, it would magically open into a different apartment, a different life, a place so bright with joy and excitement that I'd be temporarily blinded when I first saw it. I pictured what a documentary film crew would capture in my face as I glimpsed this whole new world before me, like in those home improvement shows Reva liked to watch when she came over. First, I'd cringe with surprise. But then, once my eyes adjusted to the light, they'd grow wide and glisten with awe. I'd drop the keys and the coffee and wander in, spinning around with my jaw hanging open, shocked at the transformation of my dim, gray apartment into a paradise of realized dreams. But what would it look like exactly? I had no idea. When I tried to imagine this new place, all I could come up with was a cheesy mural of a rainbow, a man in a white bunny costume, a set of dentures in a glass, a huge slice of watermelon on a yellow plate - an odd prediction, maybe, of when I'm ninety-five and losing my mind in an assisted-living facility where they treat the elderly residents like retarded children. I should be so lucky, I thought. I opened the door to my apartment, and, of course, nothing had changed. ~ Ottessa Moshfegh

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

If my courage was a man, I imagined that he would be big, scarred, and wear a kilt. I'd seen a documentary once ~ Elizabeth A. Reeves

I spent my childhood and youth on the outskirts of the Alps, in a region that was largely spared the immediate effects of the so-called hostilities. At the end of the war I was just one year old, so I can hardly have any impressions of that period of destruction based on personal experience. Yet to this day, when I see photographs or documentary films dating from the war I feel as if I were its child, so to speak, as if those horrors I did not experience cast a shadow over me ... I see pictures merging before my mind's eye - paths through the fields, river meadows, and mountain pastures mingling with images of destruction - and oddly enough, it is the latter, not the now entirely unreal idylls of my early childhood, that make me feel rather as if I were coming home ... ~ W.G. Sebald

Whenever I'm making a feature film, I wish I were filming a documentary, because making feature films is so stressful. It happens every time. ~ Fatih Akin

I'm a curious guy. I can't turn away from an investigative story, when it comes to the forensic analysis. I've done 33 dives, to the titanic wreck site. I've spent over 50 hours piloting robotic vehicles at that wreck trying to piece together what happened during the disaster. How the ship broke up, comparing the historical record with the forensic record. Documentaries are kind of my new life. I love documentary filmmaking. ~ James Cameron

We tried to present the ordinary in an extraordinary manner. But that's the paradox because the only thing extraordinary about it was that it was so ordinary. Nobody had ever done it before, deliberately. Now it's called documentary, which I suppose is all right ... We just took pictures that cried out to be taken. ~ Ben Shahn

Miramax didn't introduce the actors at any of the screenings. That's why a lot of people thought 'Kids' was a documentary. I still meet people who think it was real. ~ Leo Fitzpatrick

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

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

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. ~ Daniel Bruhl

I'll check on you when I get home. I love you, baby. (Kiefer)
I love you too, Daddy. (Kiara)
What the hell was that action? (Syn)
I think it's something called 'paternal concern.' (Nykyrian)
What…? You sure? I thought that crap was a myth. (Syn)
No, really. I watched it once in a documentary. It was fascinating. Believe it or not, there are people out there who actually have feelings for their progeny. (Nykyrian)
Get the fuck out. No way. You're screwing with my head again, aren't you? (Syn)
No, I swear. You just saw it with your own eyes. I did not make that shit up. (Nykyrian)
Yeah but it's really messing with my concept of the natural order of the universe. Paternal love? What's next? Limb regrowth? Genetic splicing reversals? (Syn) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

I have a great career, and no matter what I am doing, a big blockbuster movie ... or my small documentary, David Letterman will call and say I would like you to sit on my couch. ~ Rosie Perez

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

Films are always a fiction, not documentary. Even a documentary is a kind of fiction. ~ Philip Seymour Hoffman

As a last resort, with the orange nearing my face and my back pressing hard against the sharp edge of my broadcast table, I grabbed my phone to tell Carlos that if I didn't make it home tonight, it wasn't because I didn't love him, or didn't want to watch a documentary on special scientific graphs, or was too obsessed with my job to relax and enjoy a good meal and some television. It was only because I was zapped out of existence by a lunatic Non-John Peters. And that, in fact, I do love Carlos, and I would want nothing more than to watch a documentary on scientific graphs over some homemade linguini, or go out to eat again, or whatever.

But then, as I grabbed my phone, I thought: That's way too long to write for a text. So I just hit John Peters upside the head with it... ~ Joseph Fink

Among other things, drag queens are living testimony to the way women used to want to be, the way some people still want them to be, and the way some women still actually want to be. Drags are ambulatory archives of ideal moviestar womanhood. They perform a documentary service, usually consecrating their lives to keeping the glittering alternative alive and available for (not-too-close) inspection. ~ Andy Warhol

In documentary, which is the only thing I'm really very familiar with, women are very easily relegated into a producer role. ~ Liz W. Garcia

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

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

I want to do a documentary about strippers, 'cause it's a moneymaker. ~ Method Man

Two remarkable men
one young, one old
fuel each other's spirits in the beautiful documentary Keep On Keepin' On. ~ Leonard Maltin

You see the profound effect literature can have on life? Who says it's all a waste of time? If only I could produce one book that left someone with that kind of ferocious grievance. If you have read one of my books, you probably feel cheated out of however much money it might have cost you, and you'll certainly begrudge the time you wasted on it. But even at my most bullish and self-aggrandizing, I can't quite make myself believe that I've actually wrecked someone's life. Any documentary evidence to the contrary will be gratefully received. ~ Nick Hornby

It is clear from both documentary and archaeological sources that conspicuous display and consumption of wealth was fundamental for an elite male to maintain power and position in society. ~ Sally Crawford

A flat screen television lowered into view. It showed an animated Islamic documentary that focused mostly on the importance of wearing the proper attire. The final prophet was quoted often, yet absent from the feature.
"If this Mohammed guy is so great, why wouldn't they put him in the cartoon?" Kira wondered. ~ Magnus Wilton

I certainly don't believe you documentary filmmakers. Like me, you are involved in making fiction, and your fiction is just as well organized and just as well predicated, but the big difference between me and you is that I'm honest and you're dishonest. I know I'm telling you lies. ~ Peter Greenaway

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

Did you ever notice? Darkness seems to make people speak in short sentences.
"YES," she said. "And when the lights come on, we open up and ramble and say absolutely nothing. But in bed in the dark we're urged on by the monkey waiting in our sleep."
"What monkey?"
"We become documentary. We become newsreels telling what we think is the truth. Our listener is really no more than a fragment of the dark. The true audience is darkness itself. We unwrap our lives to it, trying to appease the monkey. ~ Don Dellillo

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

I saw a documentary on how ships are kept together. Riveting! ~ Stewart Francis

T. S. Eliot and Jean-Paul Sartre, dissimilar enough as thinkers, both tend to undervalue prose and to deny it any imaginative function. Poetry is the creation of linguistic quasi-things; prose is for explanation and exposition, it is essentially didactic, documentary, informative. Prose is ideally transparent; it is only faute de mieux written in words. The influential modern stylist is Hemingway. It would be almost inconceivable now to write like Landor. Most modern English novels indeed are not written. One feels they could slip into some other medium without much loss. It takes a foreigner like Nabokov or an Irishman like Beckett to animate prose language into an imaginative stuff in its own right. ~ Iris Murdoch

I was driven to give the best possible performance I could based on the material that was given to me and that material was documentary footage of the President speaking to people. ~ Timothy Bottoms

In fiction film, there are so many trappings - money, glory, champagne and supermodels - that attract the wolves. But in documentary film, there's none of that, so the wolves stay away. The only people who make docs are people who are curious about other people and just like making documentaries. ~ Marshall Curry

You can start a documentary with just a camera, as opposed to a fiction film where you need actors, a crew, a script, a lot more start-up resources. It may be self-perpetuating. ~ Thom Powers

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

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

It's supposed to be entertainment. It's not supposed to be a documentary. ~ Jeri Ryan

I am deeply honored to be making 'Life Itself,' a documentary on the life of Roger Ebert, and to have had the full cooperation and enthusiasm of Roger and his wife, Chaz. ~ Steve James

I love documentary because it's alive. ~ Josh Fox

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. ~ Bruce Jackson

As I've grown older, the simple pleasure of sitting on the couch with someone you love and watching a documentary is about as good as it gets for me. ~ Paul Wesley

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

One thing people often forget when making a documentary is that, in a sense, you still have to cast, find a star, and it has all of those built-in challenges. ~ Brian Lindstrom

I know a lot of other actors that don't like to look at other references to their characters and things. But I like it. I always look at everything, I read all the books. I read Dieter's "Escape from Laos." I watched the documentary again and again and again. I recorded it just to listen to him a lot. I just don't suffer from feeling like I'm getting caught into an imitation. I just feel like I want to steal some good stuff if it's in there. ~ Christian Bale

I was so used to documentary filming, where it's one take. You can't really say, 'Make that elephant charge again!' And you talk to the camera. With movie filming, you're talking to someone else. ~ Bindi Irwin

What would people in their old lives be saying about these girls? Would they be called missing? Would some documentary program on the ABC that nobody watched, or one of those thin newspapers nobody read, somehow connect their cases, find the thread to make them a story? The Lost Girls, they could be called. Would it be said, they 'disappeared', 'were lost'? Would it be said that they were abandoned or taken, the way people said a girl was attacked, a woman was raped, this femaleness always at the centre, as if womanhood itself were the cause of these things? As if the girls somehow, through the natural way of things, did it to themselves. They lured abduction and abandonment to themselves, they marshalled themselves into this prison where they had made their beds, and now, once more, were lying in them. ~ Charlotte Wood

I think documentary filmmaking is a braver way to make films because it's real, and you're really there. ~ Jamie Bell

Stories have a special way of putting us inside the people, inside the boots of the soldiers. You're absorbed in a way a documentary or nonfiction can't do for you. ~ Tim O'Brien

Her boys were growing up, too. William would start nursery school in January of 1987 at four and a half. The most exciting part for William was the uniform, "which he is thrilled to bits about, especially as Harry is very envious of his big brother!" The next year would find Diana and Charles in Portugal, Spain, and Germany. "It never stops and it's certainly no holiday package tour!" How true. I'd seen that for myself in Washington.
I had been thrilled to catch a television documentary on the royal couple and had said so in my letter. Diana wrote, "An awful lot of money was raised for very worthy causes so that made the intrusion much more worthwhile!" This comment exemplified the conflict Diana faced between her desire for privacy and her desire to do good. ~ Mary Robertson

You can always go back and reconstruct stuff in a documentary, but it's so much cooler when you're there as it happens. ~ Ed Cunningham

I read slave narratives, books like Bullwhip Days, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. [The Root's chairman] Henry Louis Gates has an amazing documentary called Many Rivers to Cross - really, his whole writings; he's such a wealth of knowledge. ~ Jurnee Smollett

Some of my pictures are poem-like in the sense that they are very condensed, haiku-lik. There are others that, if they were poetry, would be more like Ezra Pound. There is a lot of information in most of my pictures, but not the kind of information you see in documentary photography. There is emotional information in my photographs. ~ Sally Mann

At times doc filmmaking feels more rewarding creatively. Because you are creating something out of pure cinema - instead of narrative cinema, where you've got a script and a cast and you build from your foundation, whereas in documentary, you're building out of chaos. ~ George Hickenlooper

When you're watching a documentary, the danger is to romanticize. ~ Ridley Scott

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

The picture is not a documentary, ... It's a drama that has to be crafted. Reality is not art. You have to make choices when you're trying to make something work. And the choices we make I think are accurate. There aren't any lies in it. There are assumpt ~ Mark Rydell

Even if it's a "talking head documentary" about a social movement or something along those lines, I've always thought of editing the timing and the sense of the piece for the theatrical experience. ~ Robert Greene

Alejandro Amenabar is a different kind of director than I lot of the directors I've asked for. He really asks you to enter his dream as opposed to, you know, a guy like Sidney Lumet or something is going to ask you to create a character almost like a documentary. He wants you to make the people really real and he's going to capture it like a documentarian. ~ Ethan Hawke

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

The ancient priests had said, "Thus far and no farther. We set the limits to thought." The Greeks said, "All things are to be examined and called into question. There are no limits set to thought." It is an extraordinary fact that by the time we have actual, documentary knowledge of the Greeks there is not a trace to be found of that domination over the mind by the priests which played such a decisive part in the ancient world. The priest plays no real part in either the history or the literature of Greece. ~ Edith Hamilton

Documentary films are created in an inverted funnel of declining possibility. ~ Bruce Jackson

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

In documentary we deal with the actual, and in one sense with the real. But the really real, if I may use that phrase, is something deeper than that. The only reality which counts in the end is the interpretation which is profound ~ John Grierson

Atlantis was one name for an ancient civilization that went through a terrible catastrophe and that we now have the opportunity to not repeat the same mistakes. We have the opportunity to use our technology responsibly and to steward the earth rather than steer it into its own destruction. ~ David Wilcock

Many people in this world do jobs that are dangerous and where their life is at risk and they feel that there is some kind of value to their job I guess that's how I feel about what I do. There is a social function to documentary photography that is very important and it requires people to take risks. ~ James Nachtwey

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

As historians, our training and discipline is based on documentary evidence,. ~ David Dixon

My instinct was that it was Sidney's childhood in the Bahamas that gave him the fearlessness to fight racism. So this documentary was a kind of rounding out of what had begun in that scene in In the Heat of the Night. ~ Lee Grant

Of course, the main reason is the change of law in the way Germany has brought Nazi war criminals to trial. The previous rules was that you'd have to have tangible evidence, and documentary evidence was not sufficient. ~ Marvin Hier

I did documentary film for a long time, and I spent a lot of time behind the camera, fervently wishing that the reality I was filming would conform to my narrative propriety. But you can't control it. ~ Ruth Ozeki

I tried [being a mogul]. It bores me. I don't really want to produce other people's movies. Because they're either grown-up filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh or Kathryn Bigelow that didn't really need me - and I've produced both of them. It's fun to sit around with them and be collegial, but they don't need me. They can make the film without me. I make my own stuff. There are tons and tons of other things I'm interested in that have nothing to do with movies or are documentary projects. ~ James Cameron

Even a documentary portrait of a person that tries to be very accurate is shaped by the filmmaker in so many ways. ~ Dana Spiotta

The pictures that were coming from Vietnam were showing us what was really happening on the ground level. It was in contradiction to what our political and military leaders were telling us. They were straight forward documentary images. A powerful indictment of the war, of how cruel and unjust it was. When I finally decided what to do with my life, it was to follow in that tradition. ~ James Nachtwey

The great documentary subjects find you, you don't really search for them. ~ Jeremy Coon