Fracked Documentary Quotes

To make a documentary is one thing, to make a feature film is quite another. ~ Dennis Hopper

Fear is not a word in my football documentary. ~ Jose Mourinho

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

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

Narrative nonfiction is an act of conception and construction; it is formation of a personal legend from the mist of memory using mental hydraulics plied with the tools of logic, structure, design, and imagination. An engaged mind possesses a documentary sensibility that fabricates a memoirist identity, which alliance mollifies their bleak interior critic. A conscientious mind hews a residue of meaning from the verisimilitude of a person's metafictional baggage. A basic impulse of all free people is to speak to an appreciative audience. Writing the story of our life constitutes asserting the universal human right to declare and define who we are. When we write our story, we become a stakeholder of our place in the world, we affirm the right to shape our future, and avow the verity to heal our torn souls. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Society? Can we trust us? Doubt it. We're probably not even real, as was revealed in the popular documentary The Matrix. That bloke next door? Made of pixels. Your co-workers? Pixels. You? One pixel. One measly pixel. You haven't even got shoes, for Christ's sake. ~ Charlie Brooker

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

Celebrate your victories and mark your defeats. Ultimately documentary filmmaking is not a job, it's a calling. ~ Pamela Yates

I became a documentary filmmaker because I wanted to make socially conscious films. I never studied filmmaking - everything I have learned has been on the field. ~ Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy

'Jurassic Park' has a lot of science in it - and a lot of it is wrong - but if it was all accurate, it would be a documentary. ~ Jack Horner

If I wanted to make something that actually made a difference roughly in this industry, I would make a documentary. That would be the closest I could come to actually try and make a difference. ~ Neill Blomkamp

It's said that if two documentary filmmakers meet they talk about the world, if two fiction filmmakers meet they talk about the million that they don't have to make their film. ~ Pirjo Honkasalo

I'd like to leave you with a bit of wisdom I picked up from a documentary I saw this weekend: Mad Max: Fury Road. All you young people really need to succeed in the future is a reliable source of fuel and a fanatical cadre of psychopathic motorcycle killers. ~ Stephen Colbert

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

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

If you're a great documentary filmmaker, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're a great narrative filmmaker. There are fantastic documentary filmmakers that can't direct actors. You don't have to do that in a documentary, if it's a real documentary. ~ Alexander Skarsgard

She'd seen a documentary once, on cult leaders, and the traits that made them so effective. One of the most important features was a commanding presence. Too many people thought that meant being loud, but in truth, it meant someone who didn't need to be loud. Someone who could command an audience without ever raising their voice. ~ Victoria Schwab

Above all, documentary must reflect the problems and realities of the present. It cannot regret the past; it is dangerous to prophesy the future. It can, and does, draw on the past in its use of existing heritages but it only does so to give point to a modern argument. In no sense is documentary a historical reconstruction and attempts to make it so are destined to failure. Rather it is contemporary fact and event expressed in relation to human associations. ~ Paul Rotha

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

This is indeed not only relevant to Documentary but is evident is most type of film making. The film often mirrors the experience, understanding and politics of the director. ~ Ben Edwards

People may assume 'The Act of Killing' is a historical documentary about what happened in 1965. But our purpose was to expose a present-day regime of fear for what it is. ~ Joshua Oppenheimer

A local director had teamed up with ESPN to tell a story about the Baltimore Colts Marching Band, and the film came out in October of 2009. The 30 for 30 documentary entitled The Band That Wouldn't Die was about how the band stayed in existence for 12 years after the team's painful midnight exodus to Indianapolis and how they eventually became the Marching Ravens. ~ Ted Patterson

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

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

I personally can watch an eight-hour documentary on Woody Allen because I'm fascinated by him. But, an audience can't really sit through more than two and a half hours on any movie. It doesn't matter if Marlon Brando came back from the dead. It's just impossible. ~ Brett Ratner

I'm myself - knowing I'm doing a documentary and speaking with the people, telling them I have a bed, that I can eat every day, but I would like to speak to you. And they really gave me wonderful answers. We got along very well without trying to make me look like I'm what I'm not. ~ Agnes Varda

I never intended to be a documentary filmmaker. I think I became a documentary filmmaker because I had trouble writing, and I had trouble finishing things. ~ Errol Morris

In documentary filmmaking, there's a tradition of telling stories about victims. We often do that from a very patronizing place, but mostly we do it from a very selfish place, to reassure ourselves that our lives are in sympathy and solidarity with the victims. ~ Joshua Oppenheimer

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

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

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

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

When I was at graduate school in London, I began working at NBC News, which had a thriving documentary unit. ~ Leslie Cockburn

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

John was one of Australia's award-winning documentary filmmakers. He and Steve had met in the late 1980s, when Steve would help John shoot commercials that required a zoo animal like a lizard or a turtle. But their friendship did not really take off until 1990, when an Australian beer company hired John to film a tricky shot involving a crocodile.
He called Steve. "They want a bloke to toss a coldie to another bloke, but a croc comes out of the water and snatches at it. The guy grabs the beer right in front of the croc's jaws. You think that's doable?"
"Sure, mate, no problem at all," Steve said with his usual confidence. "Only one thing, it has to be my hand in front of the croc. ~ Terri Irwin

I take care to only teach courses about fiction film. I believe that this balances and broadens my documentary work. ~ Arnon Goldfinger

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

Photography is not documentary, but intuition, a poetic experience. ~ Henri Cartier-Bresson

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

A good print is really essential. I want to take strong documentary photographs that are as good technically as any of the best technical photographs, and as creative as any of the best fine-art photographs. [ ... ] I don't want to just be a photo essayist; I'm more interested in single images ... ones that I feel are good enough to stand on their own. ~ Mary Ellen Mark

Witnessing is the essence of being a documentary filmmaker. Capturing moments in time; never knowing how history will judge them. ~ Pamela Yates

My friends adore 'TOWIE' - the TV documentary series, 'The Only Way is Essex.' They like it, I'm afraid, for the most unworthy of reasons: class mockery. They tune in to wonder in a 'can you believe those people?' way at the natives of Brentwood and Buckhurst Hill. ~ Peter York

There's a great documentary on Tupac called 'Resurrection' about the last few years of Tupac's life and how he transformed. And, ironically, how this East Coast rapper became this West Coast icon, back when all that Death Row/Sean Combs stuff was going on. ~ Marco Rubio

I'm sometimes called a 'documentary photographer' but ... a man operating under that definition could take a sly pleasure in the disguise. Very often I'm doing one thing when I'm thought to be doing another. ~ Walker Evans

I read "Milk" and immediately I was very emotional after reading it and then I saw the documentary - the one that Rob Epstein did - and I said that's it. I saw it with my daughter and that was it. This thing is a different thing. It's like I've been offered these kind of superhero movies or "Terminator" or whatever those movies are and I just go ahh. ~ Josh Brolin

The thing about documentary is that you don't really choose your subjects: they come and grab you out of your bed. ~ Beeban Kidron

I just watched this documentary on the mating habits of whiptail lizards and trust me, if those things can make it happen, you can too, my friend. ~ Robin Bielman