Words matter. These are the best D. A. Pennebaker Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
Animals are companions on this planet, not necessarily our feedbags.
I heard the new film, ‘Tangerine,’ was filmed entirely on iPhones. No cameras were involved!
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.
Well, it is curious what lasts and what doesn’t. Publishing empires and whatnot would pay anything to figure it out. But they can’t figure it out.
I wanted James Carville to never die. I wanted Dylan, the poet, to not die. I wanted to put these people in a place where they would be inviolate. It wasn’t enough to have a still life of them. I wanted to surround them with the lives they led.
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.
Two of my sons are themselves filmmakers, and we can’t afford them nor they us. They work in the real world and earn money and are pretty good at it.
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.’
Nobody would let us do ‘Crisis’ again.
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.
A film is made in somebody’s head – out of their determination to do it at all.
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?
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.
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.
