Top 188 Documentaries Quotes

I am a little wary of entering another situation where I would just be another director for hire and I’ve been doing this in one form or another since I was twenty-two doing documentaries for PBS and HBO.

When I took a couple of years to do the documentaries after I left ‘American Morning’ – what was I gone for, five years? – I didn’t feel that I was floating under the radar.

Well, I’ve been in several films including documentaries, but the big blockbuster, I was hired as advisor to the actors, I was trying to make Jesuits out of them.

From making documentaries all these years, it doesn’t feel right to lead someone. In narratives, I’m always trying to shoot as though it’s really happening, and I trust my actors are going to make decisions that I’m going to be following. I want to follow them.

I love those documentaries where everyone is fabulous and always perfect.

When I was a teenager, I thought maybe I’ll be a filmmaker, making film documentaries. My dream when I was a girl was I would be hired by ‘National Geographic’ or work with David Attenborough, but it didn’t happen. I became a model.

I really like ‘The Three Kings’ DVD. I love that movie and all the extra footage and documentaries.

I love documentaries. It’s actually my favorite medium of film.

When I go to the DVD shop, I mostly buy documentaries because you learn a lot from documentaries.

I love these sort of documentaries, which you might turn on late on a Saturday night – like, say, ‘The Alma Cogan Story.’ But they are ripe for spoofing, because the presenters are always so serious and anxious to make themselves look like rather attractive and interesting people.

So I do tend to do documentaries where I can move in and out of them.

Remember that the NFL was cultivated into prominence by Pete Rozelle, a pro-war conservative. In the 1960s, Rozelle hired a World War II veteran-turned-filmmaker, Ed Sabol, to produce highlights, commercials and documentaries that marketed the sport as patriotic and militaristic.

I love to watch documentaries on The History Channel and TLC.

I don’t watch a lot of TV, but I watch cartoons. And documentaries.

I never say I make documentaries. I say I make television.

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.

I watch ‘Al Jazeera.’ They have news that you can’t find anywhere else. They do great documentaries, too.

After college, I did a bunch of different jobs – taught English in Mexico, worked in public radio, worked for a web design company – but there was something about documentaries that really attracted me.

I was born 20 years after World War II had ended, and people of my generation mostly thought of it as a terrible period portrayed in documentaries you’d seen, flickering, in black and white.

In my little imperfect way, what I’m trying to do is understand the world. As a filmmaker, you realize as you get older that each film is part of a dialogue you’re having with yourself. That started when I was working in documentaries. And in a way, I’ve never deviated from it.

When you come to documentaries, the stakes are too low for it to be cutthroat. You’re all doing it for the right reasons.

I discovered the 7th art at home when I was kid, through Charlie Chaplin’s movies and those of my father who shot documentaries. He was my biggest influence. So I took his camera and started shooting.

I’ve always done live art history lectures and small documentaries in the past in Australia, on Australian art and art galleries, so I’ve already done a lot of that.

Most of my films have been documentaries, but I’m also very interested in narrative filmmaking.

I’ve always been a fiction filmmaker and I’ve been heading in the direction of fiction filmmaking, doing documentaries along the way.

I think that, as a filmmaker, you’re always making the same film, regardless of how many different stories you tell. This is the case for me, whether I’m making documentaries or fiction films.

I make a rod for my own back because people see my novels as quasi documentaries. But it is never history that’s the main event of my books. It’s my characters.

When I left ‘American Morning’ in 2007, I’d focused on doing documentaries. But I thought ‘Starting Point’ was a great opportunity to be involved in the zeitgeist.

I love documentaries. My problem is when the filmmaker becomes the star.

I don’t tend to watch TV. I’m like a Netflix junkie. I watch a lot of documentaries and movies on Netflix. I like ‘Downton Abbey.’

We lived a lovely, middle-class, suburban life in Philadelphia. And I really thought that the TV programs of the ’50s, like ‘Father Knows Best’ and ‘The Adventures Of Ozzie And Harriet’ Nelson were documentaries filmed with hidden cameras in our neighborhood.

I love devastating movies, documentaries and hummingbirds (yes, in that order).

I had the most incredible English and literature teachers in school, and it really influenced my love of storytelling. It’s what made me excited to study journalism in college. I love editorials and documentaries. All of that came from being given the opportunity to lose myself in good writing when I was a kid.

I’m not one of those people who sees documentaries as a stepping stone to doing fiction. I love documentaries and watch tons of documentaries. But, I like fiction films a lot, too.

When I do documentaries, my best information ends up on the cutting-room floor. People have trouble dealing with sexual honesty.

People in general have a preconceived idea of what prison is, from seeing documentaries or whatever.

In some ways, making documentaries is like being a journalist. You interview people and then use the bits you want to use as opposed to the bits they want you to use.

I would make documentaries if it was a worthy cause. I have a lot of respect for people who put themselves in harm’s way to make people see that something needs to be done.

There are documentaries that will just save your life and be the conduit to the art form you started out loving.

The luxury that I have is I’m not career-minded, I just live from one film to the next. For a time, I was making documentaries, and all my documentaries were winning awards and stuff, and then I lost interest in documentaries.

When I’m actually making a film and trying to find solutions, I like to watch making-of documentaries about huge films, like ‘Gladiator.’ That couldn’t be more apart from what I’m doing, but you see Ridley Scott facing huge problems and fixing them.

Providing free access to research papers on websites like Sci-Hub breaks so-called copyright law that was made to taboo free distribution of information on the Internet. That includes music, movies, documentaries, books, and research articles. Not everyone agrees that copyright law should exist in the first place.

I had seen some films made about the underground music world in Tehran, and most of them were short documentaries about 30 or 40 minutes long. And I always wondered why they weren’t publicized more. Really, their only flaw was they were short documentaries.

I was a TV producer at a noncommercial station, and we were producing some good documentaries – on Head Start, on poverty. But I was struck by the children, and the damage that poverty was doing to them. I didn’t think filming them was helping much, so I wondered how we could use TV for them, to teach them.

I’ve always worked very efficiently on small budgets, both in documentaries and in features.

I don’t like docudramas. Documentaries should not go together with fiction, or half-fiction or quarter-fiction. The two should not go together. They cannot mix.

Virtual reality is the ‘ultimate empathy machine.’ These experiences are more than documentaries. They’re opportunities to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.

There’s a really geeky YouTube channel which I love. It’s a guy called Oliver Harper. He makes documentaries about films. He’s a real movie buff – there’s loads of trivia and detail.

My background is sociology. Combined with my graphic approach, if I could do some film projects, I think I’d be very good at making documentaries eventually, but people don’t think of me for that, of course. But dialogue is something I know I can be good at.

I’ve always wanted to make Australian art interesting. To get a different audience watching art documentaries would be great.

Stories, as we’re taught in journalism school early on, are told through people. Those stories make our documentaries powerful. You can explore someone’s culture, you can explore their experience, you can explore an issue through human beings who are going through it.

Like many environmental documentaries, ‘Planet of Humans’ endorses debunked Malthusian ideas that the world is running out of energy.

Documentary films have always been my passion, I have done documentaries.

I feel like a lot of funders of documentaries today want to fund films that have a social message that is going to yield results.