I feel that cinema can’t change society or bring a revolution. I’m also not sure of cinema as a medium of education. Documentaries can be educative, not feature films.
Documentaries can embrace contradictions in a way that journalism can’t.
Mostly, what I watch are reality shows and documentaries.
The message films that try to be message films always fail. Likewise with documentaries. The documentaries that work best are the ones that eschew a simple message for an odd angle. I found that one of the most spectacular films about the Middle East was ‘Waltz With Bashir,’ or ‘The Gatekeepers,’ or ‘5 Broken Cameras.’
My dad had a dream of his kids reaching the NFL. My older brother was actually the first to make it. His career didn’t really last too long, but he always had more passion for documentaries.
We draw inspiration directly and indirectly from all sorts of things, like movies, documentaries, TV dramas, novels, non-fiction books, animation, science and nature shows, and our own life experiences.
My roots are documentaries.
I am really into crime documentaries.
Documentaries are inherently instinctual; you’re constantly moment to moment, determining what the best place for the camera is to tell the story, usually in service of natural lighting.
I auditioned for ‘Loving’ two years before we started shooting, so in the hopes that I would be playing Mildred, I watched it again. Also it’s one of the best documentaries I’ve seen. I found this couple interminably fascinating; even if I didn’t get the part, I just wanted to know more about them and their story.
I think all documentaries leave out areas of people’s lives. Which is good. There are areas that need not be explored.
We struck an unusual deal. I’ll get to leave CNN with my catalog and documentaries. We were able to create a brand at CNN – ‘Black in America’ – that I now own. I can take that brand and extend it in any way I want.
It was through watching documentaries on the BBC in the late 1980s that I first became interested in art and history.
I’m cooking and taking the lockdown as an experience in cooking, trying different things. Apart from that it has been listeniing to music and watching documentaries.
I always thought that life is full of stories and characters that feel like literary stories and characters. So when I started making documentaries, they weren’t humble empirical things, just following people around. I was always trying to impose a story.
Documentaries for me always felt kind of limiting. I wanted to go bigger. And I also love actors, and I love performance. So feature filmmaking was always the intent.
A publisher friend of mine suggested that I write a book about my grandfather, who had just died. I had nothing else to fill my empty days with, so I started work on this book. While researching it – watching lots of movies, talking to moviemakers – I became interested in movies and started making documentaries.
One of the reasons to do documentaries is that. There’s more sense of creating something, more sense of my own soul in the documentaries than in movies, because I don’t write the movies I do.
I’ve always thought that a Saturday morning at home should be education time. I mean fun education, for example learning to cook a dish or reading about something new. So I put on documentaries, get a bunch of magazines and newspapers and use the morning to make myself better.
You should bear in mind that almost all my documentaries are feature films in disguise.
When you make documentaries or short films, you have to have eyes and ears in the back of your head and on the sides and all around you. I like that in my films.
I think making a documentary gets you out and about more, with people. With stand-up, you’re talking at people. With documentaries you’re talking with people, and you’re listening a lot more.
I always thought of documentaries as films through which you find your voice as a narrator.
The documentaries I made were never normal documentaries. They were about subjects I was obsessed with, and I suppose I thought I could sculpt them. What I think I do with my fiction is the same.
When I have had a long day at work, I want something to watch that is funny, lighthearted and easy to get into, and reality is that. I’m not really into serious programmes or documentaries.
Documentaries are a form of journalism.
As with the Trojans or the Tudors, there are many evergreen stories that we come back to again and again. I think history documentaries are as much about the present as they are the past.
I only ever wanted to do history, and make documentaries.
I’m a huge ‘Game of Thrones’ fan. I’m really into the ‘Colbert Report’ and ‘Last Week Tonight.’ And I really like to get on Netflix and watch, like, TV documentaries about: What happened to the mastodon? Or who was Jack the Ripper?
There’s a lot of documentaries out in the world; it sometimes seems as if there’s no topic left!
People are beginning to realize that it’s important that we see animals in a natural state – but through film, through video, through documentaries, at wildlife preserves, and through other humanely protected ways, which don’t involve… performing for us.
2018 has been such a fantastic year for me: working on some hard-hitting documentaries, as well as ‘Strictly,’ has been a real treat.
I’ve always loved to paint – I was studying to do an art degree when I was approached to become a model – and I’ve being doing some design work as well. I also love just having a quiet time, sitting in my little library at home in Brooklyn and reading or watching documentaries or listening to music.
I coauthored my first nonfiction book by the time I was 25. I have been involved in nonfiction documentaries, newspapers, TV and internet since that time.
With documentaries, what’s beautiful about them is that you capture something unique in a shot, something that will never repeat itself.
I did documentaries for maybe 10 years before I turned to fiction films.
Brilliant documentaries are about so much more than their subject.
I try to support stories that enable us to see the difficulties in our society and the challenges we face, which is why I’ve also produced documentaries like ‘Brick City’ and ‘Serving Life.’
I’m not your expert on Africa or animals or whatever. I’m not a travel writer or maker of documentaries. I was someone who doesn’t know very much, trying to communicate.
My tastes in all things lean towards the arty and boring. I like sports documentaries about Scrabble players, bands that play quiet, unassuming music, and TV shows that win awards. In that way, I am an elitist snob.
I love going on BBC6 and BBC7 and listening to documentaries.
When I’m making documentaries, I think a lot about how fiction films play. I want them to have the pacing, the twists and the character development of fiction films.
When I make a film, I never want the film to become a vehicle of social propaganda. If I wanted to do that, I’d make documentaries.
I saw ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel.’ I liked it. I saw ‘The Fault in Our Stars,’ and I could see why young girls like it. But it dropped off like crazy in the second weekend. I liked ‘Fed Up’ – I love documentaries. I go to a lot of documentaries.
That’s why I have always admired documentaries, because they open windows that can make you understand much better where you come from, much better than fiction, I think.
I think books make you think in a different way than movies and documentaries.
Documentaries can provoke much more than narrative movies.
Television has its own award. It’s called the Emmy. It’s a good award. I like it. I have one. But you don’t see movies like ‘The King’s Speech’ win Oscars and then go to TV and qualify for Emmys. In documentaries, some networks have been able to game the system.
I’d like to make documentaries. Way-out documentaries. I’d like to do one on a tour of the U.S.
Critics can say what they like about the films, but very often, there’s a certain expectation of documentaries that they’re supposed to be like PowerPoint presentations. I see documentaries as movies. So when I see some critics writing that we could have done without the recreations altogether – well, perhaps.
At the heart of the best documentaries, there is a journey of inquiry – someone who travels out into the world, comes back with a story, and who then finds meaning in it, and intrigue; someone who tells you about something you never quite knew before, or in a way you hadn’t quite thought about.
I watched a lot of documentaries about North Korean defectors. I also practiced speaking in a North Korean accent with a teacher, and studied a lot.
I’m a big fan of documentaries. I’ve always loved them, and I’ve just never had the opportunity or the time to make a feature.
I love documentaries and TED talks.
Every time I see documentaries or infomercials about little kids with cancer, I just freak out. It affects me on the highest emotional level… Anytime I think about it, it makes me sadder than anything I can think of.
I love the idea of documentaries. I love seeing documentaries, and I love making them. Documentaries are incredibly easy to shoot. The ease with which you can hear something’s going on, somebody’s going to be somewhere: That sounds so interesting. Pick up your camera and go.
