Top 225 Documentary Quotes

I was watching the Nina Simone documentary alone in my room, and I said out loud to myself, ‘Why do we not know that this woman is beauty? She is beauty! Why did no one tell me this growing up? Why was her name not next to ‘beauty’ in the dictionary?’

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.

I want to communicate through my music. If you want to know Geri Halliwell listen to my album: it tells you more about me than a documentary ever could.

The very first film, documentary that I made, was called ‘The First Year.’ It was 11 years ago and I followed these five novice teachers. I was actually with them on their first day of school and followed them for their first year.

I think what I love about the documentary process is that you bring yourself to the documentary. And hopefully that makes you ask good questions, and hopefully that makes you reveal a little bit about yourself as well.

When you make a documentary, you have to adapt to what reality imposes upon you.

The reason I call myself a documentary photographer is the idea of how photographs contain and participate in history.

Feature filmmaking is a different kind of complication as documentary comes in the editing room.

With ‘Street Fight,’ it took an urban mayoral election and found lots of complexity in there. The same with ‘Racing Dreams.’ I wanted to show complexity within this world that most documentary people don’t know anything about.

A buddy of mine is doing a documentary on decisions, and they’re not based on a ton of logic. It’s mostly how you relate to them emotionally.

I feel like one of the things that I watched that I felt was really helpful in some way but, more than anything, is worth mentioning was this film ‘Boogie Man.’ It’s a documentary about Lee Atwater.

With everything that I’ve done with YouTube and podcasts for so many years, it’s been: you can record it, edit, and then upload that day. With the book and documentary, it’s been such a longer process.

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.

Is this film more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?

You can’t hope for a better result as a campaigner than to have the prime minister announce a major policy change within 48 hours of your documentary.

Yeah I’m telling real stories, but if you pick up a documentary on strippers, you’re going to want to see some stripping, so we definitely got that in there.

‘Monuments Men’ is not a docudrama. It’s not a documentary.

The documentary ‘Certifiably Jonathan’ has engrossing moments in it. How can it not? It’s got a great subject – the extraordinarily voluble comedian Jonathan Winters, whose constant rush of words can be like a blizzard: beautiful, maddening, exhausting, and finally beautiful again. But it’s not a great film.

In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director.

I’ll read a book. I’ll watch a documentary or a film or whatever. I’ll go to an art exhibit and just try and open myself to influence.

As far as entertainment, ‘The Right Stuff’ is a good movie. As far as a documentary of the early space days, which they purported it to be, it is not at all.

A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph.

I stay at home a lot by choice but go out a lot due to work. 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.

I like the idea of the documentary as a portrait. There’s not a chronological beginning, middle, and end structure. You build something in the editing room that’s shaped by getting to know the person and digging deeper, unpeeling the layers of them as you get to know them.

There’s a really great documentary called ‘Many Rivers,’ which documents the totality of slavery from its inception, and then it gives you a little history on how America came to prominence. It’s crazy – the first black man to actually step foot in America came as a free man, as an explorer, with the Spaniards.

I want to venture into film more, and I think that a nice way to transition into doing that would be a documentary. I think it would be interesting to find one person that really fascinated me or maybe a band and travel with them, but I don’t think I could do it like I used to do it.

People never read my books for the quality of the documentary value.

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.

I’ve often thought even ragtag gatherings of documentary filmmakers are more fun than gatherings of fiction filmmakers.

In college, I actually did some work on a documentary project talking to Vietnam vets about the images of war and how it changed. When they grew up, it was like ‘Sands of Iwo Jima’ and there was this, you know – after Vietnam, there was a whole different way of looking at war.

Feature filmmaking is a different kind of complication as documentary comes in the editing room.

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.

Post my parents’ divorce, when I was 10, my mother, Deepa Motwane, took up a job as a line producer with documentary filmmaker Shukla Das, who was a cousin of hers. When I was 17, she did a TV talk show and I helped her with research and assisted her as she was also producing that show.

I run a fast pace on my sets, man. I like the energy of the scene to be the energy on the set. I think it affects the actors, and I think it affects the crew. There’s that sensation like you’re really shooting it for real, like in a documentary.

I, for one, personally like rom-coms, silly rom-coms, but at the same time, I also want to watch a documentary or an award-winning drama.

The documentary genre, shows like ‘Making a Murderer’ and ‘The Jinx’ on HBO, there’s been a whole raft of long-form docs.

In 1993, my first documentary was about the civil war in Algeria. That was in French and in Arabic. Another short film I did was silent. What I’m trying to say is that, yes, I’m Italian, and yes, I make films with Italian money, but personally, I’ve always been invested in the broader world of film-making.

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. Then when I was around 15, I did my first movie.

A film based on my life would not be as interesting as my father. I have not lived a life as enriching as my father. I have only been observer to his life, so I think I’m the best person to make a documentary on him.

I would do a documentary about Jay-Z. Yes, I would.

On telly, there’s been a move towards entertainment – with some very high-powered, fast-moving dramas. Then we have the Internet, where we get our information but it’s all in bite-size pieces. I think the documentary, as a form, actually speaks to what’s missing.

I directed 24’s pilot. I felt we should follow the characters around as if we were a documentary crew, using available light, hand-held cameras, split screens, sound that isn’t always what it should be, to suit the reality of the premise.

The making of the documentary is an involving and collaborative process where you go deeper unlike in movies where you just borrow someone else’s script.

Documentary makers use other people’s lives as their raw material, and that is morally indefensible.

As far as the balance between being a journalist, being an artist, being a storyteller – documentary filmmakers are all three of those things. The balance between them is affected by the film itself, the topic of the film.

On Monday and Thursday, I eat fewer than 500 calories a day; then I eat like a pig for the other five days. You ‘surprise’ the body: keep it guessing. I got the idea from a BBC documentary about this Indian man who seemed about 138 years old and said his secret was severe calorie restriction.

I don’t know if I’d mastered that documentary format, but I wanted to move on from it.

When I’m not singing, I’m a lot of persons: I’m a producer. I’m a badminton player. I’m a writer. I’m a movie freak. I’m a documentary maker.

People who hate me call me a Twitter troll, which is laughable given my extensive body of work, which you can find on Amazon in the form of books like ‘Gorilla Mindset’ and my documentary on free speech, ‘Silenced.’

You see a documentary, you want to see it on Aerosmith or Jon Bon Jovi or Kiss, a band that’s been established and sold millions of records and done something notable.

I have taken advantage of my husband, to the extent that I even got HBO to do a documentary with me.

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.

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

I watched the Sandra Bland documentary and her tape itself over and over and over and over again, and just the reality of that, the fear in that.

So many good fortunes have come my way, and I’m trying to pay it forward by helping to raise money to complete ‘Bulbul: Song Of The Nightingale,’ a documentary that brings attention to the social and human injustices suffered by the Banchara tribe in India.

Stylistically, in improv, I don’t think you can have as many camera tricks; I think you’re kind of shooting more like a documentary: you don’t know where it’s going, so you have to hang back a little more.

I’ve watched ‘Senna’ – a documentary film about a Formula One driver – three or four times now. I’m not a massive Formula One fan but I watch it and think ‘God, what a waste.’

‘Generation Food’ is a collaboration between myself and author/activist Raj Patel that will tell stories about efforts around the world to try to solve the food crisis – through a documentary, a book, a website and mobile apps.

So it is that one side effect of the HD revolution has been the gratifying and edifying return of the nature documentary – films about the hugely varied forms of life that eat, sleep, stalk, mate, fight, thrive, suffer and struggle on our dear and embattled old Earth.

I eat raw vegetables. But my 30 for 30 documentary better include sit-down interviews with Ronald McDonald, Colonel Sanders and Little Debbie.

I think you can do a lot with fiction, and in some cases you can say even more in fiction than you can in straight-up documentary journalism.

I feel like there’s a lot of sympathy and camaraderie among documentary filmmakers.

My brother made a whole documentary of my life. It’s a long story.

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.

I had long been resistant to doing a documentary about my mother for personal reasons. And I thought there was no way she’d want to, but then I asked her and she said ‘yes.’

I could probably do a documentary on acting classes; I’ve taken so many.

I’d seen Jose Padilha’s ‘Elite Squad 1’ and ‘2’, and I’d seen his documentary, ‘Bus 174’.

Films are always a fiction, not documentary. Even a documentary is a kind of fiction.

Maybe if I found something I was really passionate about, which is entirely possible, I would make another documentary, but it’s not a good career choice for anybody. I don’t recommend it.

When you are cleaning, sweeping, swabbing floors and running around for the littlest of things on a shoot for an ad or a documentary, you realize how tough life is behind the camera.

It’s such a rich experience when you enter into a subject from a documentary point of view. It’s hard for fiction to compete with that.

The first time I thought about attempting a body suspension was after watching a documentary on rites-of-passage ceremonies from other cultures. I was completely intrigued by what these people put their bodies through.

‘America 24/7’ will be a landmark series in documentary photography and the watershed event of the new digital photography age.

A documentary film-maker can’t help but use poetry to tell the story. I bring truth to my fiction. These things go hand in hand.

I think you could very much make a ‘Vanity Fair’ in 2018, and I think it would probably look like a documentary.

With a free afternoon, I’d probably put on a onesie, find something like a really dark, uncomfortable documentary on Netflix, and order pizza with a lot of ranch on the side.

The power and appeal of Documentary is the way it alters and plays with the way the viewer relates to and understands the subject.

I went on a cross-country trip with three buddies to find out what our generation is about. I bought a video camera, started shooting, learned as I went, and ended up with ‘Our Time,’ a feature-length documentary about what it’s like to be young in America. I was hooked.

Most of the photographs people take with their cameraphones are of little value in terms of documentary.

In Austin, you work in anything that will pay and a lot of things that don’t. The documentary filmmaker may also be a gaffer on a feature and producer for a commercial series and web host. Everyone just does a little bit of everything, and you have to because it’s a secondary market.

People aren’t familiar with wheelchair sports. The only film crew in Athens for the Paralympics was the documentary crew.

We’ll be back to our nature documentary, ‘Baggy the Anorexic Elephant’ in just a second.

I was the first independent to walk in with a documentary.

Because ‘Call The Midwife’ is a gentle drama, not a documentary, it’s not appropriate to portray Sister Monica Joan’s condition in all its brutal reality.

Everybody was apprehensive about a documentary. When we’re all dead and gone, we don’t want to leave something that is not going to be representing the band in a true and honest way that shows everything that’s important.

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.’

I would encourage people that, if you are waiting for the end of ‘The Office,’ to re-tune in right away. It is the beginning of the end, where we start to break down what’s going on with this documentary and see behind the scenes with who is involved.

My first job in the film business was working as a production assistant, and then a production manager on a documentary about Townes Van Zandt.

My senior thesis was a documentary. By the time I graduated from college, I thought I was going to make films, and my interest in acting was there but kind of confused.

I live in Tuxedo Park, N.Y. and spend time in the West Village, where my wife Elizabeth Cotnoir, a writer-producer and documentary filmmaker, has an office.

I have watched a documentary on Caster Semenya. I am inspired by how she made a comeback.

The worst thing that can happen to a comedian is to do a documentary on your life and you’re watching it with an audience and there’s not a laugh.

I try to learn from both, from features and documentaries. In both cases you have to find a way to make the camera as discreet as possible, and flexible enough to be able to capture the moment when it happens. I know from documentary how to not have a preconceived idea of what the scene could be.

With portable cameras and affordable data and non-linear digital editing, I think this is a golden age of documentary filmmaking. These new technologies mean we can make complicated, beautifully crafted and cinematic films about real-life stories.

I’ll sit down for ‘Stranger Things’ or ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ – or a really good documentary.

When I hear the word ‘documentary,’ I don’t think certain things should be left out. You’ve got to keep it 100 percent as much as you can, unless your group has a meeting beforehand and says, ‘Yo – don’t say this, ’cause boom, boom, boom.’ Other than that, it’s a documentary so let’s document, you know what I mean?

Is this film more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?

I feel like we’re going to see a lot more movies that mix documentary style with fiction, more along the lines of ‘District 9.’

What is interesting to me about film, and documentary film in particular, is that I can write about these people, and you trust my judgment, more or less, but when you’re confronted yourself with humans who are right there on the screen telling you their story, you make a judgment yourself that is conclusive.

In film, I believe things should either be documentary or drama.

I’m so proud of myself. I thought, ‘I’ve got to learn about American history.’ I literally took two months off and watched every documentary known to man. I really didn’t know Benjamin Franklin was so cool.

Regardless of the medium, be it television or feature or documentary, I’m not gonna distinguish and worry about my particular canon, whatever that means.

The power and appeal of Documentary is the way it alters and plays with the way the viewer relates to and understands the subject.

I’m always reaching for something we really haven’t done, and War of the Worlds has a lot of this sort of documentary look to it and first-person camera view that is a new thing for me. I’ve done some stuff like that before, but nothing like the extent of this and digitally.

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

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.

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

We were approached by Alison Ellwood about the idea of doing a documentary. At first, we were a bit nervous because we didn’t want it come across as a salacious ‘Behind The Music’ kind of thing. Alison did such a great job. It really puts perspective on things.

My next project is ‘Venus Vs,’ which is a documentary that follows tennis star Venus Williams and her effort to get equal-award pay for women at Wimbledon. Most people don’t realize that Venus fought for years to make sure women and men winners of that tennis championship received the same amount in award money.

The great thing about ‘The Exorcist’ is it’s dead serious horror. No comedy, no self-reference, it’s a documentary style.

I don’t see how a woman in documentary photography could have children. I think it’s a very difficult thing to do to raise a family, and I have enormous respect for people who do it. I’d hate to do something like that and not be good at it.

In documentary films, the most difficult thing to achieve is to make something complex appear simple.

The best films of any kind, narrative or documentary, provoke questions.

I’m pretty interested in documentary film, and I’d watch almost anything. At some point, I stumbled upon ‘shoot interviews’ and found out that wrestlers were now talking openly about things that were going on in wrestling that we as viewers were not privy to. This fascinated me.

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.

In late 2011, I watched a documentary by Stephen Fry called ‘The Secret Life Of The Manic Depressive.’ He shared his story of bipolar disorder and depression, and it sounded exactly like me. I just cried.

We all need to be huge supporters of the theatrical documentary.

I have learned that documentary makers are incredibly sneaky people.

Bob Weir calls me a saint, but I’m ‘Saint Misbehavin’.’ They’re making a documentary about my life, and that’s the current shooting title. I can roll with that, but otherwise the s-word makes me really paranoid.

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.

If I actually invited someone to make a documentary about me, and I said, ‘Anything goes’, and then I refused to answer any questions, that would be inconsistent.

I never said that I was going to do a documentary talking about my experiences of colourism. I think people took it the wrong way with the working title – ‘Leigh-Anne: Race and Colourism.’ That’s not what I was doing, I’m here to amplify the voices of darker-skinned women and hear their experiences.

I regard sports first and foremost as entertainment, so dry documentary narration is not for me.

I went on a cross-country trip with three buddies to find out what our generation is about. I bought a video camera, started shooting, learned as I went, and ended up with ‘Our Time,’ a feature-length documentary about what it’s like to be young in America. I was hooked.

With a documentary, you can cut away, you can do jump cuts, cut to a photograph at any point to bridge two scenes.

I was at the National Film School and was a cinematographer there. I got quite a lot of experience on documentary film-making and with directors who were interesting – maybe they weren’t using scripts or were using non-actors.

I like to take a little of what I learned in fiction and apply it to documentary and vice versa.

Well, I want to do everything in sort of a documentary style, ever since I started in the ’80s.

The great thing about ‘The Office’ and it being single-camera and the documentary style is that it’s mostly a comedy, but 10 percent of it is, we get to show the existential angst that exists in the American workplace.

I think the greatest thing about making a documentary is your ability to just follow the story and the subject.

If you are playing someone living, it is a different type of judgment. However much work you do, it is not a documentary. There will be things you can’t get right, and ultimately, you have to take a leap because – you weren’t there.

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.

I think independent filmmakers, documentary filmmakers – they are journalists.

I live in Tuxedo Park, N.Y. and spend time in the West Village, where my wife Elizabeth Cotnoir, a writer-producer and documentary filmmaker, has an office.

In Delhi, I got a chance to assist someone on a documentary film. Then I moved to Mumbai. This was before the satellite TV. One had to assist a director for years before being able to direct a movie.

The Highlander was a documentary, and events happened in real time.

It’s supposed to be entertainment. It’s not supposed to be a documentary.

When I did Taming of the Shrew, I was very tired, and I decided to have a holiday and make a documentary.

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.

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.

I spoke to my father about making a documentary on him. I have been seriously contemplating that.

My background was art school, documentary director and surfer with a keen interest in thrilling acts of life threatening stupidity.

Lack of diversity in Hollywood has been well documented thanks to #OscarSoWhite, but lack of diversity in the documentary world is less talked about.

Right after watching ‘Kabul Express,’ I wanted to work with Kabir sir. Moreover, earlier he was a documentary maker, and the respective genre has always fascinated me, and I still desire to work in one.

As a documentary filmmaker, ‘Meru’ was an irresistible challenge. You can spend years searching for the right story, but this one had all the elements: the obstacles, the characters, and the drama.

I wasn’t setting out to write a documentary; if I had, I would have done it in a completely different way. I was asked to write a drama that would appeal to a big audience in America that had no knowledge or interest in The Tudors at all.

Films are always a fiction, not documentary. Even a documentary is a kind of fiction.

I never got into making documentaries for any kind of success, because documentary careers are generally ones of prolonged failures.

We have a documentary film festival in Mexico. It’s really original. It’s called Ambulante, and it’s a film festival that travels around several cities in Mexico.

And in reality, I don’t think it’s a real documentary. It’s more a story of her life. It’s a story of survival. It’s a story of the time in which she lived. The story of success and failure.

My weekend might not start on a Friday like everyone else’s, because I could be working on Saturday and Sunday. But when I do get the chance to have some weekend time, I like to hang out with my friends and just chill out on the couch – maybe we’ll watch a documentary or a comedy.

I love documentary because it’s alive.

Especially when you talk about the power of documentary filmmaking, you can’t really have a slant; financially, you can’t have a slant on the end goals.

I like to tell people that I have the best job in the media. All I do is hang around with heroes. I do that every week for my ‘War Stories’ documentary series – and when FOX News wants – I go off and cover the young Americans we send to places like Afghanistan or Iraq.

The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve gotten a little precious about music-related films as it comes to biopics. I kind of don’t want to see it; I’d rather see a documentary. And this is just coming from me. I love music documentaries; I kind of don’t want to see people embodying those people.

I would love to make a documentary on my father, Mahesh Bhatt. What is interesting about Bhatt sahab is that he became more interesting personality after he left work.

In documentary, mostly, people are going to say untoward things; people are going to have gnarly beliefs. People aren’t perfect.

I’m a documentary filmmaker, I know what it means to craft a story, especially when you’ve shot a lot of material.

When we were all kids, there was one particular trailer that I think we can all remember. That was the trailer for ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind.’ There was an amazing teaser trailer with all this weird kind of documentary footage. We were like, ‘What was that! I’ve got to see that! What the hell was that?’

I don’t think the subject of a documentary film should be producers on it.

It had an enormous impact to the point of the United Nations passing a resolution against the killing and hunting of these whales as they are an endangered species. This was a documentary on the plight of the whales.

You have so much more time to observe and learn with a documentary because of the time between the shoots. You get a much deeper understanding of day-to-day life and its themes. It’s also much more of a mess after three years; you have to comb it out carefully and see what fits together and makes sense.

I like the idea of the documentary as a portrait. There’s not a chronological beginning, middle, and end structure. You build something in the editing room that’s shaped by getting to know the person and digging deeper, unpeeling the layers of them as you get to know them.

In a way then, the Divine Principle, this new revelation, is the documentary of my life. It is my own life experience. The Divine Principle is in me, and I am in the Divine Principle.

I really liked that documentary, ‘Room 237.’

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

I began my filmmaking career by shooting a feature length documentary in China in 2004, the year I graduated from film school.

For a documentary filmmaker, I do very well.

A bad historian is even more dangerous than dead documentary wood.

I may be wrong, but the essential illustrative nature of most documentary photography, and the worship of the object per se, in our best nature photography, is not enough to satisfy the man of today, compounded as he is of Christ, Freud, and Marx.

I’ve always been interested in Vietnam, feel it’s a seminal event in our nation’s history, and have explored it over the years – but I hadn’t been interested in doing a documentary about it. I felt there had been a lot done about Vietnam, and didn’t know if I could add anything new to the discussion.

It’s weird writing for a documentary because I have all these ideas for what I want to happen, but what actually happens is obviously completely different.

I like the boundaries, the kinds of conventions of a documentary and having to work within that.

Like my father and grandfather, Philippe and Jacques-Yves Cousteau, I’ve dedicated my life to exploring and protecting our seas, in large part through documentary film.

Even a fiction film is hard to end. You can going on shooting and editing a documentary forever.

I feel as if I became a documentary film-maker only because I had writer’s block for four decades. There’s no other good reason.

I’m working on this documentary. It’s called ‘Walking Home With Baby,’ and when I say ‘Walking Home With Baby,’ it’s a hood in Memphis. This is where I come from. This is my hood in Memphis – the South of Memphis.

Cinema is not truth. Even when you make documentary films, you can choose to show this shot and not the other shot – this side and not the other side. In cinema, there’s one truth – not ‘the truth.’ It’s only ‘my point of view.’ Cinema is powerful because of that.

In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director.

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.

A stand-up comedian who’s assaultive and decent and has managed a career that has spanned over five decades deserves a documentary.

I’m a documentary image maker, still and moving, because keeping the real world on the agenda is really important at a time when we’re increasingly disconnected from parts of the world on whom we depend.

I’ve always been interested in how to present something that relates to our reality – which is not really… I don’t even know if documentary itself does as good a job. It has its own problems in trying to get at the reality of the situation.

As the documentary ‘True Son’ illustrates, my campaign for city council started really small – with eight mostly political neophytes in my living room and with young people knocking on doors.

People have said to me, ‘Oh, you are much nicer making documentaries than you were in politics.’ So I should be. If you are making a documentary, you are having fun. You are not under any pressure, normally.

I’m pretty interested in documentary film, and I’d watch almost anything. At some point, I stumbled upon ‘shoot interviews’ and found out that wrestlers were now talking openly about things that were going on in wrestling that we as viewers were not privy to. This fascinated me.

It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.

There are a lot of female directors in documentary, very talented. But it’s always lower budget.

Any nature documentary or TV show will always make you start thinking differently about what surrounds us and how to take care of it.

I didn’t realize that, in doing a documentary, there is this process of discovery. It’s not like a film or a play with a set script. It sort of reveals itself.

I saw this documentary he did years ago called ‘Fade to Black.’ I was always a Jay Z fan – I liked Jay Z – but after I saw that documentary, I loved Jay Z. I realized how intelligent he was.

Documentary film without nuanced journalistic sourcing risks being sensational, tendentious or broad-brushed.

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.

In the spring of 1984, I went to the northwest of France, to Normandy, to prepare an NBC documentary on the 40th anniversary of D-Day.

The work of WikiLeaks is with principal documentary evidence; that’s where the truth lies. It gets to the heart of the matter. It educates people and in turn empowers them.

When a documentary filmmaker, working in the style that I do, suggests that there has been a shooting ratio of 40 hours to every one hour of finished film, that doesn’t mean that the other 39 are bad.

I could really sink my teeth into a David Bowie documentary.

A documentary film is a great way of helping people understand because, somehow, when one is able to see the people involved, it lends a certain immediacy and understanding that is hard to get on the page.

There’s a really great documentary called ‘Many Rivers,’ which documents the totality of slavery from its inception, and then it gives you a little history on how America came to prominence. It’s crazy – the first black man to actually step foot in America came as a free man, as an explorer, with the Spaniards.

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.

I really loved working on ‘Laguna Beach,’ and I’d do it all over again. I’m one of the luckiest kids in the world, but I thought it was going to be a documentary about kids in high school, and they exaggerated all this drama. When it came out, it was this weird thing. People feel that they know you.

I was very impressed with Davis Guggenheim’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth.’ He’s inspired me as one of the newer, cutting-edge documentary filmmakers. I see those films, and I’m just instinctively drawn to them.

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.

For me, documentary photography has always come with great responsibility. Not just to tell the story honestly and with empathy, but also to make sure the right people hear it. When you photograph somebody who is in pain or discomfort, they trust you to make sure the images will act as their advocate.

As a documentary filmmaker, I try to be sensitive to my subjects.

I don’t really believe that documentary is objective reality and fiction is all illusion.

With documentary, you just pick up a camera and start.

As a documentary filmmaker, I couldn’t afford to give my children the lifestyle I had in San Francisco growing up.

In the U.S., the ’50s and ’60s marked the documentary’s golden age, especially at CBS, where pioneering television journalist Edward R. Murrow, immortalised in George Clooney’s ‘Good Night, and Good Luck,’ produced such landmark investigations as the CBS Reports programme ‘Hunger in America.’

When I do feature films, I usually have a very strong sense of what I want to do. I have topics and subjects, so I go for it. I even know technically what I want to. But in the case of documentary, the story comes to me.

I watched the documentary ‘I Hate Christian Laettner,’ and I really hate Christian Laettner. It made me understand why everybody hates Christian Laettner and Duke basketball. I mean, they’re just a bunch of preppy white boys from Tobacco Road or whatever.

There are many documentary filmmakers who have a tough time because they don’t really get what they need to do what they want. There are so many people with good visions that should be encouraged and helped. And they will deliver, I’m sure.

When I look back at the way that I was in that documentary I cringe.

I didn’t realize that, in doing a documentary, there is this process of discovery. It’s not like a film or a play with a set script. It sort of reveals itself.

I’m a documentary photographer. That’s what I’ve always wanted to be; that’s where my heart and soul is.

I wouldn’t do nudity in films. For me, personally… To act with my clothes on is a performance; to act with my clothes off is a documentary.

I remember the first time seeing myself on TV, when my family was watching the documentary ‘Eyes on the Prize’ for the first time. There were pictures of people going up the school stairs, and Mom said, ‘Oh, that’s you!’ I said, ‘I can’t believe this. This is important.’

I watched a documentary called ‘Plastic Oceans’ on Netflix, and it was an eye-opener for me.

I’m really excited to be a part of it and sharing the legacy, any documentary I look up at the sky and Kevin Burns did and Bryan did and showed me again you know the history that’s in this character and you know.

There is no way I could have ever dared to make a documentary, much less have the money to make a documentary, if it was on 16mm. But, with the magic of digital.

We should not confuse having a Flip camera with making a documentary.

Documentary is reality. It shows the truth.

My books are based 98 percent on documentary evidence.

I don’t want to be on a soapbox, but I feel like a lot of documentary filmmakers are part of the ancient tradition of writing down notes, of saying, ‘Hey people, hey people!’

In documentary films, the most difficult thing to achieve is to make something complex appear simple.