Terry Zwigoff Quotes

The only consistency in the work I do is that I try to use cinematography to best tell the narrative and do justice to the character arcs, but not to do it in such an overt way that people are distracted by it.

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 like directing. It takes a lot out of you, but I'd like to do it again - I just have to find a story I want to tell.

Documentaries have always inspired me in narrative filmmaking.

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.

From the very, very beginning, we made the decision that 'Tarzan' wasn't going to sing. My co-director, Chris Buck, and I said to each other that we couldn't imagine a half-naked man in the jungle simply bursting into song.

Of course I want my films to look really good, but every single element is chosen for a reason. It's telling something in the story.

If it's a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on.

I enjoy scenes in films, which do not have the pressure of the story so much... and it flows. I've tried to go in that direction.

A film is - or should be - more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what's behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.

There's nothing I find more lazy than unmotivated camerawork just to make things look interesting.

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

I find that movies tend to fix the aesthetics of a story in people's minds.

Film is really the one art form that can effectively use silence. Music and theater can play with silence, but they can't sustain silence without losing energy, whereas film can go into a silent mode and stay there for minutes at a time.

I have major credibility as a hip, out-there documentary filmmaker, and I'm not going to say, 'I'm only a drama filmmaker' anymore.

I don't normally make documentaries. I'm a drama director. I've made a few short docs, but I don't like talking heads or 'voice of God' narrators.

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.'

Hollywood films are alienating to the spectator because they use too much dialogue, too much explication and leave no space for the viewer. They depress me.

The way films establish the order of scenes is very artificial.

We work very hard in all of the Pixar films to not make anything in the imagery that causes people to think of something other than the story.

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

The directing is something that is incredibly satisfying to me and challenging to me because it's asking me to draw on everything I've been able to absorb over all these years of acting and having all this set experience.

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

It's hard not to want to become Ken Burns at times. I'm interested in being a Ken Burns who reaches that 17-year-old who goes to the multiplex just to see a good story well-told. And if there's history in it, all the better.

People confuse 'pretty' with good cinematography.