Michael Patrick Jann Quotes

One good thing about television is that you have a lot of people with money who have real good cameras going around to all these countries. You haven't been there? Great. Turn on The History Channel or The Discovery Channel. So, we're lucky in that way.

We've evolved from sitting back on our tripods and shooting wildlife films like they have been shot historically, which doesn't work for us.

I think Direct Cinema's trying to be insightful by looking at reality in a very close way while, in fact, much more is staged than we like to think. In cinema verite, it's about trying to make something invisible visible - the role of fantasy and imagination in everyday life.

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 never saw myself as a director. It's certainly a second language but making movies for 40 years, you pick stuff up. However, this style of making movies, this documentary style, is easier for me because I gather a lot of material and with an editor, write it on screen. You try to write based on what you shot.

I think growing an economy is a good way to help with a deficit, but ultimately, it's about fiscal discipline and responsible spending - and smart decisions.

I was attracted to filmmaking in college because of my love of storytelling. You can have such an impact and reach a broader audience than conventional journalism.

And I sense it was a rather constructed, almost half narrative fiction film in some ways. A lot of it was staged and manipulated to get those things in there that I knew to be strong.

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.

You should bear in mind that almost all my documentaries are feature films in disguise.

My first job was as a waitress, and I waitressed for a long, long time. I was a very bad waitress. I didn't care if people had ketchup or if they were allergic to fish. It really didn't bother me either way. I didn't care. I was bad, but it was a good way to make money. And it's a fun job if you are working with fun people.

I'm a documentary filmmaker by training. You got to start with the real people and the real place.

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

There's an ecstasy about doing something really good on film: the composition of a shot, the drama within the shot, the texture... It's palpable.

When you're shooting a movie that's not necessarily a huge budget, you have to think about what you can leave out and still make it interesting.

Basically, if you could get a good trailer out of the script, Roger had no objection to you making a really good movie. He liked it if you did. He liked the more cleverness and ingenuity you could bring to it. He just wasn't going to give you any more money.

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.

Now I want to use money in a good way. I make foundations back home in Russia, I have sponsored vaccinations for more than one million children in my homeland and I have founded scholarships in the names of my great Russian compatriots - Oistrakh, Richter, Gilels, Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Schnittke.

I think comics is a really good way to talk about skepticism and atheism and things like that... it was easy to tell those stories and, I think, helpful to some people to tell them in comic form. Using visuals makes it easier to break stuff down and makes it somewhat easier to understand.

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.

In an era when party fundraising is badly tainted, dinners are a really good way of raising cash for campaigning. Lots of people giving very small amounts of money through ticket sales and raffle prizes: yes, it's much harder work than big donations, but I think it's a more democratic and transparent way of fundraising.

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.'

Homosexuality in hip-hop is an extension of homosexuality in the black community. The black community is very, very conservative when it comes to homosexuality, and I don't mean conservative in the good way, like we're saving money. I mean very intolerant.

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.

There are all kinds of ways that people present their films, but that's kind of a good feeling, if you can make it seem like the characters are really there.