Joshua Oppenheimer Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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.'

With the dramatic canvas, I found you could still operate with the documentarist's observational eye.

Raman Raghav' was shot on location, but there are many stylistic things in it. I like this mixture of documentary and extreme stylization.

Like all art, nonfiction film should invite, seduce, or force us to confront the most difficult, frightening or mysterious aspects of what it means to be human.

Wiseman's films are some of the most pure cinema, and to take a journey in a Wiseman film is like no other. He's been doing it so long, with a body of over 40 films!

Cinema is not just a medium of entertainment. Yes, it should entertain, but cinema is made to convey a message, to say something.

Images can make realities out of people and struggles - the reality we give them. Images really matter.

There was a time when villains were stylized as very fashionable with gelled hair, girls in arms and cigar in mouth but now films have come closer to the reality. Realism has entered our industry.

I make films about stories that I get interested in.

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

For me, film is an extremely powerful way of conveying a message to a mainstream audience.

I have never made a film to praise or to criticize something. That kind of filmmaking is nothing but propaganda.

Every time you are getting ready to make a shot in a documentary film, you are asking yourself questions about your cinematographic approach. You are approaching the truth, but the image is never the truth itself.

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

I'd worked on music docs for years. It felt like writing a novel. By the time I got to Keith Richards, it felt like making a sketch.

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.

I started as a documentary maker, and they're my first love.

Art is observing society around you, representing it through your eyes.

One of the reasons I paint black people is because I am a black person.

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!'

My background is in filmmaking, and my mentor is Dusan Makavejev, who combined fiction and documentary.