Arnon Goldfinger Quotes

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

This whole business of documentary being a second-class citizen is bullshit. A documentary can be as interesting, as dramatic, as sad, as funny, blah, blah, blah, as a fiction movie. Or it can be as awful as a fiction movie!

I love documentaries. It's actually my favorite medium of film.

I really admire Werner Herzog and Spike Lee. They're amazing documentarians. If you took away all the narratives, they'd just be amazing documentarians.

It is possible to work out of New York on film and television and still not lose your connection to theater.

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.

I love making fiction films as well as nonfiction ones, and hope to keep challenging myself to make better and better work.

When I started my filmmaking journey 17 years ago, I honestly didn't know what a documentary film was.

I am a big fan of Jim Jarmusch, and I do love big screen documentaries.

For me, every film is actually a form of documentary.

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

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.

It's all movies for me. And besides, when you say documentaries, in my case, in most of these cases, means "feature film" in disguise.

A lot of the distinctions that we make between drama and documentary are spurious. We're deeply confused about these issues. About the difference between the two, about where documentary ends and drama begins.

No one likes documentaries.

In the documentary the basic material has been created by God, whereas in the fiction film the director is a God; he must create life.

If I could make a decent living doing documentaries, I would. I don't really care about [the other] stuff so much. But you can't make a living doing documentaries. Although it has affected my work, at least in that I think I make fairly realistic-looking pictures.

I would love to work with Guillermo del Toro and J.J. Abrams. I think they are creative geniuses that are constantly producing great work, and they're two people that I would just love to work with.

I think my home is in that sort of the part of cinema that's disappeared is where I lived, that sort of mid-budget you know, drama. I suppose that's what I am known for.

I've ended up as a filmmaker who really loves the movie part of movies. That time in my life was a big influence on the kind of movies that I ended up making. I always think I'm going to make a movie that's gritty and real, but then I make a movie that's like an opera. I fight it at first and then that's just the way it is.

People say to me, "You make fantastic films" and I say, "No, I make documentaries.

I don't ask my students to have studied film or any education in general. What I ask them is to come and sit and tell me a story, and the way they choose it and tell it, for me, the best criteria for whether they are right for making films. There's nothing more important than being able to tell your story orally.

I want people to feel that they've gotten to know the people in the film a little bit, gotten to see Pine Ridge in ways they haven't seen before. I think that's a good start.

I just feel like it's so amazing every few years when I'm not making a film to act and basically go back to film school and just watch other filmmakers work and try to be a part of somebody else's vision. So I feel like you do use two very different parts of your brain, and it's great to be able to jump back and forth.

Just as counterpoint and harmony follow their own laws, and differ in rhythm and movement, both formal tensions and color tensions have a development of their own in accordance with the inherent laws from which they are separately derived. Both, however, aim toward the realization of the same image. And both deal with the depth problem.