Debra Granik Quotes

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.

People who make documentaries have to be faithful to the facts. But when you are making a drama, a fiction based on the life, all you have to be faithful to is the spirit of the facts, which I think I was in every case. As long as you don't violate their spirit, you can play with the facts.

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

Writing is writing to me. I'm incapable of saying no to any writing job, so I've done everything - historical fiction, myths, fairy tales, anything that anybody expresses any interest in me writing, I'll write. It's the same reason I used to read as a child: I like going somewhere else and being someone else.

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

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.

In documentaries, there's a truth that unfolds unnaturally, and you get to chronicle it. In narratives, you have to create the situations so that the truth will come out.

In any genre you're working in, you can always find a way to tell a particular kind of story. I love fantasy; I love science fiction. I love all kinds of fiction, in fact.

I would be more frightened as a writer if people thought my movies were like science fiction.

I think books, novels and autobiographies have a power to touch people far more personally than films do, so there's a bit more of a responsibility when you then dramatise it.

I never really considered writing something that was nonfiction.

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

Writing is so fun precisely because if you take out the right adjective, the readers can decide what kind of book is in their hands. Suspension of disbelief should not be mandatory in contemporary writing.

I love writing fiction - you can take just what you want from a place, and leave the rest.

All novels are experimental.

writing fiction is the best thing there is because absolutely everything is possible!

But that’s one advantage of fiction, you can speed up time.

Writers do not write what they know. They write what they can imagine.

We need to find another way or another shape or an allegory or something that tells us more. Even Vagabond - it was a fiction but it was really a documentary. I mean, it has the texture of documentary. Even if I made up every line, it has the texture of being true.

I'm a moviemaker, not a documentarian. I try to hit the truth.

Genres give a vocabulary. They give a frame of reference for the audience to enter into a movie. Then, once they have their footing, that's when you can start doing things that they don't expect.

Good fiction creates its own reality.

IMAGINATION, n. A warehouse of facts, with poet and liar in joint ownership.

We are not documentarians, we are filmmakers.

It's always wrong of course to say that you can't do this or you can't do that in fiction. You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.