Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi Quotes

But I can say what interests me about documentary is the fact that you don't know how the story ends at the onset - that you are investigating, with a camera, and the story emerges as you go along.

You know, the process of making a documentary is one of discovery, and like writing a story, you follow a lead and that leads you to something else and then by the time you finish, the story is nothing like you expected.

In documentaries, the process is that you film a lot of things, and out of what you've shot, something organically reveals itself, and there's a discovery process.

Sometimes I get the start of a story from a memory, an anecdote, but that gets lost and is usually unrecognizable in the final story.

Writers have to be observant. Every nuance, every inflection in a voice, the quality of air, even - they all get mixed up in this soup of the story developing in our minds.

When I started the 'Broken Empire' trilogy, I thought it was a short story, and I didn't know the beginning, middle, or end of even that.

I love rewriting because that is where and how you discover the story. It's like you have this skeleton, and you get to put flesh on it and hair and clothes and really wonderful jewelry.

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.

If you take a few days to write an outline, you're just making up scenes that you think will work, that you think will be interesting. But as you write it, other ideas occur - better ideas that have to do with what you're writing.

A lot of new writers assume you have to know the where the story is going and that it flows out as molten gold. But really, sometimes you think you are going to one place, but then you decide that is dumb idea. Then you go somewhere else and it is a worse idea. But then you switch again and you might have a beautiful accident.

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.

All the stories in 'The UnAmericans' required interviews, travel, hours and hours in the archives. All of that stuff is so important in the beginning, but I reach a point where I have to shuck it away.

The bane of my existence is the synopses that publishers request for a new novel or series. That's where I'm really producing fiction - my final book never ends up looking like the synopsis.

What's great about documentary, it seems to me, is that it can be experimental filmmaking. You have a license to do a lot of diverse things under the umbrella of 'documentary.'

We went through all the scenes and they became kind of funny and they expanded a little bit and because it seemed to be working so well in the movie, they added a couple of things later on in the movie and that's how it turned out.

I love the idea of documentaries. I love seeing documentaries, and I love making them. Documentaries are incredibly easy to shoot. The ease with which you can hear something's going on, somebody's going to be somewhere: That sounds so interesting. Pick up your camera and go.

I write synopses after the book is completed. I can't write it beforehand, because I don't know what the book's about. I invent something for my publisher because he asks for one, but the final book ends up very differently.

Documentaries are a form of journalism.

I tend to start books with a very broad outline, but I always leave room for happy accidents. With 'The Passenger,' there were perhaps too many of those.

It's weird writing for a documentary because I have all these ideas for what I want to happen, but what actually happens is obviously completely different.

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

When I was doing 'Baahubali 2,' the story was being discussed with many people. The story evolved over 9-10 months in that way.

The story is supposed to change; it's supposed to evolve. In making 'Cartel Land,' I ended up with a much, much different story than I started with.

I'm not necessarily scanning for clues when I make documentaries.

The only thing documentary filmmakers have to work with, at least the way I make films, is trust. That's been true of everyone from James Carville and George Stephanopoulos to the kids in 'American High' to the soldiers in 'Military Diaries' to Anna Wintour to Dick Cheney.