Walter Salles Quotes

Non-fiction or documentaries can tell any kind of a story because they don't have to adhere to the rules of what's possible. When you're making something up, you have to say, 'Well, this is what would happen here,' but in reality, stuff happens that seems impossible.

The thing I found in correlation with my studies as a history major was that experience taught me you have to figure out your background, where you come from, who you are, and what you want. All of that propelled me into following acting because I had to develop characters as well as develop characters' history which is most important.

It's all those stories and how they braid together that tells us who and what and where we are

Stories serve the purpose of consolidating whatever gains people or their leaders have made or imagine they have made in their existing journey thorough the world.

I think documentaries are the greatest way to educate an entire generation that doesn't often look back to learn anything about the history that provided a safe haven for so many of us today.

We are all affected by the time we are born into, and of course that feeds into your work. Society is based on storytelling - religious myths, opera, film - and 1968 was always seen as a time of rupture and fragmentation. I have always been interested in those words.

Documentaries have always inspired me in narrative filmmaking.

I think history is collective memories. In writing, I'm using my own memory, and I'm using my collective memory.

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

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

I'm a big fan of documentaries. I've always loved them, and I've just never had the opportunity or the time to make a feature.

But I'm a historian. I wasn't interested in just being a producer, I was interested in doing research and presenting that research to a general public.

Many novelists take well-defined, precise characters, whose stories are sometimes of mediocre interest, and place them in an important historical context, which remains secondary in spite of everything.

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.

For 'Seabiscuit', I interviewed 100 people I never met.

Literature has as one of its principal allures that it tells you something about life that life itself can't tell you. I just thought literature is a thing that human beings do.

My own being can be judged by the depths I reach in making these historical origins my own.

Unlike fiction, which you create before you go into production, with reality you kind of create it after everything is produced. The drama and the storytelling is really done in post.

I think a biography is only as interesting as the lives and times it illuminates.

What I find interesting about folklore is the dialogue it gives us with storytellers from centuries past.

We learn history not in order to know how to behave or how to succeed, but to know who we are.

There is no self-knowledge except historical self-knowledge.

For Africa to me... is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.

Documentaries are a form of journalism.

I was so hungry to learn my history, to really know who I was.