Simon Beaufoy Quotes

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.

When you make a film that is based in reality, reality will come up all around it.

A biopic teaches you a lot.

Whenever Hollywood gets involved with real life events, certain liberties have to be taken.

When you want to transcribe an idea truthfully from the page to the screen, it is not necessarily best to be particularly literal about it. It can be hard to convince people, specifically writers, of that.

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.

In a film, you have to externalize things that are internal and of course it becomes a debate about to what extent you do that.

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.

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.

When I'm making documentaries, I think a lot about how fiction films play. I want them to have the pacing, the twists and the character development of fiction films.

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.'

Is an audience open to seeing a film that isn't what they expect when they see a film that's been adapted from a children's book?

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.

This is indeed not only relevant to Documentary but is evident is most type of film making. The film often mirrors the experience, understanding and politics of the director.

When 'The Thin Blue Line' came out, I was criticized by many people for using reenactments, as if I wasn't dedicated to the truth because I filmed these scenes. That always and still seems to be nonsensical.

Generally in my films like 'Hearts of Darkness' or 'Picture This,' I try not to make myself a presence in the film.

In the 40 years since 'The Amityville Horror', dramatizations of those supposedly-real events have gotten loose enough - special-effects laden enough, star-power re-packaged enough - that the audience no longer trusts the dramatization's loyalty to the core story.

I've read the 'Public Enemies' script and, no, it's not 100 percent historically accurate. But it's by far the closest thing to fact Hollywood has attempted, and for that, I am both excited and quietly relieved.

You don't need the 'voice of God' commentary. Instead, by juxtaposing contradictory or confirmatory witnesses and archive material, your point of view becomes obvious.

I have had the unfortunate experience of having someone write an unauthorised biography of me. Half of it is lies and the other half is badly written. My feeling is that if I'm going to write my life story, I ought to have my life first.

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

In documentary films, the most difficult thing to achieve is to make something complex appear simple.

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

Each movie you do about a real person is like a painting, and you choose certain things in the painting that you want to pull out and you want to show.