I think all documentaries leave out areas of people's lives. Which is good. There are areas that need not be explored.
Documentaries deal with people who live real, everyday lives. But if these people trusted us and told us the truth about their lives, it could be used against them - which sometimes happened.
I don't think a camera and a cameraman can destroy a family.
I don't think the subject of a documentary film should be producers on it.
Now and then, someone would accuse me of being evil - of letting people destroy themselves while I watched, just so I could film them and tape-record them. But I didn't think of myself as evil - just realistic.
Is Michael Moore an honest documentarian? Honestly? I don't think he is... The real discussion gets left behind the entertainment value.
For my part, as a filmmaker, I've never been a fly-on-the-wall documentarian. I have no commitment to that method. I believe it's a lie.
I don't know the facts surrounding Andrew Jarecki's work. I think it's a triumph of television. But it does raise troubling issues that I think we as a documentary community, you know, need to address.
I feel that a documentarian has an obligation to tell the truth as he or she interprets it. And what I mean by that is that documentarians don't necessarily have the same sort of obligations that a journalist might have. A journalist might be called upon to be objective, whereas a documentarian is sort of forced to take sides.
Direct cinema is about simulating a reality in which you're not having the overwhelming influence that you really are having.
I think that the whole voyeuristic attitude of filmmakers or of me personally - of shooting documentaries and so forth - is an important issue.
