Documentary Making Quotes

As a documentarian, you think, 'Follow your curiosity.'

Documentaries sometimes can be shot over 10 years. You plan to stop in two, but you still gotta catch more.

If you want to make a documentary you should automatically go to the fiction, and if you want to nourish your fiction you have to come back to reality.

I hate making TV documentaries.

When I watch my early documentaries, they're very eclectic. They don't follow any particular [pattern]. I would have gotten thrown out of film school because I didn't. I was just putting them together somehow as the spirit moved me, following my nose, thinking I was brilliant.

Teaching regularly has made me an even more adept reader, I think. The kind of teaching I do is more like editing than anything else. The kind of editing book editors used to do before lunch. The kind of editing I used to do as a radio documentary maker.

I think making a documentary gets you out and about more, with people. With stand-up, you're talking at people. With documentaries you're talking with people, and you're listening a lot more.

For me, the making of a documentary to mark the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain was an intensely personal journey. I was born in February 1940, so I was just six months old as the battle raged overhead.

I came from a background of directing behind-the-scenes documentaries.

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.

With documentary-film projects, you hope you highlight an area of concern people haven't thought about before. A lot of times, I'm asking myself - 'This seems to be a significant problem. What can be done that hasn't been done?'

Documentary films have always been my passion, I have done documentaries.

I have learned that documentary makers are incredibly sneaky people.

When you make documentaries or short films, you have to have eyes and ears in the back of your head and on the sides and all around you. I like that in my films.

One of the great things about making 'Reel History' was meeting British people from all over the class system. It made me realise that London is a different country.

Movies, to a large extent, stand or fall on the strength of their scripts. But a documentary is a collection of found objects: fragments you've collected, accidents of interview and happenstance, pieces of stock footage that surface in the course of six to nine months of research and production.

I had travelled pretty widely around the world even before then, so I knew where to go to film wildlife.

My background is sociology. Combined with my graphic approach, if I could do some film projects, I think I'd be very good at making documentaries eventually, but people don't think of me for that, of course. But dialogue is something I know I can be good at.

Precisely that, covering 500 years of African-American history in six hours. I've been working on this for seven years. The biggest challenge was deciding which stories to tell.

But one of the amazing things about documentary is that you can remake it every time you make one. There is no rule about how a documentary film has to be made.

I would love to direct a documentary film if any good subject comes my way.

I'm following my interests, and there's something about investigating the world and creating a watchable, entertaining programme out of it that is deeply satisfying.

So I do tend to do documentaries where I can move in and out of them.

I'm a documentary filmmaker, I know what it means to craft a story, especially when you've shot a lot of material.

When making documentaries, the most important thing I learned was to listen, observe gestures and facial expressions.