Documentary Narrative Quotes

With documentaries, what's beautiful about them is that you capture something unique in a shot, something that will never repeat itself.

When I'm filming a documentary, I feel like I should be the straight man, watching with a raised eyebrow.

I'm not trying to acquire a reputation as serious documentary maker for its own sake.

I have major credibility as a hip, out-there documentary filmmaker, and I'm not going to say, 'I'm only a drama filmmaker' anymore.

I don't think the subject of a documentary film should be producers on it.

I'm not a documentarian. I'm not a photojournalist.

When I started my filmmaking journey 17 years ago, I honestly didn't know what a documentary film was.

Documentaries make a difference.

With a documentary, you can cut away, you can do jump cuts, cut to a photograph at any point to bridge two scenes.

Many people have this memory of traditional TV documentary-making that aims to portray pure reality, and I just don't see that as the only option.

I always thought that life is full of stories and characters that feel like literary stories and characters. So when I started making documentaries, they weren't humble empirical things, just following people around. I was always trying to impose a story.

In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director.

If you acknowledge that filming is an occasion where people express things they might not otherwise express, that offers a much more insightful analysis of why documentaries - even of the fly-on-the-wall variety - are powerful.

I like the boundaries, the kinds of conventions of a documentary and having to work within that.