Observational Filmmaking Quotes

If I were just curious, it would be very hard to say to someone, I want to come to your house and have you talk to me and tell me the story of your life. I mean people are going to say, You're crazy. Plus they're going to keep mighty guarded. But the camera is a kind of license. A lot of people, they want to be paid that much attention and that's a reasonable kind of attention to be paid.

You don't necessarily need a script or actors to tell a compelling tale. Finding a person at a key moment in his life and rendering the truth as you see it - that's the truest form of drama.

My first camera job was filming workplace safety videos, which involved months of watching and videotaping people doing their jobs. I was hooked - from there, I wanted to know where they lived and the rest of their habits and desires.

Jay [Duplass] and I normally just sit around and people watch, and we talk about things that are happening in our lives, or with people that we've met. That's the soup from which our movies usually come from.

I tend to make movies about my peer group. I couldn't see myself now going back and making a movie about a bunch of college kids, necessarily. I kind of always operate in the things I'm observing around me, whether it's friends having babies now in my life or what have you.

If there were teenagers who had a video camera and saw what I did on a daily basis, they'd be bored out of their mind.

When I grew up, a director was Cecil B DeMille, a guy sitting down with a megaphone speaking. He was the voice of God, the image of God. When I went to start making docs, I quickly turned the megaphone to my ear not to my mouth. It's more about funneling in the words and listening as doc filmmaker.

Documentary: That’s a sophisticated and misleading word. And not really clear… The term should be documentary style… You see, a document has use, whereas art is really useless.

If you're a great documentary filmmaker, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're a great narrative filmmaker. There are fantastic documentary filmmakers that can't direct actors. You don't have to do that in a documentary, if it's a real documentary.

My first narrative films developed out of a documentary process - finding someone who was willing to be filmed, watching, listening, taking copious notes and many hours of video footage.

When I think about the new film, I think I can do whatever I want with fiction, but the more documentary it is, the better it will be because that's what I'm good at. I'm good at observing people's behavior and putting these unspoken things into movie contexts in ways that other people can sometimes miss.

When we made 'Primary,' it was just one camera. We were trying to make ourselves inconspicuous.

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.

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

I want to get out of the way of the actors. I want to get out of their eye lines. I want to them to stop thinking they're making a movie. I want them to just go and live. It's like you take these great actors and put them in an aquarium of life, and just watch them swim. That's what makes editing tough because you get all these beautiful, unplanned moments.

The camera cannot leave the man, but the man can leave the camera. It's in the style of documentary where you make an agreement between a camera and a man and say, "I'm going to film you now."

Well, I want to do everything in sort of a documentary style, ever since I started in the '80s.

I have received the digital camera as a blessing. It has really changed my life as a filmmaker, because I don't use my camera anymore as a camera. I don't feel it as a camera. I feel it as a friend, as something that doesn't make an impression on people, that doesn't make them feel uncomfortable, and that is completely forgotten in my way of approaching life and people and film.

That's what I love about the mockumentary style, is the added thing of people knowing they are on-camera, which changes your behavior. That's why we sometimes do what we call spy shots.

I think I can do whatever I want with fiction, but the more documentary it is, the better it will be because that's what I'm good at. I'm good at observing people's behavior and putting these unspoken things into movie contexts in ways that other people can sometimes miss.

I think my movies aren't sentimental. I think my movies are funny and sad and realistic. Not realistic in the sense that they're documentaries, but realistic in the sense that they're not idealistic, they're not optimistic, not pessimistic, and not propagandistic. They're an analysis of a situation. I call it as I see it, so to speak.