Staged Reality Quotes

You can't believe everything you read in a newspaper or everything that's coming out of the president's mouth. And you can't believe when someone posts a picture from their personal life, because most of the time, it's staged - we're showing each other these idealized versions of ourselves so that we seem better and other people will feel worse.

There's a difference between reality TV and reality. There's a big difference.

The media are less a window on reality, than a stage on which officials and journalists perform self-scripted, self-serving fictions.

Reality shows are for reality stars. Celebrities do, maybe, Dancing With The Stars, maybe they might do Celebrity Wife Swap, but dealing with strangers, with people you don't know, in a real situation? People say it's fake, it's based on what they tell other people to do but won't tell you, but you still have a gut reaction, you know.

Does the real thing ever have the perfection of a stage performance?

Housewives' is real, yes. We say what we're thinking at the time. But filming our real lives is a huge production that takes a long time. Sometimes you have to sit there for hours and hours while the show is being produced.

I think Direct Cinema's trying to be insightful by looking at reality in a very close way while, in fact, much more is staged than we like to think. In cinema verite, it's about trying to make something invisible visible - the role of fantasy and imagination in everyday life.

For every little kid who still believes in Santa Claus, there is at least one adult who still believes in professional wrestling.

Being in the camera's eye is like stepping into a dream world, one that is often more interesting than real life.

The reality in which a camera turns up is always posed, e.g., the moon landing.

You see reality TV and it's not reality TV. It's contrived and everything is plotted and scripted nearly. Documentaries are the same and just as bad.

I come down as an actor and my marks are already laid out on the floor - somebody else organized what I'm going to do. I think, why am I here? And why I'm here is to express the words with some sort of vague emotion and make them seem real. I wanted to go back to how it was before.

I learned a long time ago: You're in the entertainment business. You're not in the reality business. One has absolutely nothing to do with the other.

Theater represents to me this phenomenon in juxtaposition to real life, where there are all these imposed guidelines.

I went to my first school dance on the set of 'Spider-Man.' The funny thing is, it wasn't actually real. I didn't choose my dress or my date or anything about it. I just showed up for work.

A lot of the distinctions that we make between drama and documentary are spurious. We're deeply confused about these issues. About the difference between the two, about where documentary ends and drama begins.

The best ones - Hulk Hogan believes in Hulkamania. It's not a thing he's selling here. It's real. He knows it's real because he goes to the Mall Of America and everybody goes insane, right? Wrestling is real. Those characters are real.

We all know that the 'reality' of reality TV is an artful construction, an effect not only of editing but of a Lorenzian rat-in-a-mirrored-labyrinth artificial environment which attenuates psychology into a series of territorial twitches.

Reality TV now doesn't feel reality TV when it started. The line between reality and fiction is blurred. So many of these people are phony or shallow, in their own right. If you've ever watched any of The Real Housewives, or those types of shows, they're all performing. Even though they're real people, they're performing.

Reality TV is anything but.

My staged work looks so real that people actually take it for documentary. But, in fact, that is my intention, to disguise the manufacturedness of it. Half of my work, or probably more than that, is staged.