Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
One of the strengths of my interviews is that I really, honest to God, have no idea what people are going to say.
You can't tell by looking at a film-clip whether it is a drama or a documentary without knowing how it was produced.
I don't believe that you can talk about a photograph being true or false. I don't think such a claim has any meaning.
I asked [Donald Trump] if he had any advice for Charles Foster Kane and he said, "Yeah, get yourself a different woman."
I've never made any money off of any of my films. Statement of fact. So without commercial work, I would be in big trouble.
My stuff always starts with interviews. I start interviewing people, and then slowly but surely, a movie insinuates itself.
Certain kinds of intimacy emerge on a phone call that might never occur if you were sitting right next to the other person.
There are many dramas that I would like to make: dramas based on real stories. It's approaching things from the other side.
The claim that everybody sees the world differently is not a claim that there's no reality. It's a different kind of claim.
I like to point out that people very often confuse the idea that truth is subjective with the fact that truth is perishable.
A lot of stories that have fascinated me are tabloid stories that have come from other newspapers, like 'The New York Times.'
Despite all of our efforts to control something, the world is much, much more powerful than us, and more deranged even than us.
I feel as if I became a documentary film-maker only because I had writer's block for four decades. There's no other good reason.
Writing is a form of talking, although writing is such an odd thing in and of itself. People go about it in such different ways.
You know, I actually like doing commercials. I don't like doing them to the exclusion of everything else, but I like doing them.
There are endless anxieties in putting a film together, and it's an enormous relief when you know it's working with an audience.
I like to think that one of things I've done with non-fiction since the very beginning is to find new ways of telling true stories.
Language can be used to so many diverse ends. It can be used to clarify and, of course, it can be used to obfuscate, confuse, evade.
I used to say that interviewing others was perhaps the way I could stop talking and start listening. It's a kind of enforced silence.
I envy certain writers, because there are writers who do go into a kind of different zone, where the writing isn't controlled anymore.
I've been writing a lot more, I believe, because of the Internet. I've been posting stuff that I've written and I've just been writing.
Appearing on the front page of the New York Times even given the state of papers today is still something that's seen by a lot of people.
I've been horribly depressed (lately), which, as you know, can be terribly time-consuming. I mean, if you're going to do it right, that is.
I've never seen myself as a documentary filmmaker. I see myself as a filmmaker, period, and I am interested in drama as well as in documentary.
There's this crazy thinking that style guarantees truth. You go out with a hand-held camera, use available light, and somehow the truth emerges.
First of all, tabloid stories are some of the richest and most important stories that we have. There's nothing wrong, per se, with tabloid stories.
I'm really interested in self-deception. Really interested in how people live in bubble universes. How people can fail to see the seemingly obvious.
I think an interview, properly considered, should be an investigation. You shouldn't know what the interview will yield. Otherwise, why do it at all?
Right now, we live in bad times in this country, and the fact that there are filmmakers addressing political and social issues is to me a good thing.
Everything is a reenactment. We are reenacting the world in the mind. The world is not inside there. It does not reside in the gray matter of the brain.
I'm asked unendingly to become involved in series involving true crime and as it so happens the Netflix series that I'm working on is about a true crime.
You're meant to think somehow that literature, in espousing eternal values, is kind of normal and balanced and reasonable. When it fact it's anything but.
I never intended to be a documentary filmmaker. I think I became a documentary filmmaker because I had trouble writing, and I had trouble finishing things.
Maybe today I would call Fred Leuchter and there would be two or three other documentary filmmakers interested in his story simply because of the exposure.
We live in a very litigious society. I've never sued anybody. I certainly can imagine a situation where I might sue, but it seems more or less in bad taste.
The way I go about making a movie... even the ones that are interview-driven, I go into them not knowing what's going to happen, and feeling my way through.
I'm one simple way I think I've succeeded was capturing Elsa [Dorfman]. There's something about Elsa, her personality, and her work that I believe is there.
I don't believe truth is conveyed by style and presentation. I don't think that if it was grainy and full of handheld material, it would be any more truthful.
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.
Not suing others does not mean that others won't sue you.If people are desperate enough to think that they can gain some kind of financial advantage, they'll sue.
I believe it was probably less than ten minutes that went by from the invention of photography to the point where people realized that they could lie with photographs.
We all know that yellow journalism didn't just happen a week ago or a month ago, that yellow journalism has probably been with us as long as journalism has been with us.
I think we get into all kinds of difficulty by saying photographs should be taken in a certain way which guarantees their veracity. I think that's a slippery slope to hell.
What's great about documentary, it seems to me, is that it can be experimental filmmaking. You have a license to do a lot of diverse things under the umbrella of 'documentary.'
There are artists who are very well known and many of us feel they should be less well known, while there are others who aren't well known and many feel deserve more attention.
You know, anything more negative, anything more disparaging, anything more adversarial than what [Donald Trump] does already. The mystery is how he's gotten as far as he's gotten.
There is something about the photographs that is endlessly disturbing. The fact that we like to think of them as torture actually hides what is really deeply offensive about them.
A movie is like a tip of an iceberg, in a way, because so little of what you do in connection with making a movie actually gets into the movie. Almost everything gets left behind.
Films are neither true nor false. That includes my films, as well as others. They may make claims that are true or false, but films are too complex. They have too many ingredients.
I actually felt diminished by watching [Donald Trump's]. If this is what discourse has become in America, who even wants to know about it? It's just too demoralizing and unsettling.