Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Politicians pretend not to be smart.
Success and singing is not synonymous.
We saw The Who on New Year's Eve in 1975.
Church singing is a great training ground.
There's no cultural revolution by mistake.
I think of myself as a cultural filmmaker.
Everyone feels entitled to their own facts.
Harmony singing isn't meant to be done alone.
Watching somebody sing reveals a lot about character.
I love Memphis, and just being there affects one's outlook.
I could really sink my teeth into a David Bowie documentary.
By the rules of debate, if you lose your cool, you've lost the game.
They don't make people like Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley anymore.
I am a big believer in the power of journalism; it's a heroic pursuit.
Docs, in general, are made in the edit bay, archival docs even more so.
There are a handful of music docs I'd love to do, including David Bowie.
The problem with a lot of narrative films is that they're not real enough.
I love documentaries. I love the format. I've been doing them for a long time.
I feel like there's a lot of sympathy and camaraderie among documentary filmmakers.
I've produced two docs for Cameron Crowe, and I've always loved him as a filmmaker.
I wish I didn't care about what people thought as much as Keith Richards doesn't care.
If we can't agree on objective truth, then how are we ever going to agree on opinions?
The easiest way to subjugate a people is to erase a culture. I've seen it in war zones.
Everything about Hank Williams interests me. His music, his life. His death. His impact.
If you're not doing it for the right reasons, then you'd be dumb to be making documentaries.
TV tends to laud the person with the perfect one-liner rather than the one with the better idea.
Being a backup singer means being able to sing on a dime. Music is oozing out of their every pore.
You make documentaries because you love doing it; it's the only sane reason to make documentaries.
Now, you watch cable news, and you know what everybody's going to say before they open their mouth.
There was no model how to make a documentary production company work. I figured it out as I went along.
Culture in general is important, and people's identify is tied up in it. It's how we connect with others.
I feel like - like Netflix is great if you've got a project ready to launch itself into the world rapidly.
I would argue that the culture is not the frosting on the cake: the culture is the plate the cake sits on.
I came up in left-wing political writing. My first job out of college was working as Gore Vidal's fact checker.
Space is something which makes us question our role here on Earth. It brings out the best of our hopes and dreams.
To be a backup singer, you have to walk into any situation and just be perfect from the first take to the 50th take.
When you come to documentaries, the stakes are too low for it to be cutthroat. You're all doing it for the right reasons.
If I told my 14-year-old self that I'd be hanging out with Keith Richards talking about records, my head would've exploded.
I'd worked on music docs for years. It felt like writing a novel. By the time I got to Keith Richards, it felt like making a sketch.
I never got into making documentaries for any kind of success, because documentary careers are generally ones of prolonged failures.
If the Olympic Spirit is about overcoming every hurdle and accepting no limits, then I think Samsung is a great ambassador for these values.
I feel more relaxed after the Oscar. I feel like I have a chance to just tell the stories I want to tell, and it's actually been really nice.
When you come from a place and an identity, you can feel constricted and have to get away. But then you realise how much a part of you it is.
The first night I met Yo-Yo Ma, I found him the most charming person I had ever met, and I was willing to follow him with the camera anywhere.
So much of what we get on our news debate shows is really people spinning one way or the other, giving their talking points one way or the other.
One of the challenges was to make a cinematic movie about literally talking heads and to try to make it feel like something you want to see in a theater.
How often do we make films just celebrating people that do a good job, work altruistically, and are in it just for the sake of the love and not the business?
Like the ancient Silk Road itself, 'The Sound of Silk' will make the foreign familiar while challenging long-held notions of identity and our place in the world.
When you're writing a story or an actor playing a role, you should never think of your characters as heroes or villains. You have to think of them as people first.
I so often doubt how much people on television believe what they're saying. They're playing roles for think tanks or political parties or shills of whatever stripe.