Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I've been fairly private about my personal life. I've been approached by other companies to do a documentary about cosplay and about my life, but I've never felt comfortable.
I don't want to be on a soapbox, but I feel like a lot of documentary filmmakers are part of the ancient tradition of writing down notes, of saying, 'Hey people, hey people!'
This is indeed not only relevant to Documentary but is evident is most type of film making. The film often mirrors the experience, understanding and politics of the director.
I made three short films of my own which I wrote, produced, directed... you did everything in those days. My favourite one was something I shot on VHS... a little documentary.
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.'
I have a great career, and no matter what I am doing, a big blockbuster movie... or my small documentary, David Letterman will call and say I would like you to sit on my couch.
I want to see that 'Anita' documentary. I want to see 'Lovelace'; I want to see 'After Midnight,' because I saw the other two and I loved them. I thought the last one was great.
In war films, even more than in other kinds of documentary, we've come to think that shaky, poor-quality footage is somehow more authentic than something classically 'well shot.'
I was driven to give the best possible performance I could based on the material that was given to me and that material was documentary footage of the President speaking to people.
When you are cleaning, sweeping, swabbing floors and running around for the littlest of things on a shoot for an ad or a documentary, you realize how tough life is behind the camera.
In a way then, the Divine Principle, this new revelation, is the documentary of my life. It is my own life experience. The Divine Principle is in me, and I am in the Divine Principle.
If you had the opportunity and some talent, there was no way you couldn't progress, because it was an open market. There was the advertising world, and there was the documentary world.
It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.
The Netflix thing with Nas is more of a documentary, where we kind of… talk. We go to my neighborhood. You get to see where I'm from and all that. And then, I'm in the studio with Nas.
When I left university I was working for a documentary film company for six or seven years to the great relief of my father whose greatest waking fear was that I would become an actor.
The testimony and the documentary evidence produced by the Government demonstrate that the Bell System had violated the antitrust laws in a number of ways over a lengthy period of time.
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.
Photography has always been about documentary, the depiction of the instant, a moment, sometimes a place. Each project is somehow an experimentation of a specific context or a character.
Maybe if I found something I was really passionate about, which is entirely possible, I would make another documentary, but it's not a good career choice for anybody. I don't recommend it.
In documentary films, you're a storyteller using found objects. You still have to have a story arc and all the elements that make a good story. It really helped me mature as a storyteller.
I began to feel that the drama of the truth that is in the moment and in the past is richer and more interesting than the drama of Hollywood movies. So I began looking at documentary films.
And in reality, I don't think it's a real documentary. It's more a story of her life. It's a story of survival. It's a story of the time in which she lived. The story of success and failure.
Until I was 16 or 17, I had heard practically nothing about the history that preceded 1945. Only when we were 17 were we confronted with a documentary film of the opening of the Belsen camp.
This was almost two hours of factual documentary. In our audience ratings, barely no one left the programme. The whole of his life is so fascinating and people kept watching for that reason.
I saw this documentary he did years ago called 'Fade to Black.' I was always a Jay Z fan - I liked Jay Z - but after I saw that documentary, I loved Jay Z. I realized how intelligent he was.
Watching a documentary with people hacking their way through some polar wasteland is merely a visual. Actually trying to deal with cold that can literally kill you is quite a different thing.
As the documentary 'True Son' illustrates, my campaign for city council started really small - with eight mostly political neophytes in my living room and with young people knocking on doors.
I think the reality-show format is brilliant, has endless possibilities. It's documentary! But unfortunately, it's rarely executed well. So it becomes just a scripted show, but without actors.
If I wanted to make something that actually made a difference roughly in this industry, I would make a documentary. That would be the closest I could come to actually try and make a difference.
Sure, 'An Inconvenient Truth' was my first documentary. What a wonderful experience. I saw Al Gore doing his slideshow presentation, and had this nutty idea that we had to make a movie out of it.
So much of art-making is about reducing things to the essentials, so I don't feel particularly crippled by this. I don't want it to look natural because then I would be making a documentary film.
Everything I've made - it doesn't mean they've all been good - but everything I've made so far, big or little, fiction or documentary, has been something that I've been really enthusiastic about.
I was so used to documentary filming, where it's one take. You can't really say, 'Make that elephant charge again!' And you talk to the camera. With movie filming, you're talking to someone else.
A lot of the times, reality shows don't like people to break the fourth wall. With a docu-series or a documentary, everyone breaks the fourth wall because you're talking to the camera quite a bit.
Why documentary about Iron Sheik? Lotta people, they ask me about my story. They ask me how the legend come from oldest country in the world, the Iran, to come to the America to become the legend.
I came through the ranks of the BBC documentary department. I was lucky working during this drama doc era, where they did reconstructions, basically like cheap drama made by the factual department.
But I can say what interests me about documentary is the fact that you don't know how the story ends at the onset - that you are investigating, with a camera, and the story emerges as you go along.
I have two sisters that are directors: one's in documentary, one's in film. My mother was a writer and a painter, so I've been surrounded since childhood by dynamic women and female voices in arts.
As a documentary filmmaker, 'Meru' was an irresistible challenge. You can spend years searching for the right story, but this one had all the elements: the obstacles, the characters, and the drama.
I learned how to tell stories with Jay-Z on 'City Is Mine.' I learned how to film and choreograph dancing on 'Can I Get A...,' and I got to kind of be a documentary filmmaker with 'Hard Knock Life.'
I feel like one of the things that I watched that I felt was really helpful in some way but, more than anything, is worth mentioning was this film 'Boogie Man.' It's a documentary about Lee Atwater.
In Delhi, I got a chance to assist someone on a documentary film. Then I moved to Mumbai. This was before the satellite TV. One had to assist a director for years before being able to direct a movie.
For someone like me, making a documentary - I don't kid myself. There's no influence at all. What I do is entertainment. I would even say much the same about the column I write in 'The Sunday Times.'
I started to do theater when I was a little boy at school, and then, I think because my father was a documentary filmmaker and worked for German television, I was of course fascinated by what he did.
When a documentary filmmaker, working in the style that I do, suggests that there has been a shooting ratio of 40 hours to every one hour of finished film, that doesn't mean that the other 39 are bad.
I did documentary film for a long time, and I spent a lot of time behind the camera, fervently wishing that the reality I was filming would conform to my narrative propriety. But you can't control it.
I'm very influenced by documentary filmmaking and independent filmmaking, by a lot of noir and films from the '40s. Those are my favorite. And then, filmmaking from the '70s is a big influence for me.
I was watching a Storyville documentary called 'Blackfish' about killer whales in captivity. I was emotionally drained by the end. It revealed a real behind-the-scenes truth on what we do with animals.
With everything that I've done with YouTube and podcasts for so many years, it's been: you can record it, edit, and then upload that day. With the book and documentary, it's been such a longer process.
Right after watching 'Kabul Express,' I wanted to work with Kabir sir. Moreover, earlier he was a documentary maker, and the respective genre has always fascinated me, and I still desire to work in one.