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I may be wrong, but the essential illustrative nature of most documentary photography, and the worship of the object per se, in our best nature photography, is not enough to satisfy the man of today, compounded as he is of Christ, Freud, and Marx.
With portable cameras and affordable data and non-linear digital editing, I think this is a golden age of documentary filmmaking. These new technologies mean we can make complicated, beautifully crafted and cinematic films about real-life stories.
With newspapers cutting foreign bureaus and budgets shrinking for long-form, investigative journalism, documentary filmmakers are often filling a void nowadays in the media landscape with their ability to spend time with their stories and subjects.
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. Then when I was around 15, I did my first movie.
You kind of form a bond with your subjects, in a way. You're in it together. To a degree that people don't realize, documentary films - or at least the kind of documentary films I'm interested in - are a collaborative undertaking with the subjects.
I would encourage people that, if you are waiting for the end of 'The Office,' to re-tune in right away. It is the beginning of the end, where we start to break down what's going on with this documentary and see behind the scenes with who is involved.
I was watching the Nina Simone documentary alone in my room, and I said out loud to myself, 'Why do we not know that this woman is beauty? She is beauty! Why did no one tell me this growing up? Why was her name not next to 'beauty' in the dictionary?'
I am in the representational business, a portraitist. I have tried to walk an amused line amid hyperbole, documentary detail, cruel characterisation, occasional affection, some good punchlines and anthropological social insight. It's been a good living.
The documentary feature film 'Legion of Brothers' tells the stories of the handful of U.S. Special Forces soldiers who, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, went into Taliban-controlled Afghanistan and, within a matter of weeks, overthrew the Taliban regime.
We have this film that we hope to finance, it's called 'Southern Rights.' It's a documentary about segregated proms that are still happening in the South of America. So there's a black prom and a white prom, so we hope to finance a film soon about that.
Teaching regularly has made me an even more adept reader, I think. The kind of teaching I do is more like editing than anything else. The kind of editing book editors used to do before lunch. The kind of editing I used to do as a radio documentary maker.
Documentary people have to know that, particularly nowadays, they have to be on a mission. And part of the mission is to - is to be like good journalists: search for the truth, have an open mind, listen to as much as you can of different sides of things.
I watched the documentary 'I Hate Christian Laettner,' and I really hate Christian Laettner. It made me understand why everybody hates Christian Laettner and Duke basketball. I mean, they're just a bunch of preppy white boys from Tobacco Road or whatever.
There's a great documentary on Tupac called 'Resurrection' about the last few years of Tupac's life and how he transformed. And, ironically, how this East Coast rapper became this West Coast icon, back when all that Death Row/Sean Combs stuff was going on.
On its surface, the HBO documentary series 'Hard Knocks,' about the New York Jets' training camp, resembles another HBO series, 'The Sopranos.' Both star the stout patriarch of a New Jersey 'family' preoccupied with food, intimidation, and florid profanity.
So many good fortunes have come my way, and I'm trying to pay it forward by helping to raise money to complete 'Bulbul: Song Of The Nightingale,' a documentary that brings attention to the social and human injustices suffered by the Banchara tribe in India.
When you make feature films, you have a script, which is a bible. The final result should be as it was written down on paper. And in documentary, you can write whatever you want, but life brings you situations where you have to be fast thinking, fast moving.
In the documentary 'Facing Ali,' nearly half the fighters involved required subtitles despite speaking English, their speech slurred by the physical toll of their ring lives. This was their reward for testing their furthermost physical and mental boundaries.
In documentary filmmaking, there's a tradition of telling stories about victims. We often do that from a very patronizing place, but mostly we do it from a very selfish place, to reassure ourselves that our lives are in sympathy and solidarity with the victims.
We were approached by Alison Ellwood about the idea of doing a documentary. At first, we were a bit nervous because we didn't want it come across as a salacious 'Behind The Music' kind of thing. Alison did such a great job. It really puts perspective on things.
We get so many requests like, 'We want behind-the-scenes access,' or 'We're going to show people what it's really like to be on the campaign with Donald Trump.' But there is just no way that a camera or an episode or a documentary could capture what has gone on.
I love 'Robot Chicken,' 'The Boondocks' and 'America's Funniest Home Videos.' Then there's this show called 'The First 48.' It's a documentary about killings where they try and find murderers. They interrogate people and they tell on each other - it's hilarious.
When you're shooting a feature that costs $200,000 a day with a crew of 250, you don't want accidents; you want to know exactly what's going to happen. But with a documentary, you don't, so you have to be sensitive to accidents because that is where the gold is.
My documentary 'Split Decision' examines Cuban-American relations, and the economic and cultural paradoxes that have shaped them since Castro's revolution, through the lens of elite Cuban boxers forced to choose between remaining in Cuba or defecting to America.
I watching this Disney documentary, and I'm not Disney, but I was thinking about Mickey Mouse and he became an icon. Walt moved onto other things but he made him exist. I was thinking, 'Wow, is 'Samurai Jack' my 'Mickey Mouse?' Am I stupid to stop working on it?'
On telly, there's been a move towards entertainment - with some very high-powered, fast-moving dramas. Then we have the Internet, where we get our information but it's all in bite-size pieces. I think the documentary, as a form, actually speaks to what's missing.
I left acting for a couple of years to found my company, Wayfarer, and the first project I did was this documentary series I created called 'My Last Days' to remind us that our time is limited and to inspire us to do more and to be the best selves that we can be.
Cinema is not truth. Even when you make documentary films, you can choose to show this shot and not the other shot - this side and not the other side. In cinema, there's one truth - not 'the truth.' It's only 'my point of view.' Cinema is powerful because of that.
My friends adore 'TOWIE' - the TV documentary series, 'The Only Way is Essex.' They like it, I'm afraid, for the most unworthy of reasons: class mockery. They tune in to wonder in a 'can you believe those people?' way at the natives of Brentwood and Buckhurst Hill.
When I speak a serious subject in an informal and humorous way, it has bigger impact. So much so, when BBC made a small documentary, they first thought of having a voiceover for me. The producer liked my English so much, he said they were retaining my original voice.
The video for 'Whatever' is kind of a documentary in a way. It's showing that love can last. Not just in your early 20s or your late 30s, but in your 50s, 60s and 70s. There's an awful myth out there that when you get married, love and lovemaking fade. It's not true.
So it is that one side effect of the HD revolution has been the gratifying and edifying return of the nature documentary - films about the hugely varied forms of life that eat, sleep, stalk, mate, fight, thrive, suffer and struggle on our dear and embattled old Earth.
I like to tell people that I have the best job in the media. All I do is hang around with heroes. I do that every week for my 'War Stories' documentary series - and when FOX News wants - I go off and cover the young Americans we send to places like Afghanistan or Iraq.
I went on a cross-country trip with three buddies to find out what our generation is about. I bought a video camera, started shooting, learned as I went, and ended up with 'Our Time,' a feature-length documentary about what it's like to be young in America. I was hooked.
I remember the first time seeing myself on TV, when my family was watching the documentary 'Eyes on the Prize' for the first time. There were pictures of people going up the school stairs, and Mom said, 'Oh, that's you!' I said, 'I can't believe this. This is important.'
I like the idea of the documentary as a portrait. There's not a chronological beginning, middle, and end structure. You build something in the editing room that's shaped by getting to know the person and digging deeper, unpeeling the layers of them as you get to know them.
The only thing documentary filmmakers have to work with, at least the way I make films, is trust. That's been true of everyone from James Carville and George Stephanopoulos to the kids in 'American High' to the soldiers in 'Military Diaries' to Anna Wintour to Dick Cheney.
Comics shouldn't be 'tools' for anyone's agenda except for the characters. And I am speaking only of super hero action comics. I love many of the alternative comics that are like journalistic stories. Documentary comics, a mix of reportage and fiction. Those are just great.
I'm always reaching for something we really haven't done, and War of the Worlds has a lot of this sort of documentary look to it and first-person camera view that is a new thing for me. I've done some stuff like that before, but nothing like the extent of this and digitally.
I watched Ricki Lake's documentary, 'The Business of Being Born,' and that led me to call a midwife, and not an ob-gyn, when I found out I had conceived. My delivery was not easy - they call it 'labor,' not 'a vacation!' - but I was incredibly grateful that I did it that way.
While the documentary community is way ahead of Hollywood, it is still nowhere near where it needs to be. Filmmakers of color rarely get hired by the powerful production companies, and they are not getting supported enough by broadcasters and funders to tell their own stories.
In college, I actually did some work on a documentary project talking to Vietnam vets about the images of war and how it changed. When they grew up, it was like 'Sands of Iwo Jima' and there was this, you know - after Vietnam, there was a whole different way of looking at war.
One of the other things that I love about Miyazaki's films, is that when he sets a film in Europe, it's not a documentary - it doesn't really look like Europe, but it's something he internalises, synthesises and weaves into his work. I love seeing that cross-cultural exchange.
'This is Spinal Tap' was a film we felt really had to be done like that. It wouldn't have worked any other way. And it turned out to be the first time a fiction film had really been made in a documentary format. I continued to do that, obviously, because it's a fun way to work.
I can sit down and watch the Discovery channel and see something on nuclear submarines that gets me thinking about torpedoes and darts . Or I can see a documentary about someone preparing for a big challenge and I'll use the same techniques. You always need to aim to get better.
I'm pretty interested in documentary film, and I'd watch almost anything. At some point, I stumbled upon 'shoot interviews' and found out that wrestlers were now talking openly about things that were going on in wrestling that we as viewers were not privy to. This fascinated me.
My weekend might not start on a Friday like everyone else's, because I could be working on Saturday and Sunday. But when I do get the chance to have some weekend time, I like to hang out with my friends and just chill out on the couch - maybe we'll watch a documentary or a comedy.
In Austin, you work in anything that will pay and a lot of things that don't. The documentary filmmaker may also be a gaffer on a feature and producer for a commercial series and web host. Everyone just does a little bit of everything, and you have to because it's a secondary market.
I want to venture into film more, and I think that a nice way to transition into doing that would be a documentary. I think it would be interesting to find one person that really fascinated me or maybe a band and travel with them, but I don't think I could do it like I used to do it.
Ben Affleck exec-produced a documentary for HBO called 'Reporter' about my 2007 win-a-trip journey. I take the trip each year partly to encourage young people to think about global humanitarian issues: I think blogs by a student may be more compelling for that audience than my own work.