Documentary Quotes

In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director. (Alfred Hitchcock)

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.

Richard Donner

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.

Rod Serling

Films are always a fiction, not documentary. Even a documentary is a kind of fiction.

Philip Seymour Hoffman

I'm really excited to be a part of it and sharing the legacy, any documentary I look up at the sky and Kevin Burns did and Bryan did and showed me again you know the history that's in this character and you know.

Brandon Routh

We'll be back to our nature documentary, 'Baggy the Anorexic Elephant' in just a second.

Colin Mochrie

Last year, I reviewed a nine-hour documentary about the lives of Mongolian yak herdsmen, and I would rather see it again than sit through The Frighteners.

Roger Ebert

Short of climbing aboard a time capsule and peeling back eight and one-half decades, James Cameron's magnificent Titanic is the closest any of us will get to walking the decks of the doomed ocean liner. Meticulous in detail, yet vast in scope and intent, Titanic is the kind of epic motion picture event that has become a rarity. You don't just watch Titanic, you experience it - from the launch to the sinking, then on a journey two and one-half miles below the surface, into the cold, watery grave where Cameron has shot never-before seen documentary footage specifically for this movie.

James Berardinelli

In the documentary the basic material has been created by God, whereas in the fiction film the director is a God; he must create life.

Alfred Hitchcock

If all human production (aesthetic or otherwise) has its documentary aspect (i.e., it can be associated, by a knowledgeable reader, with a time and place), does this endanger its aesthetic aspects per se? It is the richness of the pattern that is aesthetically at stake. How many art histories does it take to make us understand that reference (a use context) and historicity are not the same?

Samuel R. Delany

We're telling a story. And the demands of that are different from the demands of a documentary. The audience must believe in order to keep faith in the story. (Bradley Whitford)

Right after I did 'The Fountain,' I wanted to go make a documentary or something that was less constructed - more natural. I was searching for a project, and sniffing around, 'The Wrestler' fit right in.

Darren Aronofsky

I watched a TV documentary about how animals are farmed, killed and prepared for us to eat. I saw all those cows and pigs and realized I couldn't be a part of it any more. It was horrible. I did some research to make sure I could still obtain enough protein to fight and, once satisfied that I could, I stopped. I'll never go back.

David Haye

Even a fiction film is hard to end. You can going on shooting and editing a documentary forever.

Leos Carax

The great thing about 'The Office' and it being single-camera and the documentary style is that it's mostly a comedy, but 10 percent of it is, we get to show the existential angst that exists in the American workplace.

Rainn Wilson

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.

Aaron Siskind

Right now, I'm Writing song lyrics. Experimenting with a play. Toying with an idea for a documentary. I hope one of these will eventually be launched into the light of day.

Anita Diament

I got five kids, and my oldest is a documentary film maker and camera man, and still photographer.

Beau Bridges

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.

Dennis Muren

When I did Taming of the Shrew, I was very tired, and I decided to have a holiday and make a documentary.

Diane Cilento

You're making a movie, not a documentary. If you made a film like the historians would like you to make, you're not going to go and see it. I'd rather see paint dry. (Dougray Scott)

I want to communicate through my music. If you want to know Geri Halliwell listen to my album: it tells you more about me than a documentary ever could.

Geri Halliwell

For me, documentary photography has always come with great responsibility. Not just to tell the story honestly and with empathy, but also to make sure the right people hear it. When you photograph somebody who is in pain or discomfort, they trust you to make sure the images will act as their advocate.

Giles Duley

Is this film more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?

Gene Siskel

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.

Harold H. Greene

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