Documentary Quotes

1. "In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director."
Author: Alfred Hitchcock

2. "So you're Zach." Townsend didn't even try to hide the judgement in his voice as he looked Zach up and down in some sort of silent but dangerous examination.Zach huffed but smiled. "so you're Townsend."The two of them stared for a long time, wordless. It felt like I was watching a documentary on the Nature Channel, something about alpha males in the wild."
Author: Ally Carter

3. "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."
Author: Anita Diament

4. "The whiteness celebrated in Paris is Burning is not just any old brand of whiteness but rather that brutal imperial ruling-class capitalist patriarchal whiteness that presents itself -its way of life- as the only meaningful life there is. What could be more reassuring to a white public fearful that marginalized disenfranchised black folks might rise any day now make revolutionary black liberation struggle a reality than a documentary affirming that colonized, victimized, exploited black folks, are all too willing to be complicit in perpetuating the fantasy that ruling-class white culture is the quintessential site of unrestricted joy, freedom, power and pleasure."
Author: Bell Hooks

5. "Watching Paris is Burning, I began to think that the many yuppie-looking, straight -acting, pushy, predominantly white folks in the audience were there because the film in no way interrogates "whiteness." These folks left the film saying it was "amazing," "marvellous," incredibly funny," worthy of statements like, "Didn't you just love it?" And no, I didn't love it. For in many ways the film was a graphic documentary portrait of the way in which colonized black people (in this case black gay brothers, some of whom were drag queens) worship at the throne of whiteness, even when such worship demands that we live in perpetual self-hate, steal, go hungry, and even die in its pursuit. The "we" evoked here is all of us, black people/people of color, who are daily bombarded by a powerful colonizing whiteness that seduces us away from ourselves, that negates that there is beauty to be found in any form of blackness that is not imitation whiteness."
Author: Bell Hooks

6. "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."
Author: Ben Edwards

7. "The last reunion was a bit of a rushed job, we had to do a gig and documentary."
Author: Brian Harvey

8. "Documentary films are created in an inverted funnel of declining possibility."
Author: Bruce Jackson

9. "The reason I call myself a documentary photographer is the idea of how photographs contain and participate in history."
Author: Catherine Opie

10. "I like the boundaries, the kinds of conventions of a documentary and having to work within that."
Author: Chris Lilley

11. "We'll be back to our nature documentary, 'Baggy the Anorexic Elephant' in just a second."
Author: Colin Mochrie

12. "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."
Author: Daniel Bruhl

13. "The worst thing that can happen to a comedian is to do a documentary on your life and you're watching it with an audience and there's not a laugh."
Author: David Steinberg

14. "To make a documentary is one thing, to make a feature film is quite another."
Author: Dennis Hopper

15. "A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph."
Author: Dorothea Lange

16. "The best films of any kind, narrative or documentary, provoke questions."
Author: Edward Norton

17. "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."
Author: Garth Stein

18. "But if anyoneso much as threatened them because of what Kaiahad once done, she would turn the Slumber PartyMassacre into Blood, Bath and Beyond, adocumentary by Kaia Skyhawk."
Author: Gena Showalter

19. "Is this film more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?"
Author: Gene Siskel

20. "I have my ideas of what a good documentary is, but drama is a different animal because you're arranging everything."
Author: Gus Van Sant

21. "I live in Tuxedo Park, N.Y. and spend time in the West Village, where my wife Elizabeth Cotnoir, a writer-producer and documentary filmmaker, has an office."
Author: Howard Shore

22. "I craved a form of naive realism. I paid special attention, I craned my readerly neck whenever a London street I knew was mentioned, or a style of frock, a real public person, even a make of car. Then, I thought, I had a measure, I could guage the quality of the writing by its accuracy, by the extent to which it aligned with my own impressions, or improved upon them. I was fortunate that most English writing of the time was in the form of undemanding social documentary. I wasn't impressed by those writers (they were spread between South and North America) who infiltrated their own pages as part of the cast, determined to remind poor reader that all the characters and even they themselves were pure inventions and the there was a difference between fiction and life. Or, to the contrary, to insist that life was a fiction anyway. Only writers, I thought, were ever in danger of confusing the two."
Author: Ian McEwan

23. "I regard sports first and foremost as entertainment, so dry documentary narration is not for me."
Author: Jack Brickhouse

24. "'Jurassic Park' has a lot of science in it - and a lot of it is wrong - but if it was all accurate, it would be a documentary."
Author: Jack Horner

25. "[Memory]... is a system of near-infinite complexity, a system that seems designed for revision as much as for replication, and revision unquestionably occurs. Details from separate experiences weave together, so that the rememberer thinks of them as having happened together. The actual year or season or time of day shifts to a different one. Many details are lost, usually in ways that serve the self in its present situation, not the self of ten or twenty or forty years ago when the remembered event took place. And even the fresh memory, the 'original,' is not reliable in a documentary sense....Memory, in short, is not a record of the past but an evolving myth of understanding the psyche spins from its engagement with the world."
Author: John Daniel

26. "There is a saying among the peoples of the Northwest Coast: "The world is as sharp as the edge of a knife," and Robert Davidson, the man responsible for carving Masset's first post-missionary pole, imagines this edge as a circle. "If you live on the edge of the circle," he explained in a documentary film, "that is the present moment. What's inside is knowledge, experience: the past. What's outside has yet to be experienced. The knife's edge is so fine that you can live either in the past or in the future. The real trick," says Davidson, "is to live on the edge."
Author: John Vaillant

27. "Documentaries - my God, there is so much going on in our country and in the world today that every time you open the newspaper or turn on the radio or watch the news on TV there is another documentary subject. We're getting the headlines for a second, shaped by corporate delivery most of the time, but what's really the story there?"
Author: Jonathan Demme

28. "...it is a very risky thing for anyone to go about proclaiming the truth simply because he finds himself in possession of concrete documentary proofs or on the evidence of his own eyes, which is always overestimated."
Author: Jorge Amado

29. "I feel like we're going to see a lot more movies that mix documentary style with fiction, more along the lines of 'District 9.'"
Author: Josh Trank

30. "My instinct was that it was Sidney's childhood in the Bahamas that gave him the fearlessness to fight racism. So this documentary was a kind of rounding out of what had begun in that scene in In the Heat of the Night."
Author: Lee Grant

31. "There is no way I could have ever dared to make a documentary, much less have the money to make a documentary, if it was on 16mm. But, with the magic of digital."
Author: Lloyd Kaufman

32. "Ten years ago I saw a documentary on the siege of that Moscow theater. After just forty-eight hours of the terrorists confining the hostages to their seats with no sleep, the lights blazing and being forced to pee their pants-although if the had to shit, they could do so in the orchestra pit-well,more than a few hostages just stood up and walked to the exit knowing they'd get shot in the back. Because the were DONE."
Author: Maria Semple

33. "People aren't familiar with wheelchair sports. The only film crew in Athens for the Paralympics was the documentary crew."
Author: Mark Zupan

34. "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."
Author: Martin Bashir

35. "I'm a documentary photographer. That's what I've always wanted to be; that's where my heart and soul is."
Author: Mary Ellen Mark

36. "Whenever I watch a documentary about the space, I find the news in the world very funny and dull!"
Author: Mehmet Murat Ildan

37. "I want to do a documentary about strippers, 'cause it's a moneymaker."
Author: Method Man

38. "Documentary"
Author: Pam Grout

39. "With documentary-film projects, you hope you highlight an area of concern people haven't thought about before. A lot of times, I'm asking myself - 'This seems to be a significant problem. What can be done that hasn't been done?'"
Author: Paul Allen

40. "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."
Author: Richard Donner

41. "I have seen the Gore documentary 'An Inconvenient Truth,' just released in the States, and admired the acutely revolutionary delivery of the slideshow assisted talk he has now been giving for some 16 years."
Author: Saffron Burrows

42. "I'll check on you when I get home. I love you, baby. (Kiefer)I love you too, Daddy. (Kiara)What the hell was that action? (Syn)I think it's something called ‘paternal concern.' (Nykyrian)What…? You sure? I thought that crap was a myth. (Syn)No, really. I watched it once in a documentary. It was fascinating. Believe it or not, there are people out there who actually have feelings for their progeny. (Nykyrian)Get the fuck out. No way. You're screwing with my head again, aren't you? (Syn)No, I swear. You just saw it with your own eyes. I did not make that shit up. (Nykyrian)Yeah but it's really messing with my concept of the natural order of the universe. Paternal love? What's next? Limb regrowth? Genetic splicing reversals? (Syn)"
Author: Sherrilyn Kenyon

43. "THE MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA(1929) the 'honesty' of documentary as compared with fiction film, the 'perfection' of the cinematic eye compared with human eye."
Author: Steven Jay Schneider

44. "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."
Author: Sun Myung Moon

45. "[Taken from a BBC documentary]Tariq was born in Lahore, now in Pakistan, then part of British-ruled India, in 1943. A Catholic school education did nothing to shake his life-long atheism, which he shared with his communist parents."
Author: Tariq Ali

46. "Tariq was born in Lahore, now in Pakistan, then part of British-ruled India, in 1943. A Catholic school education did nothing to shake his life-long atheism.(BBC Documentary)"
Author: Tariq Ali

47. "As a documentary filmmaker, I'm very respectful, and my interview style is not intrusive. I don't really have an agenda. I just go in there, I mumble something or other, I wait for them to speak, and I wait for them to stop."
Author: Tony Kaye

48. "It had an enormous impact to the point of the United Nations passing a resolution against the killing and hunting of these whales as they are an endangered species. This was a documentary on the plight of the whales."
Author: Wavy Gravy

49. "Bob Weir calls me a saint, but I'm 'Saint Misbehavin'.' They're making a documentary about my life, and that's the current shooting title. I can roll with that, but otherwise the s-word makes me really paranoid."
Author: Wavy Gravy

50. "Ever since the robot was first invented, there have been people who swear up and down that this marks the first step towards the fall of man … To be fair, their arguments are backed with scientific fact taken from documentary films such as The Terminator, The Matrix, and RoboCop."
Author: Weston Locher

Documentary Quotes Pictures