I don't think I'll be making documentaries my whole life.
I love the unexpected and I think that's why documentary is an attractive genre to me because you don't know where it's going to go, so I tend to involve that as much as possible in the production process.
Even the best documentaries reach tens of thousands in their cinematic window. I believe that by launching online, we could potentially reach millions.
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.
A good documentary or educational film is not raw experience. The material has passed the mill of reason, it has been sifted and interpreted.
I think documentary filmmakers need as much protection as possible under journalist's privilege. How else is the public to know what is going on?
In some ways, the documentary form is a kind of trap and so is societal norms.
It's funny how it reads like a Kubrick-inspired moment, a filmmaker controlling one's mise en scène. What it truly is is a documentary moment.
You see reality TV and it's not reality TV. It's contrived and everything is plotted and scripted nearly. Documentaries are the same and just as bad.
When the American documentary filmmaker Donn Alan Pennebaker wanted to do a film on Dylan, Dylan asked him what he'd already done, and Pennebaker answered, Nothing except shots in the street. Dylan asked to see them, and he agreed to let him do the film.
I had worked in fiction a lot before I started making documentaries, but when I was around 32 or 33-years-old I suddenly got so fed up with the world of fiction, which is so money-centered.
It's said that if two documentary filmmakers meet they talk about the world, if two fiction filmmakers meet they talk about the million that they don't have to make their film.
From film to film, even documentaries, I was learning the medium and learning how to bring form into some kind of relationship with the content, how to work it, and above all, how to create some kind of order out of chaos.
When you make a documentary film, after many years the only thing you remember is what you put into the film, not what you took out.
I think most albums deserve a documentary because [an album] is a visual book. You don't have to read up on it because you can listen and watch the whole story. I would love to see lots of albums [become films.]
Documentary film without nuanced journalistic sourcing risks being sensational, tendentious or broad-brushed.
I'm not somebody who comes in with a whole outline, and says, "Here's the movie we're going to make." That's not what a documentary is for me. I think a documentary is about capturing events as they unfold in real time.
I don't really believe that documentary is objective reality and fiction is all illusion.
I love documentaries and I watch documentaries to no end.
Three of the top six documentaries of all time, grossing, are made by me.
I've been encouraging documentary filmmakers to use more and more humor, and they're loath to do that because they think if it's a documentary it has to be deadly serious - it has to be like medicine that you're supposed to take. And I think it's what keeps the mass audience from going to documentaries.
Post-war filmmakers gave us the documentary, Rob Reiner gave us the mockumentary and Moore initiated a third genre, the crockumentary.
We all need to be huge supporters of the theatrical documentary.
For a documentary filmmaker, I do very well.
I've made many documentaries, but prostitution was the hardest in terms of gaining the trust of the people being filmed.
