Documentary Filmmaking Quotes

The best documentaries are independent. They don’t exist to serve interests, philanthropic or otherwise.

Ridiculous. You guys are going to have the most boring documentary on earth," I said and stormed inside. "Could you walk in the building again, but slower and don't slam the door," Hugo called after me.

A few years ago, the wonderful documentary filmmaker Michael Pack and the no-less-wonderful historian-biographer Richard Brookhiser visited us at Princeton to offer an advance viewing of their film biography George Washington. Some of the students were a bit perplexed when Brookhiser explained that Washington came to be who he was by imagining an ideal, truly noble individual. As a young man, the future statesman formed a picture of the kind of person he would like to be and then tried to become that person by acting the way that person would act. He “stepped into the role” he had designed for himself. He sought to make himself virtuous by ridding himself of wayward desires or passions that would have no place in the character and life of the noble individual he sought to emulate and, by emulating, to become.

But for many people, an even more motivating example than increasing blood flow to your brain and your heart can be found in The Game Changers, a powerful new documentary film produced by legendary filmmaker James Cameron

I seriously doubt that Agnès Varda ever followed in anyone else’s footsteps, in any corner of her life or her art…which were one in the same. She charted and walked her own path each step of the way, she and her camera. Every single one of her remarkable handmade pictures, so beautifully balanced between documentary and fiction, is like no one else’s—every image, every cut… What a body of work she left behind: movies big and small, playful and tough, generous and solitary, lyrical and unflinching…and alive. I saw her for the last time a couple of months ago. She knew that she didn’t have much longer, and she made every second count: she didn’t want to miss a thing. I feel so lucky to have known her. And to all young filmmakers: you need to watch Agnès Varda’s pictures.

The Oscar-nominated documentary The Act of Killing tells the story of the gangster leaders who carried out anti-communist purges in Indonesia in 1965 to usher in the regime of Suharto. The film’s hook, which makes it compelling and accessible, is that the filmmakers get Anwar —one of the death-squad leaders, who murdered around a thousand communists using a wire rope—and his acolytes to reenact the killings and events around them on film in a variety of genres of their choosing. In the film’s most memorable sequence, Anwar—who is old now and actually really likable, a bit like Nelson Mandela, all soft and wrinkly with nice, fuzzy gray hair—for the purposes of a scene plays the role of a victim in one of the murders that he in real life carried out. A little way into it, he gets a bit tearful and distressed and, when discussing it with the filmmaker on camera in the next scene, reveals that he found the scene upsetting. The offcamera director asks the poignant question, “What do you think your victims must’ve felt like?” and Anwar initially almost fails to see the connection. Eventually, when the bloody obvious correlation hits him, he thinks it unlikely that his victims were as upset as he was, because he was “really” upset. The director, pressing the film’s point home, says, “Yeah but it must’ve been worse for them, because we were just pretending; for them it was real.” Evidently at this point the reality of the cruelty he has inflicted hits Anwar, because when they return to the concrete garden where the executions had taken place years before, he, on camera, begins to violently gag. This makes incredible viewing, as this literally visceral ejection of his self and sickness at his previous actions is a vivid catharsis. He gagged at what he’d done. After watching the film, I thought—as did probably everyone who saw it—how can people carry out violent murders by the thousand without it ever occurring to them that it is causing suffering? Surely someone with piano wire round their neck, being asphyxiated, must give off some recognizable signs? Like going “ouch” or “stop” or having blood come out of their throats while twitching and spluttering into perpetual slumber? What it must be is that in order to carry out that kind of brutal murder, you have to disengage with the empathetic aspect of your nature and cultivate an idea of the victim as different, inferior, and subhuman. The only way to understand how such inhumane behavior could be unthinkingly conducted is to look for comparable examples from our own lives. Our attitude to homelessness is apposite here. It isn’t difficult to envisage a species like us, only slightly more evolved, being universally appalled by our acceptance of homelessness. “What? You had sufficient housing, it cost less money to house them, and you just ignored the problem?” They’d be as astonished by our indifference as we are by the disconnected cruelty of Anwar.

chairman of the Washington Post Company, in a one-word e-mail I received the morning after the story appeared. A German filmmaker, who happened to be visiting Washington’s Holocaust Memorial Museum on the day the story was published, decided to make a documentary about Shin’s life.

James O. Incandenza - A Filmography The following listing is as complete as we can make it. Because the twelve years of Incadenza'a directorial activity also coincided with large shifts in film venue - from public art cinemas, to VCR-capable magnetic recordings, to InterLace TelEntertainment laser dissemination and reviewable storage disk laser cartridges - and because Incadenza's output itself comprises industrial, documentary, conceptual, advertorial, technical, parodic, dramatic non-commercial, nondramatic ('anti-confluential') noncommercial, nondramatic commercial, and dramatic commercial works, this filmmaker's career presents substantive archival challenges. These challenges are also compounded by the fact that, first, for conceptual reasons, Incadenza eschewed both L. of C. registration and formal dating until the advent of Subsidized Time, secondly, that his output increased steadily until during the last years of his life Incadenza often had several works in production at the same time, thirdly, that his production company was privately owned and underwent at least four different changes of corporate name, and lastly that certain of his high-conceptual projects' agendas required that they be titled and subjected to critique but never filmed, making their status as film subject to controversy.

John was one of Australia’s award-winning documentary filmmakers. He and Steve had met in the late 1980s, when Steve would help John shoot commercials that required a zoo animal like a lizard or a turtle. But their friendship did not really take off until 1990, when an Australian beer company hired John to film a tricky shot involving a crocodile. He called Steve. “They want a bloke to toss a coldie to another bloke, but a croc comes out of the water and snatches at it. The guy grabs the beer right in front of the croc’s jaws. You think that’s doable?” “Sure, mate, no problem at all,” Steve said with his usual confidence. “Only one thing, it has to be my hand in front of the croc.

Before getting into CRISPR, Zayner tried a variety of synthetic biology experiments, including on himself. To treat his gastrointestinal problems, he performed a fecal transplant (don’t ask) to transform his gut’s microbiome. He did the procedure in a hotel room with two filmmakers documenting the scene, and (in case you really do want to know how it works) it became a short documentary called Gut Hack that can be found online.2

I went to see Frederick Wiseman, the pioneer of interview-free, commentary-free, documentation-free documentary – a filmmaker who glides so slowly with his camera into the heart of what he is filming that everyone forgets that he is there. I told him about all the difficulties I found myself up against in trying to piece together the life of Barbara Loden. And he said to me – this man, who never works on anything that isn’t real, said to me quite calmly – ‘Make it up. All you have to do is make it up.

At a young age, Evan would listen in on his father’s long legal calls, which he credits for giving him early business exposure that helped develop his critical thinking and business accumen. He can often become obsessed with ideas, hungrily learning everything he can about them at a rapid pace. Evan is constantly curious and is learning and getting better at being a CEO very quickly. But his two superpowers are (1) his ability to get inside his users’ heads and think like a teenage girl and (2) his knack for attracting brilliant, powerful mentors. Evan loves picking other people’s brains over a walk or a meal. Over the years he has attracted an A-list roster of mentors, including SoftBank’s Nikesh Arora, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Google’s Eric Schmidt. He doesn’t just limit these brain dumps to tech luminaries, though, as he often walks and chats with fashion designers, politicians, documentary filmmakers, and other intriguing peers. Often, these impressive people will come speak to Team Snapchat at their Venice headquarters.

Then, just as we were to leave on a whirlwind honeymoon in the beautiful Pacific Northwest, a call came from Australia. Steve’s friend John Stainton had word that a big croc had been frequenting areas too close to civilization, and someone had been taking potshots at him. “It’s a big one, Stevo, maybe fourteen or fifteen feet,” John said over the phone. “I hate to catch you right at this moment, but they’re going to kill him unless he gets relocated.” John was one of Australia’s award-winning documentary filmmakers. He and Steve had met in the late 1980s, when Steve would help John shoot commercials that required a zoo animal like a lizard or a turtle. But their friendship did not really take off until 1990, when an Australian beer company hired John to film a tricky shot involving a crocodile. He called Steve. “They want a bloke to toss a coldie to another bloke, but a croc comes out of the water and snatches at it. The guy grabs the beer right in front of the croc’s jaws. You think that’s doable?” “Sure, mate, no problem at all,” Steve said with his usual confidence. “Only one thing, it has to be my hand in front of the croc.” John agreed. He journeyed up to the zoo to film the commercial. It was the first time he had seen Steve on his own turf, and he was impressed. He was even more impressed when the croc shoot went off flawlessly. Monty, the saltwater crocodile, lay partially submerged in his pool. An actor fetched a coldie from the esky and tossed it toward Steve. As Steve’s hand went above Monty’s head, the crocodile lunged upward in a food response. On film it looked like the croc was about to snatch the can--which Steve caught right in front of his jaws. John was extremely impressed. As he left the zoo after completing the commercial shoot, Steve gave him a collection of VHS tapes. Steve had shot the videotapes himself. The raw footage came from Steve simply propping his camera in a tree, or jamming it into the mud, and filming himself single-handedly catching crocs. John watched the tapes when he got home to Brisbane. He told me later that what he saw was unbelievable. “It was three hours of captivating film and I watched it straight through, twice,” John recalled to me. “It was Steve. The camera loved him.” He rang up his contacts in television and explained that he had a hot property. The programmers couldn’t use Steve’s original VHS footage, but one of them had a better idea. He gave John the green light to shoot his own documentary of Steve. That led to John Stainton’s call to Oregon on the eve of our honeymoon. “I know it’s not the best timing, mate,” John said, “but we could take a crew and film a documentary of you rescuing this crocodile.” Steve turned to me. Honeymoon or crocodile? For him, it wasn’t much of a quandary. But what about me?” “Let’s go,” I replied.

The world is full of misconceptions, but perhaps none more fatally fantastical than those involving the lemming. As legend has it, these feisty creatures are prone to combating periods of overpopulation by blindly marching one by one off tall cliffs and unceremoniously plummeting to their deaths. It’s unclear where this global rumor began, but evidence suggests that its popularity spread from Disney’s 1958 Academy Award–winning documentary White Wilderness, which highlighted this unusual and unnatural behavior. Although it was later discovered that the filmmakers had flown in the featured lemmings from Canada and had actually tossed them off the cliffs by hand, it was too late to reverse this morbid misconception.

If that was a real question, there wasn’t time for me to answer because a very smartly dressed woman flared over and began talking to him, standing close with her fists on the hips of her slim-cut skirt, blocking him from view. This was Lillian Hellman, I would soon learn. She and Ernest and the others in the room made up the newly formed Contemporary Historians, a corporation bent on funding a documentary film that would help Spain acquire ambulances and other kinds of support. The filmmaker was Dutch, apparently, and already over in Spain with his Norwegian cameraman. Other members of the Historians were John Dos Passos, Archie MacLeish, and Evan Shipman, all writers big enough to cast shadows. The room seemed full of them as I sat in my blue chair, wondering how I might break in.

A filmmaker made a short documentary about this happy-go-lucky teenager on death row, called My Last Days. It showed Zach living happily, hanging out with his family, and playing music. Everybody loved Zach. When you see the footage, you can’t help but like him. As you watch him laugh and love and sing, you catch yourself forgetting: this kid is about to die. Zach’s family tells the camera how knowing he would die has helped them realize what matters in life and to find true meaning. “It’s really simple, actually,” Zach says. “Just try and make people happy.” As the 22-minute film closes, Zach looks into the camera, smiling, and says, “I want to be remembered as the kid who went down fighting, and didn’t really lose.” Not long after he said those words, Zach passed away. When Eli Pariser and Peter Koechley of Upworthy saw the film, they thought, This is a story that needs to be heard. Now just over a year old, Upworthy has become quite popular. In fact, it recently hit 30 million monthly visitors, making it, according to the Business Insider, the fastest-growing media company in history.* (Seven-year-old BuzzFeed was serving 50 million monthly visitors at the time.) The Zach Sobiech story illustrates how Upworthy used rapid feedback to do it: According to Upworthy’s calculations, My Last Days had the potential to reach a lot of people. But so far, few had seen it. The filmmaker had posted the documentary under the headline, “My Last Days: Meet Zach Sobiech.” Though descriptive, it was suboptimal packaging. In the ADD world of Facebook and Twitter, it’s no surprise that few people clicked. Upworthy reposted the video with a new title: “We Lost This Kid 80 Years Too Early. I’m Glad He Went Out with a Bang,” and shared it with a small number of its subscribers, then waited to see who clicked.

As much as he influenced her, Bindi changed Steve, too. After our Florida trip, Bindi and I went home, while Steve flew off to the Indonesian island of Sumatra. We couldn’t accompany him because of the malaria risk, so we kept the home fires burning instead. At one point, Steve was filming with orangutans when his newfound fatherhood came in handy. A local park ranger who had worked with the national park’s orangutans for twenty-five years accompanied Steve into the rain forest, where they encountered a mother and baby orangutan. The rangers keep a close eye on the orangutans to prevent poaching, and the ranger recognized a lot of the animals by sight. “She reminds me of Bindi,” Steve exclaimed, seeing the infant ape. It was a mischievous, happy baby, clinging to her mother way up in the top branches of a tree. “This will be great to film,” Steve said. “I’ll climb into the tree, and then you can get me and the orangutans in the same shot.” The ranger waved his hands, heading Steve off. “You absolutely can’t do that,” the ranger said. “The mother orangutans are extremely protective. If you make a move anywhere near that tree, she’ll come down and pull your arms off.” Steve paused to listen. “They are very strong,” the ranger said. “She won’t tolerate you in her tree.” “I won’t climb very close to her,” Steve said. “I’ll just go a little way up. Then the camera can shoot up at me and get her in the background.” The ranger looked doubtful. “Okay, Steve,” he said. “But I promise you, she will come down out of that tree and pull your head off.” “Don’t worry, mate,” Steve said confidently, “she’ll be right.” He climbed into the tree. Down came the mother, just as the ranger had predicted. Tugging, pulling, and dragging her baby along behind her, she deftly made her way right over to Steve. He didn’t move. He sat on his tree limb and watched her come toward him. The crew filmed it all, and it became one of the most incredible shots in documentary filmmaking. Mama came close to Steve. She swung onto the same tree limb. Then she edged her way over until she sat right beside him. Everyone on the crew was nervous, except for Steve. Mama put her arm around Steve’s shoulders. I guess the ranger was right, Steve thought, wondering if he would be armless or headless in the very immediate future. While hanging on to her baby, Mama pulled Steve in tight with her other arm, looked him square in the face, and…started making kissy faces at him. The whole crew busted up laughing as Mama puckered up her lips and looked lovingly into Steve’s eyes. “You’ve got a beautiful little baby, sweetheart,” Steve said softly. The baby scrambled up the limb away from them, and without taking her eyes off Steve, the mother reached over, grabbed her baby, and dragged the tot back down. “You’re a good mum,” Steve cooed. “You take good care of that little bib-bib.” “I have never seen anything like that,” the park ranger said later. I had to believe that the encounter was further evidence of the uncanny connection Steve had with the wildlife he loved so much, as well as one proud parent recognizing another.

The underwear bomber was so incredibly nervous that he decided to wear the bomb three weeks before his mission, and that’s how he ruined it. He was willing, and he tried to kill a plane full of people—but what he actually did was burn his crotch off. There happened to be a Swedish documentary filmmaker several seats over. When he saw the fire and the bomber fiddling with his explosive, the Swede hopped over seats from the other side of the plane and beat the crap out of him. Other passengers joined in.

Everything in life, except her kids, made her impatient. She had tried to do a million things. She'd wanted to be a documentary filmmaker and then a painter and then a tiny-ceramic-figure maker. None of it panned out. She'd be full of enthusiasm at first, full of big ideas and energy and drive, but it would all gradually evaporate and disappear. She could never maintain the momentum or the concentration or the confidence she needed to get anything done.

We are always concocting theories about how the world works and why people act in the ways they do. We invent motives for them, as if it's possible for us to know, but more often than not these explanations are like flimsy cardboard state sets we put up in front of reality because they are simpler and less distracting than what's actually there. I think I became a documentary filmmaker to try to get a truer view. It's not that film can't lie or distort or be used for dastardly purposes, it's that sometimes the camera extracts from the faces and bodies of its subjects what they do not say aloud. I was sixteen when I first saw Marcel Ophuls's The Sorrow and the Pity, and after that, I couldn't stop thinking about he expressiveness of people's hands when they are controlling their faces.

What is the ultimate quantification of success? For me, it’s not how much time you spend doing what you love. It’s how little time you spend doing what you hate. And this woman spent all day, every day doing what she loved.” Spirit animal: Rhino Morgan Spurlock Morgan Spurlock (TW: @MorganSpurlock, morganspurlock.com) is an Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker based in New York.

In the early 1980s, London filmmaker Jon Blair was working on a documentary about Oskar Schindler

Laura Waters Hinson, an award-winning documentary filmmaker based in Washington, D.C., described it to me: If you think about the fact that 95 percent of all movies you see are created through a male lens—that’s a staggering thought. The vast majority of the media that we consume, that is shaping our souls in a lot of ways, is created by men. And I love men! But no wonder so much of it is violent or sexualized. This

Last year, the single evening generated almost $12 million, was a trending topic on Twitter and attracted over 25 million page views on vogue.com the following day. This year, it will be part of a documentary by the filmmaker

evidence suggests that its popularity spread from Disney’s 1958 Academy Award–winning documentary White Wilderness, which highlighted this unusual and unnatural behavior. Although it was later discovered that the filmmakers had flown in the featured lemmings from Canada and had actually tossed them off the cliffs by hand, it was too late to reverse this morbid misconception.

The North Korean news followed up with a documentary about a greedy man whose stomach burst from eating too much food, suggesting that starving was actually good for you. There is no record of how that tactic was received.

Filmmaking never seemed to her like a real job, the sort where you show up at a certain place at a certain time most days of the week, the sort she could explain to her friends in a sentence. At the premiere of one of his documentaries, as Joan and I sat among an audience applauding Brian onstage, she leaned over to me and said, “What he should’ve done is gotten a teaching license.

By 2000, RMS Titanic Inc. had returned to the site four more times, using French or Russian submersibles. In a game of Finders Keepers, they pocketed more than 6,000 artifacts and displayed them in a museum, charging people to see them. The company even broadcast a documentary showing how it took the objects. All told, the items included eyeglasses, shoes, handbags, luggage, and even a bronze cherub statue from the Grand Staircase. A bell and a light from the foremast were removed, and the salvagers even raised a chunk of the hull weighing 18 tons. They sold pieces of coal from the engine room for $25 a block. They created a website, so you could peruse the collections online. Documentary filmmakers and wealthy sightseers visited the site in mini-subs. And, perhaps most grotesque of all, a couple were married in a submersible perched on Titanic’s bow. I wouldn’t think of a mass grave as romantic, but I guess some couples are into that.