I love documentary because it's alive.
You know, the process of making a documentary is one of discovery, and like writing a story, you follow a lead and that leads you to something else and then by the time you finish, the story is nothing like you expected.
I directed 24's pilot. I felt we should follow the characters around as if we were a documentary crew, using available light, hand-held cameras, split screens, sound that isn't always what it should be, to suit the reality of the premise.
We'll be back to our nature documentary, 'Baggy the Anorexic Elephant' in just a second.
Well, it was actually - I brought the idea of doing a documentary to HBO back in 2000, when there were some press reports sort of were bandied about that there were going to TV movies based on some of the books that were out.
I remember when I took Quentin Tarantino with me to a very private screening of the documentary 'Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,' which shows some of the legal irregularities of his case. I was involved by the film, and it was an amazing experience to see people weep at the end of it.
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.
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.
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.
Regardless of the medium, be it television or feature or documentary, I'm not gonna distinguish and worry about my particular canon, whatever that means.
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.
I submerged myself in all the information that I could find about Idi Amin. I mean, before I left Los Angeles, I was studying Kiswahili. I was working on the dialect. I was studying every documentary and tape of him that I could find - not just visual, but also audiocassettes, even in other languages when he was speaking in other dialects.
When I'm not singing, I'm a lot of persons: I'm a producer. I'm a badminton player. I'm a writer. I'm a movie freak. I'm a documentary maker.
Working on 'The War Room' was a thrill, not only because we were given such exquisite access to the nerve center of Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign, but for me personally, it was so exciting to be producing my first film and working with documentary filmmaking legends D.A. Pannebaker and Chris Hegedus, who were the film's directors.
'Under the Skin' is handsome, in a dour way, but inert - a cunning experiment that died in the shooting or on the editing table. You'll want to get the DVD, though, and not just for its study of Scarlett. Odds are that the Making-Of documentary will be far stranger and more fascinating than the movie that was made.
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.
The Highlander was a documentary, and events happened in real time.
If you want to see the real Pablo Escobar, go see a documentary.
Documentary films are created in an inverted funnel of declining possibility.
When I graduated from Brown after majoring in women's studies, I made my first PBS documentary, 'Women of Substance.' My first feature documentary was called 'American Hollow,' which I did for HBO and was at the Sundance Film Festival.
Is this film more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?
A documentary film is a great way of helping people understand because, somehow, when one is able to see the people involved, it lends a certain immediacy and understanding that is hard to get on the page.
I had long been resistant to doing a documentary about my mother for personal reasons. And I thought there was no way she'd want to, but then I asked her and she said 'yes.'
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.
My senior thesis was a documentary. By the time I graduated from college, I thought I was going to make films, and my interest in acting was there but kind of confused.
Independent documentary isn't beholden to some of the interests that the mainstream media are influenced by. It's a pathway to renegade, independent reporting in an in-depth, investigative fashion, and it can do so with a compassionate lens; it allows people to speak in a way that is more human than the mainstream media approach.
When I look back at the way that I was in that documentary I cringe.
Because 'Call The Midwife' is a gentle drama, not a documentary, it's not appropriate to portray Sister Monica Joan's condition in all its brutal reality.
The documentary 'Certifiably Jonathan' has engrossing moments in it. How can it not? It's got a great subject - the extraordinarily voluble comedian Jonathan Winters, whose constant rush of words can be like a blizzard: beautiful, maddening, exhausting, and finally beautiful again. But it's not a great film.
What is interesting to me about film, and documentary film in particular, is that I can write about these people, and you trust my judgment, more or less, but when you're confronted yourself with humans who are right there on the screen telling you their story, you make a judgment yourself that is conclusive.
The key fact missed most often by social scientists utilizing documentary films for data, is this: documentary films are not found or reported things; they're made things.
To make a documentary is one thing, to make a feature film is quite another.
The best films of any kind, narrative or documentary, provoke questions.
There are a lot of female directors in documentary, very talented. But it's always lower budget.
Yeah I'm telling real stories, but if you pick up a documentary on strippers, you're going to want to see some stripping, so we definitely got that in there.
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.