I think the documentary is something that people are hungry for, that it embodies careful thought, nuance.
'America 24/7' will be a landmark series in documentary photography and the watershed event of the new digital photography age.
I think the greatest thing about making a documentary is your ability to just follow the story and the subject.
Whatever storytelling muscles you've developed as a documentary filmmaker will be extremely helpful as a narrative filmmaker.
Like my father and grandfather, Philippe and Jacques-Yves Cousteau, I've dedicated my life to exploring and protecting our seas, in large part through documentary film.
While the documentary community is way ahead of Hollywood, it is still nowhere near where it needs to be. Filmmakers of color rarely get hired by the powerful production companies, and they are not getting supported enough by broadcasters and funders to tell their own stories.
A buddy of mine is doing a documentary on decisions, and they're not based on a ton of logic. It's mostly how you relate to them emotionally.
I feel like there's a lot of sympathy and camaraderie among documentary filmmakers.
When I was at Stratford, the very first thing that I was commissioned to work on was trying to make a musical out of the documentary material about the General Strike, which was the next big historical event in England, after the First World War.
I watched Ricki Lake's documentary, 'The Business of Being Born,' and that led me to call a midwife, and not an ob-gyn, when I found out I had conceived. My delivery was not easy - they call it 'labor,' not 'a vacation!' - but I was incredibly grateful that I did it that way.
I saw a documentary on the Naadam festival that happens in Mongolia during the summer. One of the features of it is a horse race across the plains that all the young men enter - some as young as 12 years old. It's such a spectacular sight. It's incredible to think that this is a tradition that has been going on for centuries.
I'd seen Jose Padilha's 'Elite Squad 1' and '2', and I'd seen his documentary, 'Bus 174'.
I'm pretty interested in documentary film, and I'd watch almost anything. At some point, I stumbled upon 'shoot interviews' and found out that wrestlers were now talking openly about things that were going on in wrestling that we as viewers were not privy to. This fascinated me.
Sure, 'An Inconvenient Truth' was my first documentary. What a wonderful experience. I saw Al Gore doing his slideshow presentation, and had this nutty idea that we had to make a movie out of it.
My interest in Virtual Reality (VR) films began for me when I began a fellowship with MIT's Open Documentary Lab. It was a profound experience to be on MIT's campus one day a week and to enter a new world of storytelling where breaking convention and traditional methods were expected. This was deeply challenging and inspiring.
I began to feel that the drama of the truth that is in the moment and in the past is richer and more interesting than the drama of Hollywood movies. So I began looking at documentary films.
In 2008, A.J. Schnack recruited Thom Powers to start the Cinema Eye Honors to recognize the artistry and craft that go into making documentary films.
For a documentary filmmaker, I do very well.
When I left university I was working for a documentary film company for six or seven years to the great relief of my father whose greatest waking fear was that I would become an actor.
