But one of the amazing things about documentary is that you can remake it every time you make one. There is no rule about how a documentary film has to be made.Collection: Amazing
What's great about documentary, it seems to me, is that it can be experimental filmmaking. You have a license to do a lot of diverse things under the umbrella of 'documentary.'
I've never had any problem with crazy people. I like crazy people; I probably am a crazy person myself.
But I can say what interests me about documentary is the fact that you don't know how the story ends at the onset - that you are investigating, with a camera, and the story emerges as you go along.
When 'The Thin Blue Line' came out, I was criticized by many people for using reenactments, as if I wasn't dedicated to the truth because I filmed these scenes. That always and still seems to be nonsensical.
You know, I actually like doing commercials. I don't like doing them to the exclusion of everything else, but I like doing them.
If you're a journalist - and I think, on some level, I'm a journalist, and proud to be a journalist, or a documentarian, however you want to describe it - part of what I do has to be the pursuit of the truth.
If everything was planned, it would be dreadful. If everything was unplanned, it would be equally dreadful.
I don't believe truth is conveyed by style and presentation. I don't think that if it was grainy and full of handheld material, it would be any more truthful.
We all know that yellow journalism didn't just happen a week ago or a month ago, that yellow journalism has probably been with us as long as journalism has been with us.
Listening to what people were saying wasn't even important. But it was important to look as if you were listening to what people were saying. Actually, listening to what people are saying, to me, interferes with looking as if you were listening to what people are saying.
Forty years ago this country went down a rabbit hole in Vietnam and millions died. I fear we're going down a rabbit hole once again - and if people can stop and think and reflect on some of the ideas and issues in this movie, perhaps I've done some damn good here!
Despite all of our efforts to control something, the world is much, much more powerful than us, and more deranged even than us.
If we're reading a first-person account, we know that each and every one of us, myself included, have a great desire to be seen in a certain way, or to be perceived in a certain way. It's unavoidable.
I think an interview, properly considered, should be an investigation. You shouldn't know what the interview will yield. Otherwise, why do it at all?
Certain kinds of intimacy emerge on a phone call that might never occur if you were sitting right next to the other person.
First of all, tabloid stories are some of the richest and most important stories that we have. There's nothing wrong, per se, with tabloid stories.
A lot of stories that have fascinated me are tabloid stories that have come from other newspapers, like 'The New York Times.'
My stuff always starts with interviews. I start interviewing people, and then slowly but surely, a movie insinuates itself.
There are endless anxieties in putting a film together, and it's an enormous relief when you know it's working with an audience.
I believe it was probably less than ten minutes that went by from the invention of photography to the point where people realized that they could lie with photographs.
I've been writing a lot more, I believe, because of the Internet. I've been posting stuff that I've written and I've just been writing.
A movie is like a tip of an iceberg, in a way, because so little of what you do in connection with making a movie actually gets into the movie. Almost everything gets left behind.
Films are neither true nor false. That includes my films, as well as others. They may make claims that are true or false, but films are too complex. They have too many ingredients.
You're meant to think somehow that literature, in espousing eternal values, is kind of normal and balanced and reasonable. When it fact it's anything but.
I've never made any money off of any of my films. Statement of fact. So without commercial work, I would be in big trouble.
Interviews, when they are just simply an exercise in hearing what you want to hear, are of no interest.
I feel as if I became a documentary film-maker only because I had writer's block for four decades. There's no other good reason.
When you're working for yourself and your own obsession with finding the truth, you're at your own mercy.
Finding truth involves some kind of activity. As I like to point out, truth isn't handed to you on a platter. It's not something that you get at a cafeteria, where they just put it on your plate. It's a search, a quest, an investigation, a continual process of looking at and looking for evidence, trying to figure out what the evidence means.Collection: Mean
They say seeing is believing, but the opposite is true. Believing is seeing.Collection: Believe
If you asked me what makes the world go round, I would say self-deception. Self-deception allows us to create a consistent narrative for ourselves that we actually believe. I’m not saying that the truth doesn’t matter. It does. But self-deception is how we survive.Collection: Believe
The claim that everybody sees the world differently is not a claim that there's no reality. It's a different kind of claim.Collection: Reality
I like to point out that people very often confuse the idea that truth is subjective with the fact that truth is perishable.Collection: Ideas
I'm really interested in self-deception. Really interested in how people live in bubble universes. How people can fail to see the seemingly obvious.Collection: Self