Morgan Neville
I feel like there's a lot of sympathy and camaraderie among documentary filmmakers.Collection: Sympathy
How often do we make films just celebrating people that do a good job, work altruistically, and are in it just for the sake of the love and not the business?
Watching somebody sing reveals a lot about character.
If I told my 14-year-old self that I'd be hanging out with Keith Richards talking about records, my head would've exploded.
I wish I didn't care about what people thought as much as Keith Richards doesn't care.
I never got into making documentaries for any kind of success, because documentary careers are generally ones of prolonged failures.
You make documentaries because you love doing it; it's the only sane reason to make documentaries.
To be a backup singer, you have to walk into any situation and just be perfect from the first take to the 50th take.
Harmony singing isn't meant to be done alone.
I think of myself as a cultural filmmaker.
At the beginning of the '70s, everything was possible.
I am a big believer in the power of journalism; it's a heroic pursuit.
The idea of music coming from the Church is not new.
I think, in the West, we often discount the arts as nice but not that important. Certainly in America when we cut funding for schools, the arts are the first programs to go. But the arts built the things we need more than anything else: collaboration and co-operation and creativity.
A lot of backup singers are really shy and don't want their life documented. They're not pining to be celebrity. They've had a front-row look at celebrity for a long time, and most people find out it's not for them.
If we can't agree on objective truth, then how are we ever going to agree on opinions?
I came up in left-wing political writing. My first job out of college was working as Gore Vidal's fact checker.
There was no model how to make a documentary production company work. I figured it out as I went along.
I always tell aspiring documentary filmmakers, 'You have to go into it because you love it; if you go into it for the money, you're an idiot.' The number one prerequisite is you have to be intensely curious. If you love learning and trying to make people figure out what makes people tick, it's the best job in the world.
Everyone feels entitled to their own facts.
The presidential and vice-presidential debates are those rare moments when people come together, but to even call them debates is a stretch because they're played by such negotiated rules, and they're so over-rehearsed.
They don't make people like Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley anymore.
Now, you watch cable news, and you know what everybody's going to say before they open their mouth.
If the Olympic Spirit is about overcoming every hurdle and accepting no limits, then I think Samsung is a great ambassador for these values.
So much of what we get on our news debate shows is really people spinning one way or the other, giving their talking points one way or the other.
In a weird way, our satirists probably have the most complicated, nuanced views of our politics now - Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver. I don't know what that says about our country.
TV tends to laud the person with the perfect one-liner rather than the one with the better idea.
In the late 1960s, English artists like the Rolling Stones and Joe Cocker began recording in the States, and at that point, they realised, 'We can get real African-American voices on our records; we don't have to pretend any more.'
Politicians pretend not to be smart.
Maybe this is my left-wing conspiracy theory, but the right has re-branded itself as kind of the everyman party: Who's the person you'd rather have a beer with? The Republican Party, even though it's a party of incredible wealth and corporate interests, has hidden behind this everyman quality.
I so often doubt how much people on television believe what they're saying. They're playing roles for think tanks or political parties or shills of whatever stripe.
Church singing is a great training ground.
Success and singing is not synonymous.
By the rules of debate, if you lose your cool, you've lost the game.
Culture in general is important, and people's identify is tied up in it. It's how we connect with others.
There's no cultural revolution by mistake.
The easiest way to subjugate a people is to erase a culture. I've seen it in war zones.
Music, like film, is an incredible tool for creating empathy.
There are a handful of music docs I'd love to do, including David Bowie.
I'd worked on music docs for years. It felt like writing a novel. By the time I got to Keith Richards, it felt like making a sketch.
I feel like - like Netflix is great if you've got a project ready to launch itself into the world rapidly.
As a writer, I think about films I work on in a traditional Hollywood kind of a way. I'm curious to see how it translates.
I knew who Buckley and Vidal were growing up, being a political junkie.
Vidal was a novelist, an essayist, a playwright, a screenwriter, and many other things. Buckley started a magazine, hosted a TV show, lead a political movement, and was a master debater. They were multihyphenates in a way that you rarely see anymore.
Sometimes we have our perfect foils, or you can call them their bete noir: the person who brings out both the best and the worst in you because you disagree with them so completely. Yet, you understand and respect them enough to give it your all.
I feel more relaxed after the Oscar. I feel like I have a chance to just tell the stories I want to tell, and it's actually been really nice.
When you come to documentaries, the stakes are too low for it to be cutthroat. You're all doing it for the right reasons.
If you're not doing it for the right reasons, then you'd be dumb to be making documentaries.
Docs, in general, are made in the edit bay, archival docs even more so.
We saw The Who on New Year's Eve in 1975.