Quote

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.

— Bruce Jackson

Sentiment: NEGATIVE

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✓Similar Perspectives

With documentary-film projects, you hope you highlight an area of concern people haven't thought about before. A lot of times, I'm asking myself - 'This seems to be a significant problem. What can be done that hasn't been done?'

— Paul Allen

For me, every film is actually a form of documentary.

— Ira Sachs

Documentaries deal with people who live real, everyday lives. But if these people trusted us and told us the truth about their lives, it could be used against them - which sometimes happened.

— Krzysztof Kieslowski

To make a documentary is one thing, to make a feature film is quite another.

— Dennis Hopper

I don't think the subject of a documentary film should be producers on it.

— Michael Rapaport

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.

— William Shatner

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.

— Josh Fox

✗Opposing Perspectives

Movies, to a large extent, stand or fall on the strength of their scripts. But a documentary is a collection of found objects: fragments you've collected, accidents of interview and happenstance, pieces of stock footage that surface in the course of six to nine months of research and production.

— David Fanning

Films are always a fiction, not documentary. Even a documentary is a kind of fiction.

— Philip Seymour Hoffman

I didn't realize that, in doing a documentary, there is this process of discovery. It's not like a film or a play with a set script. It sort of reveals itself.

— William Shatner