The best documentaries are independent. They don’t exist…

I like the cinema of people like Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton. I am not keen on trying to reproduce reality - for that…

— Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Many people, including myself, thought of Jobs as an inventor, an Edison-like figure, but he wasn't. I did a documentary on James Brown recently;…

— Alex Gibney

The documentary style is an incredibly flexible and useful one. It's a wonderful tool for establishing the credibility of the version of things that's…

— Frank Gohlke

Most of the photographs people take with their cameraphones are of little value in terms of documentary.

— Martin Parr

...it is a very risky thing for anyone to go about proclaiming the truth simply because he finds himself in possession of concrete documentary…

— Jorge Amado

Most of my life, I thought that I would end up a novelist. But then, in New York City, after college, I started a…

— Jon Spaihts

By calling it a memoir, I meant is as a collection of memories. I thought it was (a more) artful (title) than documentary.

— Natalie Merchant

I'm a documentary photographer. That's what I've always wanted to be; that's where my heart and soul is.

— Mary Ellen Mark

The pictures that were coming from Vietnam were showing us what was really happening on the ground level. It was in contradiction to what…

— James Nachtwey

I'm in school every day. It depends on what it is that you do with all that free time when I'm not on the…

— MC Lyte

If you merely focus on what we already know, then it's not revelatory. You may as well just go and watch a documentary or…

— David Oyelowo

So I do tend to do documentaries where I can move in and out of them.

— Michael Apted

Helen Weaver’s book was a revelation to me! Although I was a young woman in the fifties, I was there, but I wasn’t there!…

— Carolyn Cassady

There's a tradition of reenactment in documentary which is about sort of illustrating what the past might have been like.

— Joshua Oppenheimer

I've had frustrated storytelling juices that have been lying dormant for a long time, and I guess the documentary was a way of me…

— Eric Bana