I did documentary film for a long time, and I spent a lot of time behind the camera, fervently wishing that the reality I was filming would conform to my narrative propriety. But you can't control it.
Interpretation
Reality often doesn't fit our narratives, no matter how much we wish it would.
Ruth Ozeki reflects on her experience in documentary filmmaking, highlighting the tension between the storyteller's intentions and the unpredictable nature of real life. Despite the desire to shape reality to fit one's narrative, she acknowledges that true authenticity cannot be controlled or manipulated, serving as a reminder that art and life can diverge significantly.
In practice
In a discussion about the challenges of documentary filmmaking, this quote can highlight the unpredictability of real life.
People have always heard voices. Sometimes they're called shamans, sometimes they're called mad, and sometimes they're called fiction writers. I always feel lucky that I live in a culture where fiction writing is legal and not seen as pathology.
Fiction is an elemental force, which has the power to shape reality in its own image - or images, I should say - because reality, like light, exists not only as a single point or particle, but also as an array of possibilities.
What's fascinating to me is the way that multiple stories go into creating any world - a fictional world, but certainly the world that we live in as well. Of course, I cannot control that world. I can just control the fictional world.
Both life and death manifest in every moment of existence. Our human body appears and disappears moment by moment, without cease, and this ceaseless arising and passing away is what we experience as time and being. They are not separate. They are one thing, and in even a fraction of a second, we have the opportunity to choose, and to turn the course of our action either toward the attainment of truth or away from it. Each instant is utterly critical to the whole world.
The American society around me looked at me and saw Japanese. Then, when I was 19, I went to Japan for the first time. And suddenly - what a shock - I realized I wasn't Japanese; they saw me as American. It was an enormous relief. Now I just appreciate being exactly in the middle.
I have a pretty good memory, but memories are time beings, too, like cherry blossoms or ginkgo leaves; for a while they are beautiful, and then they fade and die.
You make a movie that is about what you want it to be about and let people have their reaction to it.
One must do the same subject over again ten times, a hundred times. In art nothing must resemble an accident, not even movement.
I'm interested in art for all. I don't want it to be only the sons and daughters of Tory MPs who get to see my plays.
There’s a lot for screenwriters to steal from songwriters, in terms of getting to the point.
The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.
I had to figure out how to bring the world into my work.
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