I never got into making documentaries for any kind of success, because documentary careers are generally ones of prolonged failures.
Interpretation
The pursuit of creating documentaries often involves enduring setbacks rather than seeking immediate success.
Morgan Neville's quote highlights the challenging nature of documentary filmmaking, where individuals often face numerous obstacles and failures before achieving any form of recognition or success. It emphasizes the importance of passion and perseverance in creative endeavors, suggesting that the journey itself is more significant than the accolades that may eventually come.
In practice
Using this quote in a film school presentation to discuss the realities of pursuing a career in documentary filmmaking.
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.
When you come to documentaries, the stakes are too low for it to be cutthroat. You're all doing it for the right reasons.
There was no model how to make a documentary production company work. I figured it out as I went along.
An artist in my eyes, is someone who can lighten up a dark room. I have never and will never find difference between the pass from Pele to Carlos Alberto in the final of the World Cup in 1970 and the poetry of the young Rimbaud, who stretches cords from steeple to steeple and garlands from window to window. There is in each of these human manifestations an expression of beauty which touches us and gives us a feeling of eternity.
Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.
I thought it would be fun to take the kind of character that nobody would like, none of our readers would like, and shove him down their throats and make them like him.
If I'm inspired to make a certain kind of song, I'm going to make that kind of song, no matter if it's what they know me as or think I am.
In Paris, we call the people who make clothing 'couturiers' - they develop new clothing items - but actually, the work of designing is to make something that works in real life.
A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.
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