If you're setting up lights and tripods, and you've got three assistants running around, people will want to get you out as fast as they can. But if you go the opposite way, if you make the camera the least important thing in the room, then it's different.

D. A. Pennebaker

Categorized in : You Lights Camera People

You can't point a camera at someone and find out what's in their head. But it does the next best thing - it lets you speculate.

D. A. Pennebaker

next cameras doe

I would never say no to anything that sounded interesting! The thing I like about making films is that the adventure just begins when you pick up the camera.

D. A. Pennebaker

cameras adventure interesting

...candid still photography had taken over... What was interesting was that the photographs came without any intention of instructing you... You're like a cat looking out the window. You don't have to even know what you're watching, but you're watching it, and you're watching it very accurately.

D. A. Pennebaker

cat photography taken

We're a family operation. There's not many of us. We have a couple people who come from time to time who work with us. Two of my sons are themselves filmmakers, and we can't afford them nor they us.

D. A. Pennebaker

couple people son

After love, the most sacred gift you can give is your labor.

D. A. Pennebaker

sacred labor giving

I think nowadays people are so used taking the camera to the family picnic - so people are less surprised by films made of them, like home movies.

D. A. Pennebaker

home people thinking

I guess I think that films have to be made totally by fascists -- there's no room for democracy in making film.

D. A. Pennebaker

democracy rooms thinking

I think the process is one of using the camera and sound in the way a detective uses a magnifying glass: to find the clues. They're discovery devices, not performance devices - you're watching things the way a cat does. You're not judging. You're there to witness something.

D. A. Pennebaker

camera think you way

People don't really want reality. They want theater, and that's different.

D. A. Pennebaker

different want reality people

Somebody like Bowie was so interesting because when you got him off stage, he was like a businessman. But on stage, he was just dazzling. It was like watching butterflies grow.

D. A. Pennebaker

grow watching you interesting

Well, it is curious what lasts and what doesn't. Publishing empires and whatnot would pay anything to figure it out. But they can't figure it out.

D. A. Pennebaker

well anything curious pay

I think the films we see, the Hollywood films, which are basically entertainment, will still be there, but they'll be in a totally different category. People won't take them seriously. They'll kind of end up the way comic books have. A side view of things.

D. A. Pennebaker

view think people way

Two of my sons are themselves filmmakers, and we can't afford them nor they us. They work in the real world and earn money and are pretty good at it.

D. A. Pennebaker

good money work world

Nobody would let us do 'Crisis' again.

D. A. Pennebaker

again us nobody crisis

When I did 'Don't Look Back,' I no longer had Time-Life looking over my shoulder, so I could kind of do it as I wanted, and it was like I was really correcting 'Jane.'

D. A. Pennebaker

looking back like look

I think of all my movies as home movies! It's just that some are more expensive than others.

D. A. Pennebaker

movies some think home

Before the camera, you only had secondhand takes - someone had to tell you what they saw or draw a picture of it or sing a song. Because of the camera, sometimes to our horror, we now know everything that happens in the world - things that before we were sheltered from.

D. A. Pennebaker

picture you song world

A film is made in somebody's head - out of their determination to do it at all.

D. A. Pennebaker

head somebody film determination

Theater is where you go to find out something new that you don't know. It goes through somebody's brain and comes out in a comprehensible way that is beautiful, that's really interesting.

D. A. Pennebaker

you brain beautiful way

I wanted James Carville to never die. I wanted Dylan, the poet, to not die. I wanted to put these people in a place where they would be inviolate. It wasn't enough to have a still life of them. I wanted to surround them with the lives they led.

D. A. Pennebaker

die place life people