Robert Drew(1924-2014)

He founded a documentary film company, Drew Associates, in 1960, on the central premise that there would be no direction of the subjects of his films, meaning they would not be coached on how or what to say whatever they had to say. In the process, he hired some of the most important documentary filmmakers of the last fifty years, from 1960s through the 2000s, including Ricky Leacock, D.A. Pennebaker, and Albert Maysles.

Nonfiction filmmakers were afflicted by two problems, one technical, the other spiritual. Technically, they did not have the equipment to do the sort of work I had in mind. Spiritually, they didn't care about the work because they'd been mistrained. They'd been mistrained because their equipment was so heavy and complicated that it made it impossible to shoot in situations where you could really capture reality. This problem couldn't be solved until somebody figured out how to cut the equipment down to a load that anybody could carry.