Quotes

We get crushes and we get crushed from almost all the subjects that we film.

The film is sort of the the beginning of a love affair between the filmmakers and the subjects. Some filmmakers make targets of the subjects they film; that's not our way.

There are daily acts of generosity and kindness and love that should be represented on film.

The natural disposition of the camera is to seek out reality.

I think my training taught me above all to be unprejudiced. Psychology was social science and so in a way my work has always combined a kind of scientific approach with art.

People are people. We're out to discover what is going on behind the scenes and get as close as we can to what is happening.

I have no difficulty in getting access or establishing rapport. Usually, it's just from the first moment of meeting someone. I think it's the way I look at them and establish trust right away. There's nothing in my method that is subversive or hurtful and I think people get a sense of trust right away.

I suppose Robert J. Flaherty would have liked to have done what Robert Drew decided to do, but Flaherty couldn't have done it because the equipment didn't exist at that time. It didn't exist during [Drew]'s time, either, which is why it had to be created. To this day, moviemaking equipment has gotten better and better, smaller and simpler and more portable. With video, it's gone way beyond even what we invented so that we could do Primary (1960).

As Robert Drew always liked to describe it, nonfiction film was then, and still is now, an illustrated lecture. With the equipment we have today, which is directly descended from the equipment we made; you could go beyond the illustrated lecture for the first time. These innovations made it possible to get what was happening so clearly and directly that the person viewing the film would feel as though he was actually present at those events. For the first time, it was possible for someone watching a documentary to feel as though he was standing in the shoes of the person he was seeing onscreen.