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.
Poetry is also the physical self of the poet, and it is impossible to separate the poet from his poetry.
Can one think that because we are engineers, beauty does not preoccupy us or that we do not try to build beautiful, as well as solid and long lasting structures? Aren't the genuine functions of strength always in keeping with unwritten conditions of harmony? ... Besides, there is an attraction, a special charm in the colossal to which ordinary theories of art do not apply.
By and large, most of the work that we see in the great museums throughout the world are populated with people who don't happen to look like me.
What I wanted in life always was to write something as good as 'Pinocchio.' I wanted to write. I wanted to evolve. I wanted to grow.
Oh Woman, come before us, before our eyes longing for beauty, and tired of the ugliness of civilization, come in simple tunics, letting us see the line and harmony of the body beneath, and dance for us. Dance us the sweetness of life. Give us again the sweetness and the beauty of the true dance, give us again the joy of seeing the simple unconscious pure body of a woman. Like a great call it has come, and women must hear it and answer it.
I start drawing, and eventually the characters involve themselves in a situation. Then in the end, I go back and try to cut out most of the preachments.
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