Making movies is an effort is an attempt to leave a trace of your existence.

My job as a film editor is to construct a dramatic narrative because otherwise it's just a chaotic arrangement of sequences.

This whole business of documentary being a second-class citizen is bullshit. A documentary can be as interesting, as dramatic, as sad, as funny, blah, blah, blah, as a fiction movie. Or it can be as awful as a fiction movie!

Of course there's conscious manipulation! Everything about a movie is manipulation ... If you like it, it's an interpretation. If you don't like it, it's a lie - but everything about these movies is a distortion."

Whether you're a newspaper journalist, a lawyer, a doctor. You have to organize your thoughts.

I don't like to read novels where the novelist tells me what to think about the situation and the characters. I prefer to discover for myself.

I think I have an obligation, to the people who have consented to be in the film, to make a film that is fair to their experience. The editing of my films is a long and selective process. I do feel that when I cut a sequence, I have an obligation to the people who are in it, to cut it so that it fairly represents what I felt was going on at the time, in the original event. I don't try and cut it to meet the standards of a producer or a network or a television show.