Even if I know I'm going to go to a church, I don't know what the minister's going to say.

It's rare in a documentary film that you have a repetitive act. So when you do, you can shoot it in different ways so that you have more choices when you're sitting down to edit that sequence six months later.

I'm too busy to be nostalgic, which is one of the reasons to keep busy. I'm not a very sentimental person.

A lot of the issues of rhythm in film are found in the editing because it's very rare that any sequence is the sequence that is shot.

Documentary filmmaking ruins you for real life, because you learn to be extremely attentive.

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.

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."