36 Quotes by D. A. Pennebaker

Before the camera, you only had secondhand takes - someone had to tell you what they saw or draw a picture of it or sing a song. Because of the camera, sometimes to our horror, we now know everything that happens in the world - things that before we were sheltered from.

When the fearsome foursome of rock music, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis, decided to show up in Toronto for a rock and roll festival, I knew we had to go there to try to get them all on film.

Filming is a witnessing process. You don't try to control it, even though sometimes you wish you could because it can go really, really wrong for you.

I think the films we see, the Hollywood films, which are basically entertainment, will still be there, but they'll be in a totally different category. People won't take them seriously. They'll kind of end up the way comic books have. A side view of things.

Two of my sons are themselves filmmakers, and we can't afford them nor they us. They work in the real world and earn money and are pretty good at it.

Nobody would let us do 'Crisis' again.

If you're setting up lights and tripods, and you've got three assistants running around, people will want to get you out as fast as they can. But if you go the opposite way, if you make the camera the least important thing in the room, then it's different.

I think of all my movies as home movies! It's just that some are more expensive than others.

Somebody like Bowie was so interesting because when you got him off stage, he was like a businessman. But on stage, he was just dazzling. It was like watching butterflies grow.