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"When a documentary filmmaker, working in the style that I do, suggests that there has been a shooting ratio of 40 hours to every one hour of finished film, that doesn't mean that the other 39 are bad."
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"We're still working out the details, but I'd be delighted to do the film. The problem at the moment is my busy schedule. Shooting on this film has been extended by a month, but I need to be in the U.S. by Dec. 20."
Film,
"My focus never wavered; I never accepted the film was not going to be finished."
"In France they spend six months training policemen, then they give them a gun and put them on the streets, and I don't know that that's enough. The film's not against the police - although I think that if someone wants to be a cop there's got to be a problem."
"I have to tell everyone that when I finish a film and it goes out and is released, I never look at my films again. I don't like looking back. I don't even like talking about 'em! So I'm really digging back in my memory because I don't like to sit and look at my films again."
"No place is boring, if you've had a good night's sleep and have a pocket full of unexposed film."
"It was a fine cast and lots of fun to make, but they did the damn thing on the cheap. The backdrops had holes in them, and it was shot on the worst film stock."
Explore more quotes by Ken Burns
"I never, ever want to apologize for a film. If it's bad I'll say it's my fault. And that's what I can say so far in all the films that I've done, that if you don't like it, it's entirely my fault."
"History is malleable. A new cache of diaries can shed new light, and archeological evidence can challenge our popular assumptions."
"Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being."
"I record all of my music with authentic instruments in a studio before we start editing, doing many, many versions. The music shapes the film as we edit so it has an organic relationship to the content."
"You need, as a historian, essential triangulation from your subject and the only way you get that triangulation is through time."
"You can learn as much about the history from reading about the present as you can vice versa, that is learning about the present through history, which is what I do for a living."
"When you are editing, the final master is Aristotle and his poetics. You might have a terrific episode, but if people are falling out because there are just too many elements in it, you have to begin to get rid of things."
"I treat the photograph as a work of great complexity in which you can find drama. Add to that a careful composition of landscapes, live photography, the right music and interviews with people, and it becomes a style."
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