A biography for D. A. Pennebakerhasn’t been written yet.
“I think, in general, independents don't have a lot of access to really good scriptwriters or actors or actresses, so they're very limited in what they can do.”
“I didn't know Jack Kennedy that well, but Bobby was a hero to me.”
“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.”
“Animals are companions on this planet, not necessarily our feedbags.”
“Theater is where you go to find out something new that you don't know. It goes through somebody's brain and comes out in a comprehensible way that is beautiful, that's really interesting.”
“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.”
“When I did 'Don't Look Back,' I no longer had Time-Life looking over my shoulder, so I could kind of do it as I wanted, and it was like I was really correcting 'Jane.'”
“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.”
“I think the process is one of using the camera and sound in the way a detective uses a magnifying glass: to find the clues. They're discovery devices, not performance devices - you're watching things the way a cat does. You're not judging. You're there to witness something.”
“When you're editing, you're putting it together in a way that makes sense metaphysically. You're not inventing it, but you're finding the story that's there. You're making a play that's eventually going to go on stage and present itself to an audience. You want to show what happened, not exactly what you have evidence of happening.”
“I think of all my movies as home movies! It's just that some are more expensive than others.”