Top 17 Davis Guggenheim Quotes

I was a terrible student. When I went to Sidwell Friends, there were 100 kids in my class. I was the worst student, by far. But I had a few teachers who, despite all that, believed in me.

I’m interested in a realization that’s hiding beneath the surface, and maybe that’s what documentaries can do best, is to try to unpack that and make you think about it.

I don’t set out to make movies about famous people, though I guess I have. I think what I set out to do is to try to understand things that we don’t understand. Or to find out what is blocking us from understanding things we should understand.

Our schools are not geared toward building, preparing kids for the modern economy.

Often I’ve met people who are famous, and as you get to know them, they disappoint you.

The more I work, the more I try to keep myself open like a raw nerve. When I feel things in a story, I want the audience to feel them as well.

If a movie can take you to the place that I’ve been to, and the audience can experience what I’ve experienced, then I feel – success might not be the right word, but I’m satisfied that I did my job.

I was going to direct the movie ‘Training Day‘, and I got fired. Denzel Washington didn’t want me to direct the movie.

Too many documentaries are intellectual exercises. I want documentaries to be alive.

If you look at great reform, it always starts from parents. If you look at the movement to reform the special education movement, it was driven by parents who were fierce advocates for their children.

I’m not one of these guys who thinks testing is the only thing. But testing is a piece but there has to be more human ways to evaluate what job teachers are doing and we have to do a better job of that.

The Muslim world is portrayed as a monolith that is consistently scary and negative, and as much as you can be an open-minded person, if the only diet of information you get is scary images of men in beards, that starts to play on you. But you come to find out that the Muslim world is not a monolith.

Is being negative more journalistic for some reason? I don’t know. But I don’t set out to make puff pieces and I don’t set out to be blindly positive. I just can’t do a movie about something I don’t care about.

I do a lot of audio-only interviews at first just to capture a feeling and go deeper, as if you’re having the most quiet, intimate conversation you’ve ever had with someone you love. If I can get that tone of intimacy, then the film will have that.

As a filmmaker, the most dramatic and the most dread-inspiring thing is when the audience can see more than the characters themselves can see.

It’s so interesting, when you’re a parent, you have these big ideals. Before I had kids, you imagine this sort of egalitarian society. You project this perfect world on the path you’re going to set for your kids.

You look at the trajectories; and as our schools have declined, you see the other alternatives increase, private school, home schooling, all of the other alternatives are going up.