“Maybe this is my left-wing conspiracy theory, but the right has re-branded itself as kind of the everyman party: Who’s the person you’d rather have a beer with? The Republican Party, even though it’s a party of incredible wealth and corporate interests, has hidden behind this everyman quality.”
― Morgan Neville
“If I told my 14-year-old self that I’d be hanging out with Keith Richards talking about records, my head would’ve exploded.”
― Morgan Neville
“You make documentaries because you love doing it; it’s the only sane reason to make documentaries.”
― Morgan Neville
“If the Olympic Spirit is about overcoming every hurdle and accepting no limits, then I think Samsung is a great ambassador for these values.”
― Morgan Neville
“I love Memphis, and just being there affects one’s outlook.”
― Morgan Neville
“The easiest way to subjugate a people is to erase a culture. I’ve seen it in war zones.”
― Morgan Neville
“If you’re making a film about a band or a songwriter or whomever, there’s a publisher, there’s a record label, and there are people who are vested interests in that film. But with back-up singers, because they did stuff for everybody, there’s no one party that has any vested interest in seeing the story told.”
― Morgan Neville
“I came up in left-wing political writing. My first job out of college was working as Gore Vidal’s fact checker.”
― Morgan Neville
“I am a big believer in the power of journalism; it’s a heroic pursuit.”
― Morgan Neville
“There was no model how to make a documentary production company work. I figured it out as I went along.”
― Morgan Neville
“I always tell aspiring documentary filmmakers, ‘You have to go into it because you love it; if you go into it for the money, you’re an idiot.’ The number one prerequisite is you have to be intensely curious. If you love learning and trying to make people figure out what makes people tick, it’s the best job in the world.”
― Morgan Neville
“Everyone feels entitled to their own facts.”
― Morgan Neville
“The presidential and vice-presidential debates are those rare moments when people come together, but to even call them debates is a stretch because they’re played by such negotiated rules, and they’re so over-rehearsed.”
― Morgan Neville
“They don’t make people like Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley anymore.”
― Morgan Neville
“Now, you watch cable news, and you know what everybody’s going to say before they open their mouth.”
― Morgan Neville
“So much of what we get on our news debate shows is really people spinning one way or the other, giving their talking points one way or the other.”
― Morgan Neville
“In a weird way, our satirists probably have the most complicated, nuanced views of our politics now – Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver. I don’t know what that says about our country.”
― Morgan Neville
“TV tends to laud the person with the perfect one-liner rather than the one with the better idea.”
― Morgan Neville
“If we can’t agree on objective truth, then how are we ever going to agree on opinions?”
― Morgan Neville
“In the late 1960s, English artists like the Rolling Stones and Joe Cocker began recording in the States, and at that point, they realised, ‘We can get real African-American voices on our records; we don’t have to pretend any more.’”
― Morgan Neville
“Politicians pretend not to be smart.”
― Morgan Neville
“I so often doubt how much people on television believe what they’re saying. They’re playing roles for think tanks or political parties or shills of whatever stripe.”
― Morgan Neville
“The idea of music coming from the Church is not new.”
― Morgan Neville
“Church singing is a great training ground.”
― Morgan Neville
“Success and singing is not synonymous.”
― Morgan Neville
“By the rules of debate, if you lose your cool, you’ve lost the game.”
― Morgan Neville
“Culture in general is important, and people’s identify is tied up in it. It’s how we connect with others.”
― Morgan Neville
“There’s no cultural revolution by mistake.”
― Morgan Neville
“Music, like film, is an incredible tool for creating empathy.”
― Morgan Neville
“There are a handful of music docs I’d love to do, including David Bowie.”
― Morgan Neville
“I’d worked on music docs for years. It felt like writing a novel. By the time I got to Keith Richards, it felt like making a sketch.”
― Morgan Neville
“I feel like – like Netflix is great if you’ve got a project ready to launch itself into the world rapidly.”
― Morgan Neville
“As a writer, I think about films I work on in a traditional Hollywood kind of a way. I’m curious to see how it translates.”
― Morgan Neville
“I knew who Buckley and Vidal were growing up, being a political junkie.”
― Morgan Neville
“Vidal was a novelist, an essayist, a playwright, a screenwriter, and many other things. Buckley started a magazine, hosted a TV show, lead a political movement, and was a master debater. They were multihyphenates in a way that you rarely see anymore.”
― Morgan Neville
“Sometimes we have our perfect foils, or you can call them their bete noir: the person who brings out both the best and the worst in you because you disagree with them so completely. Yet, you understand and respect them enough to give it your all.”
― Morgan Neville
“I feel more relaxed after the Oscar. I feel like I have a chance to just tell the stories I want to tell, and it’s actually been really nice.”
― Morgan Neville
“When you come to documentaries, the stakes are too low for it to be cutthroat. You’re all doing it for the right reasons.”
― Morgan Neville
“If you’re not doing it for the right reasons, then you’d be dumb to be making documentaries.”
― Morgan Neville
“I feel like there’s a lot of sympathy and camaraderie among documentary filmmakers.”
― Morgan Neville
“Docs, in general, are made in the edit bay, archival docs even more so.”
― Morgan Neville
“We saw The Who on New Year’s Eve in 1975.”
― Morgan Neville
“I feel like I’m in a privileged position where I get to meet people and talk to them about the most important things in their lives. I appreciate that trust they’re putting in me.”
― Morgan Neville
“The first night I met Yo-Yo Ma, I found him the most charming person I had ever met, and I was willing to follow him with the camera anywhere.”
― Morgan Neville
“I think, in the West, we often discount the arts as nice but not that important. Certainly in America when we cut funding for schools, the arts are the first programs to go. But the arts built the things we need more than anything else: collaboration and co-operation and creativity.”
― Morgan Neville
“I would argue that the culture is not the frosting on the cake: the culture is the plate the cake sits on.”
― Morgan Neville
“When you come from a place and an identity, you can feel constricted and have to get away. But then you realise how much a part of you it is.”
― Morgan Neville
“Being a backup singer means being able to sing on a dime. Music is oozing out of their every pore.”
― Morgan Neville
“Space is something which makes us question our role here on Earth. It brings out the best of our hopes and dreams.”
― Morgan Neville
“’The Sound of Silk’ will serve as a lens for larger questions about cultural identity in a global society and the potential for individuals to act as catalysts for change.”
― Morgan Neville
“Like the ancient Silk Road itself, ‘The Sound of Silk’ will make the foreign familiar while challenging long-held notions of identity and our place in the world.”
― Morgan Neville
“Everything about Hank Williams interests me. His music, his life. His death. His impact.”
― Morgan Neville
“We had an incredible experience on ’20 Feet.’”
― Morgan Neville
“You tend to put your rock stars on pedestals – they seem like they’ve been there for time immemorial. But you realize that the rock stars have their own rock stars. They were fans and kids once, too.”
― Morgan Neville
“I could really sink my teeth into a David Bowie documentary.”
― Morgan Neville
“I always like learning the small details about a subject.”
― Morgan Neville
“I love documentaries. I love the format. I’ve been doing them for a long time.”
― Morgan Neville
“I’ve produced two docs for Cameron Crowe, and I’ve always loved him as a filmmaker.”
― Morgan Neville
“The problem with a lot of narrative films is that they’re not real enough.”
― Morgan Neville
“Non-fiction or documentaries can tell any kind of a story because they don’t have to adhere to the rules of what’s possible. When you’re making something up, you have to say, ‘Well, this is what would happen here,’ but in reality, stuff happens that seems impossible.”
― Morgan Neville
“The best music films are not about music… Music is just the language we’re speaking to tell a story about culture.”
― Morgan Neville
“How often do we make films just celebrating people that do a good job, work altruistically, and are in it just for the sake of the love and not the business?”
― Morgan Neville
“Watching somebody sing reveals a lot about character.”
― Morgan Neville
“I wish I didn’t care about what people thought as much as Keith Richards doesn’t care.”
― Morgan Neville
“I never got into making documentaries for any kind of success, because documentary careers are generally ones of prolonged failures.”
― Morgan Neville
“To be a backup singer, you have to walk into any situation and just be perfect from the first take to the 50th take.”
― Morgan Neville
“A lot of backup singers are really shy and don’t want their life documented. They’re not pining to be celebrity. They’ve had a front-row look at celebrity for a long time, and most people find out it’s not for them.”
― Morgan Neville
“Harmony singing isn’t meant to be done alone.”
― Morgan Neville
“I think of myself as a cultural filmmaker.”
― Morgan Neville
“At the beginning of the ’70s, everything was possible.”
― Morgan Neville
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