At Berkeley

Is there such thing as nonfiction? I know you also like the term “reality fiction” to describe your work.

I coined that once as a joke because somebody was going on about fly-on-the-wall, cinema vérité, it was just originally a straight-faced joke and it got picked up. But, like all jokes, there’s something to it, in the sense that movies are based on unstaged real events, but the way they’re edited and the order in which they’re put resembles the construction of a novel or play.

from an interview with Frederick Wiseman on Gawker, November 8, 2013