Frederick Wiseman (1930–), a Boston native of Jewish descent, is unquestionably one of history’s most celebrated and influential documentarians. There is hardly a book, chapter, or article on American Cinéma Vérité—or “Direct Cinema,” and more broadly on documentary history and theory—that does not allocate attention, whether minimally or substantially, to praise or to criticize Wiseman’s crystalline, puritanical, and innovative filmic style and rhetoric, as well as his persistent line of thematic choices. In addition, Wiseman has given countless interviews over the past sixty years, one of which is the focus of this chapter. On November 22, 1974, Thomas R. Atkins conducted an interview with Wiseman immediately after the inaugural public screening of Wiseman’s eighth film, Primate. In 1976, the interview was molded into a book chapter titled “Reality Fictions, Wiseman on Primate.” Wiseman says to Atkins: “I think the phrase ‘reality fictions’ is a better description of what I’m doing than documentary.” The chapter develops two lines of interrogation. First, a thorough review of the history of the words “reality” and “fiction” in the annals of documentary definitions; and second, a hermeneutics of the unavoidable collision Wiseman posits between “reality” and “fiction,” two seemingly contradictory fundamentals.