Errol Morris Quotes
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People often trust low-res images because they look more real. But of course they are not more real, just easier to fake. You never see a 10-megapixel photograph of Big Foot or the Abominable Snowman or the Loch Ness Monster.
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There are many dramas that I would like to make: dramas based on real stories. It's approaching things from the other side.
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Maybe today I would call Fred Leuchter and there would be two or three other documentary filmmakers interested in his story simply because of the exposure.
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What's interesting is that Citizen Kane was meant as an anti-fascist/anti-capitalist melodrama and for Donald Trump it becomes just another kind of misogynistic claim that misses the point.
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I think we get into all kinds of difficulty by saying photographs should be taken in a certain way which guarantees their veracity. I think that's a slippery slope to hell.
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Maybe killers is one of my real passions. Why deny it?
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It's a kind of honour when I see how many people are imitating the style of how I make films.
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I actually wanted to publish interview with Donald Trump about Citizen Kane in the New York Times, but the circumstances under which I did that movie made me vulnerable to a lawsuit and at this point in my career, I don't want to go there. But it's amazing.
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I like to point out that people very often confuse the idea that truth is subjective with the fact that truth is perishable.
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I've always loved Elsa Dorfman work. I've loved her and her work is so much an expression of her. One of the reasons to make the film is to expose Elsa, hopefully, to a wider audience.
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Finding truth involves some kind of activity. As I like to point out, truth isn't handed to you on a platter. It's not something that you get at a cafeteria, where they just put it on your plate. It's a search, a quest, an investigation, a continual process of looking at and looking for evidence, trying to figure out what the evidence means.
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Truth and falsity is something that concerns language, it's a property of language.
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Like all great documentaries, The Act of Killing demands another way of looking at reality. It starts as a dreamscape, an attempt to allow the perpetrators to reenact what they did, and then something truly amazing happens. The dream dissolves into nightmare and then into bitter reality. An amazing and impressive film.
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Philip Glass once told me, "They can always copy what you've done, but they can't copy what you're going to do."
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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility.
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Interviews, when they are just simply an exercise in hearing what you want to hear, are of no interest. And many, many, if not most interviews have that character. The interviewer who comes in with a list of bullet points they're going to address one after the other. Interviews, properly considered, should be investigative. You should not know what you're going to hear. You should be surprised.
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I'm asked unendingly to become involved in series involving true crime and as it so happens the Netflix series that I'm working on is about a true crime.
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I actually felt diminished by watching Donald Trump's. If this is what discourse has become in America, who even wants to know about it? It's just too demoralizing and unsettling.
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If someone tells you that George Bush is not the 43rd president of the United States, they might be engaged in wishful thinking, or denial, but if they make that claim, it's either true or false! And you can assess that, regardless of whether there's an omniscient narrator, or an unreliable narrator, or it's shot in vérité, or it's manipulated, it's agitprop, whatever! It makes no difference! It's a style!
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Writing is a form of talking, although writing is such an odd thing in and of itself. People go about it in such different ways.
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In fact, part of the Netflix series is drama.Beyond re-enactments. Why not invent something new?
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If you want to trick someone with a photograph, there are lots of easy ways to do it. You don't need Photoshop. You don't need sophisticated digital photo-manipulation. You don't need a computer. All you need to do is change the caption.
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Listening to what people were saying wasn't even important. But it was important to look as if you were listening to what people were saying. Actually, listening to what people are saying, to me, interferes with looking as if you were listening to what people are saying.
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I like to think that every movie emerges from the conversations.