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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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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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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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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Maybe killers is one of my real passions. Why deny it?
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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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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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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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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility.
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Truth and falsity is something that concerns language, it's a property of language.
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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'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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In fact, part of the Netflix series is drama.Beyond re-enactments. Why not invent something new?
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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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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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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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Everything is a reenactment. We are reenacting the world in the mind. The world is not inside there. It does not reside in the gray matter of the brain.
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What is it that angers us?... We have been tricked. In essence, we have been lied to. The problem is not that the photograph has been manipulated, but that we have been manipulated by the photograph.
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If you asked me what makes the world go round, I would say self-deception. Self-deception allows us to create a consistent narrative for ourselves that we actually believe. I’m not saying that the truth doesn’t matter. It does. But self-deception is how we survive.
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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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I've always wondered where explanations end and excuses begin.