Errol Morris Quotes
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The proper route to an understanding of the world is an examination of our errors about it.
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There's a line I love in Conan The Barbarian where someone says, "That used to be another snake cult, now I see it everywhere." That's certainly true of documentaries. I wouldn't say it's ubiquitous, but it's become close to ubiquitous. It's everywhere.
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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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The imprimatur of truthfulness does not guarantee truthfulness. People should know better. But they don't.
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The smarter people I know declined to watch the most recent debate with Donald Trump.
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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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I like to think that every movie emerges from the conversations.
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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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They say seeing is believing, but the opposite is true. Believing is seeing.
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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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I used to work as a private detective years and years ago.
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But there's a big difference between, say, reporting on a story and simply making up a story.
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I've done interviews in one day that went on for fifteen, sixteen hours. And at a certain point, the control over what they're saying breaks down; it becomes different. It becomes really powerful, and for me, real. It becomes out of control.
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I believe that we face incredible obstacles in our attempts to see the world. Everything in our nature tries to deny the world around us; to refabricate it in our own image; to reinvent it for our own benefit. And so, it becomes something of a challenge, a task, to recover (or at least attempt to recover) the real world despite all the impediments to that end.
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War is such a peculiar thing - inaugurated by the whims of few, affecting the fate of many. It is difficult, if not impossible, thing to understand, yet we feel compelled to describe it as though it has meaning - even virtue. It starts for reasons often hopelessly obscure, meanders on, then stops.
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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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Forty years ago this country went down a rabbit hole in Vietnam and millions died. I fear we're going down a rabbit hole once again - and if people can stop and think and reflect on some of the ideas and issues in this movie, perhaps I've done some damn good here!
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I've never seen myself as a documentary filmmaker. I see myself as a filmmaker, period, and I am interested in drama as well as in documentary.
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I'm really interested in self-deception. Really interested in how people live in bubble universes. How people can fail to see the seemingly obvious.
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We live in a very litigious society. I've never sued anybody. I certainly can imagine a situation where I might sue, but it seems more or less in bad taste.
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Certain kinds of intimacy emerge on a phone call that might never occur if you were sitting right next to the other person.
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A lot of the themes of my movies, the actual stories, come from tabloid stories.
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I've always wondered where explanations end and excuses begin.