Errol Morris Quotes
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The way I go about making a movie... even the ones that are interview-driven, I go into them not knowing what's going to happen, and feeling my way through.
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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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People like nonfiction presented to them in a certain way, so that they don't have to think about whether it's true or not. They like it to have that imprimatur of respectability, of genuineness.
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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'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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The smarter people I know declined to watch the most recent debate with Donald Trump.
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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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You can talk about a caption underneath a photograph being true or false, because there is a linguistic element. You can claim that a photograph is a picture of a horse or a cow, but it is the sentence that expresses the claim, which is true or false, not the photograph.
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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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I've always wondered where explanations end and excuses begin.
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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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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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The imprimatur of truthfulness does not guarantee truthfulness. People should know better. But they don't.
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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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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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A lot of the themes of my movies, the actual stories, come from tabloid stories.
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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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I asked Donald Trump if he had any advice for Charles Foster Kane and he said, "Yeah, get yourself a different woman."
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I used to work as a private detective years and years ago. And my boss gave me this one very simple piece of advice about trying to figure out who to interview first in any investigation. His recommendation: Always pick the people who were fired. Pick the people who are pissed off.
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What's great about documentary genre, it seems to me, is that it can be experimental filmmaking. You have a license to do a lot of diverse things under the umbrella of "documentary."
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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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We have more information - a glut of information - than ever before, and perhaps less knowledge. That's what's peculiar. And the only way you can deal with it, I suppose, is to make fun of it. I would rather watch Comedy Central for the news than I'd like to watch any other program on television. Maybe that shows you the state of affairs.
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Those who cannot condemn the past repeat it in order to remember it.
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But there's a big difference between, say, reporting on a story and simply making up a story.