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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The imprimatur of truthfulness does not guarantee truthfulness. People should know better. But they don't.
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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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I like to think that every movie emerges from the conversations.
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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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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility.
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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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The smarter people I know declined to watch the most recent debate with Donald Trump.
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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'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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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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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 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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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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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 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'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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Those who cannot condemn the past repeat it in order to remember it.
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I've always wondered where explanations end and excuses begin.
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I used to work as a private detective years and years ago.
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A lot of the themes of my movies, the actual stories, come from tabloid stories.
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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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But there's a big difference between, say, reporting on a story and simply making up a story.
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I am profoundly skeptical about our abilities to predict the future in general, and human behavior in particular.