Errol Morris Quotes
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My films are as much concerned with truth as anything in vérité. Maybe more so.
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Truth exists independent of style. It involves all kinds of issues. Properly considered, it's a quest, a pursuit. To say that vérité is more truthful than something that is narrated is just misplaced. Completely wrong. And the fact that people still talk about it as though they're really talking about something... it puzzles me greatly. A moment of reflection about it tells you that it makes no sense!
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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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Ecstatic absurdity: it's the confrontation with meaninglessness.
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There are artists who are very well known and many of us feel they should be less well known, while there are others who aren't well known and many feel deserve more attention.
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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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People can burn archives; people can destroy evidence, but to say that history is perishable, that historical evidence is perishable, is different than saying that history is subjective.
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I am profoundly skeptical about our abilities to predict the future in general, and human behavior in particular.
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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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In the case of The Thin Blue Line, I was surprised actually by many things. I was shooting down in Texas where the actual killer David Harris lived and I interviewed the town cop. He described these guys as being David Harris' partners in crime and even though they had criminal records and had committed crimes, they sued me! More often than not, the insurance company that protects you against this type of lawsuit will settle it with cash and contest it in a court of law.
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It's so much easier to make a movie about someone who is so likeable that you just want to get out of the way.
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Appearing on the front page of the New York Times even given the state of papers today is still something that's seen by a lot of people.
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I gave someone a perverse argument not so long ago about why advertising is better than movies. You want to hear it? Movies operate from a really disingenuous premise, that people are heroes. I know a lot of people and have had an opportunity over the years to observe them. Are they heroes...? Let's put it this way. Advertising tries something simpler and more believable: Products as heroes. I guess the idea is: When all else fails, put your faith in conditioner.
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We falsely interpret the world around us. We ignore evidence that doesn't support our prior beliefs and we convince ourselves we know things we don. We think we know things we don't know.
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I've been horribly depressed (lately), which, as you know, can be terribly time-consuming. I mean, if you're going to do it right, that is.
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The perfect war is started for obscure reasons, is hopelessly murderous, and accomplishes nothing.
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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 very idea of photography is as Oliver Wendell Holmes said in the 19th century, "it's a mirror with a memory."
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The pursuit of truth, properly considered, shouldn't stop short of insanity.
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Recently it's become much to my surprise, something that does happen. For example, I used to get almost all of my stories, and it's probably still true, from newspapers. Primarily from The New York Times. No one ever really thinks of The New York Times as a tabloid newspaper and it isn't a tabloid newspaper. But there is a tabloid newspaper within The New York Times very, very often.
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Maybe existence is ultimately a lonely thing.
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They say seeing is believing, but the opposite is true. Believing is seeing.
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Photographs attract false beliefs the way flypaper attracts flies.
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I used to work as a private detective years and years ago.