Errol Morris Quotes
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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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But there's a big difference between, say, reporting on a story and simply making up a story.
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I think calling someone a character is a compliment.
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Twenty to thirty years ago, who was making documentary films? Nobody. Well, relatively few people. It was an art form that had limited theatrical distribution, if any at all. Some television distribution, but relatively small audiences regardless. And in the intervening years it's become more and more popular with a lot of people.
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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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Ecstatic absurdity: it's the confrontation with meaninglessness.
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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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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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Long, long before I became a filmmaker I was talking to killers. Filmmaking was an after thought.
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You can't really trust anybody who doesn't talk a lot, because how would you know what they're thinking?
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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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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'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 pursuit of truth, properly considered, shouldn't stop short of insanity.
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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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I remember on page one of The New York Times the article about Fred Leuchter. The heading was "Can Capital Punishment Be Humane" and it was the story about an electric chair repairman and execution machine designer. And then buried in the back of the paper was the fact that Fred Leuchter had also been involved in holocaust denial.
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Part of the mystery of any given photograph is the fact that it was taken at a certain time and in a certain place and time keeps moving on. A photograph might be a moment in time preserved, but the world continues to change around it.
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My films are as much concerned with truth as anything in vérité. Maybe more so.
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They say seeing is believing, but the opposite is true. Believing is seeing.
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I've been involved in doing advertising for various elections and I just couldn't see doing anti-Trump advertising in this election. My line has been, "How could you do anything worse that what he does himself?".
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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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You can ask yourself, if a film makes a claim, is the claim true or false? Having said that, a style of presenting material doesn't guarantee truth. There's this crazy idea that somehow you pick a style, and by virtue of picking the style, you've provided something that is more truthful. It's as if you imagine that changing the font on a sentence you write makes it more truthful.
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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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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.