Errol Morris Quotes
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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 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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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 probably wouldn't have done Fred Leuchter story if it was just a story about an executioner or a holocaust denier, but the combination of the two elements was irresistible. So yeah, I find it strange that there are so many people out there now.
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This uses a lens system, which I have used for years in various different ways, but I've never used it in the context of an interview. This is the very first time that I've done that. It's a lens called The Revolution, so it allowed me to interview Elsa Dorfman and actually operate the camera. Well one of the cameras, because there were four cameras there.
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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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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 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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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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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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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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If you told me thirty years ago that people would be parodying documentary films, I never would have believed it. It wasn't clear that the films themselves even had an audience, let alone an audience for parodies of them.
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My stuff always starts with interviews. I start interviewing people, and then slowly but surely, a movie insinuates itself.
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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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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 perfect war is started for obscure reasons, is hopelessly murderous, and accomplishes nothing.
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Tell me what's wrong with this idea: If you're selling to somebody, find someone like that person to sell to them. If you're trying to reach swing voters, if you're trying to reach people on the fence, if you're trying to reach Republicans who are unsure about this candidate... get people who switched! Get people who are registered Republicans. Get people who were George Bush voters who can't bring themselves to do it again. Talk to them, get them to explain what their reasons are, and show them to people. What's wrong with this idea?!
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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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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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There is a documentary element in my films, a very strong documentary element, but by documentary element, I mean an element that's out of control, that's not controlled by me. And that element is the words, the language that people use, what they say in an interview. They're not written, not rehearsed. It's spontaneous, extemporaneous material.
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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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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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Maybe existence is ultimately a lonely thing.