Errol Morris Quotes
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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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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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The chance that any given sentence is a lie, rather than a truth, I think, is fairly great. An intentional lie, a self-deception, a misconception - there are lots of categories of untruth, not one grab bag. And hotographs can reveal something to us, and they can also conceal things.
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The pursuit of truth, properly considered, shouldn't stop short of insanity.
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It was assumed that you can't touch evangelical Christians. "Oh, they're the Republican Right. Stay away from those people. Don't even try to talk to them." Well, what's interesting is that there were evangelical Christians who were voting for Kerry. There were right-to-lifers who were voting for Kerry. And it's interesting to listen to the reasons why. To ignore that segment of the electorate is moronic. Particularly if you don't know who those people are, or what their concerns are.
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All alone - shorn of context, without captions - a photograph is neither true nor false.... For truth, properly considered, is about the relationship between language and the world, not about photographs and the world.
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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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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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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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It's pretty clear that fame isn't inextricably connected with merit .
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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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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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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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Photographs attract false beliefs the way flypaper attracts flies.
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People think in narratives - in beginnings, middles and ends. The danger when you edit something too severely is that it no longer makes sense; worse still, it leaves people with the disquieting impression that something is being hidden.
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The perfect war is started for obscure reasons, is hopelessly murderous, and accomplishes nothing.
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The fact that the world is utterly insane makes it tolerable.
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We imagine what this country is, but quite clearly, this country is a mystery. I mean, one of the reasons I did the election ads is, I thought I could learn something. Like, what the hell is going on? I think anybody - particularly a person of leftist persuasion such as myself - who stops and thinks even for a moment, realizes that something strange is going on and we don't quite get it.
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Right now, we live in bad times in this country, and the fact that there are filmmakers addressing political and social issues is to me a good thing.
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There's this crazy thinking that style guarantees truth. You go out with a hand-held camera, use available light, and somehow the truth emerges.
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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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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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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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You can't tell by looking at a film-clip whether it is a drama or a documentary without knowing how it was produced.