Errol Morris Quotes
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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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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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Ecstatic absurdity: it's the confrontation with meaninglessness.
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My films are as much concerned with truth as anything in vérité. Maybe more so.
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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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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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It's pretty clear that fame isn't inextricably connected with merit .
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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.
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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 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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There is only one direction. (Down.) There is only one color. (Black.) And there is only one number (Zero.)
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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 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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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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The fact that the world is utterly insane makes it tolerable.
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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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I'm one simple way I think I've succeeded was capturing Elsa Dorfman. There's something about Elsa, her personality, and her work that I believe is there.
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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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Truth is a pursuit, it's a quest. And proof is certainly in the pudding in this particular instance, because the film, and the evidence accumulated in making the film, led to this man's release from prison. And that's hardly ever happened, if it's happened at all, in any other film that I can think of.
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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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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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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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It's really hard to know why certain artists become famous and others don't.
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I don't believe that you can talk about a photograph being true or false. I don't think such a claim has any meaning.