Errol Morris Quotes
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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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I used to say that interviewing others was perhaps the way I could stop talking and start listening. It's a kind of enforced silence.
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People often trust low-res images because they look more real. But of course they are not more real, just easier to fake. [...] You never see a 10-megapixel photograph of Big Foot or the Abominable Snowman or the Loch Ness Monster.
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Interviews, when they are just simply an exercise in hearing what you want to hear, are of no interest. And many, many, if not most interviews have that character. The interviewer who comes in with a list of bullet points they're going to address one after the other. Interviews, properly considered, should be investigative. You should not know what you're going to hear. You should be surprised.
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I've had people turn me down. Not all that many, but certainly it happens.
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War is such a peculiar thing - inaugurated by the whims of few, affecting the fate of many. It is difficult, if not impossible, thing to understand, yet we feel compelled to describe it as though it has meaning - even virtue. It starts for reasons often hopelessly obscure, meanders on, then stops
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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'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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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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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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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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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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People like nonfiction presented to them in a certain way, so that they don't have to think about whether it's true or not. They like it to have that imprimatur of respectability, of genuineness.
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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 believe we have two ideas about how movies are made in our heads. Idealizations. Platonic ideals. One of them is of a movie that is completely uncontrolled, and another is a movie that is completely controlled. The auteur theory vs. cinéma vérité.
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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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What's interesting is that Citizen Kane was meant as an anti-fascist/anti-capitalist melodrama and for Donald Trump it becomes just another kind of misogynistic claim that misses the point.
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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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Those who cannot condemn the past repeat it in order to remember it.
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I like to think that one of things I've done with non-fiction since the very beginning is to find new ways of telling true stories.
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You can think of my films as cautionary tales, but you might even think of them as despairing tales, because at least in a cautionary tale, you have this idea that by listening to the story you can assure a better outcome. Whereas I'm not at all convinced that's the case. In fact, if anything, I'm convinced that it's the opposite.
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Robert Nozick [a Havard philosopher, famous for his book "Anarchy, State and Utopia"] defined revenge as delivering the message that you know what someone has done, and it doesn't involve hurting them or doing anything to them beyond that. It's just delivering the message that their crime has been noted not just by its victims, because the victim might be dead, but by another who has a different moral view and will challenge the perpetrator's view.
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I don't think that anybody really makes films quite like mine. That's maybe true of any filmmaker.
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Film is lies at twenty-four frames a second.
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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 like to think that I differ from other interviewers in the sense that I hide my agenda more successfully, and I'm more open to hearing stuff that is surprising and unexpected. That I'm actually involved in an investigation, through monologue, at times.
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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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I think we get into all kinds of difficulty by saying photographs should be taken in a certain way which guarantees their veracity. I think that's a slippery slope to hell.
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God is greater than anything that man can do or has done. He is not undone by just a train of powder. "Our God is not out of breath because he has blown one tempest and swallowed a Navy: Our God has not burnt out his eyes because he has looked upon a Train of Powder."
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Photographs attract false beliefs the way flypaper attracts flies.
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