Best 118 quotes of Errol Morris on MyQuotes

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.

A lot of the distinctions that we make between drama and documentary are spurious. We're deeply confused about these issues. About the difference between the two, about where documentary ends and drama begins.

A lot of the themes of my movies, the actual stories, come from tabloid stories.

A movie is like a tip of an iceberg, in a way, because so little of what you do in connection with making a movie actually gets into the movie. Almost everything gets left behind.

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.

Basically, "Making a Murderer" chronicles a set of crimes committed in Wisconsin: Manitowoc, Wisconsin. The first crime is a miscarriage of justice. Steven Avery is convicted and sentenced to a very, very long prison sentence for the assault on a woman. And it comes to light through DNA evidence that he was not the assailant.

But there's a big difference between, say, reporting on a story and simply making up a story.

Certain kinds of intimacy emerge on a phone call that might never occur if you were sitting right next to the other person.

Did you know that Nuremberg courtroom was designed so that the Allies could project movies during the trial? And, also so that they could film the trial? The first movies that were shown were prepared by John Ford - a compilation of material from the liberation of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau. But here comes an interesting part. Did you know they lit (using fluorescent tubes) the defendants so they could be filmed watching the films that were shown during the trial?

Ecstatic absurdity: it's the confrontation with meaninglessness.

[Elsa Dorfman]was well known. Certainly in the Boston area, she's well known as a portrait photographer. My wife always wanted to meet her and then there was some benefit where she was taking pictures.

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.

Film is lies at twenty-four frames a second.

Finding truth involves some kind of activity. As I like to point out, truth isn't handed to you on a platter. It's not something that you get at a cafeteria, where they just put it on your plate. It's a search, a quest, an investigation, a continual process of looking at and looking for evidence, trying to figure out what the evidence means.

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!

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.

I actually felt diminished by watching [Donald Trump's]. If this is what discourse has become in America, who even wants to know about it? It's just too demoralizing and unsettling.

I actually like doing commercials. I don't like doing them to the exclusion of everything else, but I like doing them. The 30-second format is very hard. I sometimes call it American Haiku. And I think some of the commercials I've done are not so bad.

I actually wanted to publish [ interview with Donald Trump about Citizen Kane] in the New York Times, but the circumstances under which I did that movie made me vulnerable to a lawsuit and at this point in my career, I don't want to go there. But it's amazing.

I am profoundly skeptical about our abilities to predict the future in general, and human behavior in particular.

I believe that we face incredible obstacles in our attempts to see the world. Everything in our nature tries to deny the world around us; to refabricate it in our own image; to reinvent it for our own benefit. And so, it becomes something of a challenge, a task, to recover (or at least attempt to recover) the real world despite all the impediments to that end.

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.

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.

I don't think that anybody really makes films quite like mine. That's maybe true of any filmmaker.

I envy certain writers, because there are writers who do go into a kind of different zone, where the writing isn't controlled anymore.

If someone tells you that George Bush is not the 43rd president of the United States, they might be engaged in wishful thinking, or denial, but if they make that claim, it's either true or false! And you can assess that, regardless of whether there's an omniscient narrator, or an unreliable narrator, or it's shot in vérité, or it's manipulated, it's agitprop, whatever! It makes no difference! It's a style!

If you asked me what makes the world go round, I would say self-deception. Self-deception allows us to create a consistent narrative for ourselves that we actually believe. I’m not saying that the truth doesn’t matter. It does. But self-deception is how we survive.

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.

If you want to trick someone with a photograph, there are lots of easy ways to do it. You don't need Photoshop. You don't need sophisticated digital photo-manipulation. You don't need a computer. All you need to do is change the caption.

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.

I like to point out that people very often confuse the idea that truth is subjective with the fact that truth is perishable.

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.

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.

I'm asked unendingly to become involved in series involving true crime and as it so happens the Netflix series that I'm working on is about a true crime.

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.

I never intended to be a documentary filmmaker. I think I became a documentary filmmaker because I had trouble writing, and I had trouble finishing things.

In fact, part of the Netflix series is drama.Beyond re-enactments. Why not invent something new?

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think calling someone a character is a compliment.

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.

It's a kind of honour when I see how many people are imitating the style of how I make films.

It's pretty clear that fame isn't inextricably connected with merit .

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.

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.

I used to live in New York City, then when my son was two years old we moved to Cambridge Massachusetts and we've been there ever since. My son is now twenty-nine years old, so we've been up there for a while.

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.

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.