Errol morris quotes

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.

Film is lies at twenty-four frames a second.

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.

It's really hard to know why certain artists become famous and others don't.

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.

Photographs attract false beliefs the way flypaper attracts flies.

I've always loved [Elsa Dorfman] work. I've loved her and her work is so much an expression of her. One of the reasons to make the film is to expose Elsa, hopefully, to a wider audience.

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

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.

The proper route to an understanding of the world is an examination of our errors about it.

Maybe existence is ultimately a lonely thing.

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.

The perfect war is started for obscure reasons, is hopelessly murderous, and accomplishes nothing.

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.

I've always wondered where explanations end and excuses begin.

I think calling someone a character is a compliment.

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.

I've had people turn me down. Not all that many, but certainly it happens.

There is such a thing as truth, but we have a vested interest in not seeing it, in avoiding it.

There are many dramas that I would like to make: dramas based on real stories. It's approaching things from the other side.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility.

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.

You know, anything more negative, anything more disparaging, anything more adversarial than what [Donald Trump] does already. The mystery is how he's gotten as far as he's gotten.

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.

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.

Ecstatic absurdity: it's the confrontation with meaninglessness.

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.

Listening to what people were saying wasn't even important. But it was important to look as if you were listening to what people were saying. Actually, listening to what people are saying, to me, interferes with looking as if you were listening to what people are saying.

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.

The very idea of photography is as Oliver Wendell Holmes said in the 19th century, "it's a mirror with a memory."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What's great about documentary genre, it seems to me, is that it can be experimental filmmaking. You have a license to do a lot of diverse things under the umbrella of "documentary."

Think of my movies as heightening our awareness, not confusing the difference between truth and fiction, but heightening our awareness of how confused we can become about what is real.

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.

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.

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

Mike Wallace's interviews may make great television, but they don't produce great evidence.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Language can be used to so many diverse ends. It can be used to clarify and, of course, it can be used to obfuscate, confuse, evade.

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.

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.

The fact that the world is utterly insane makes it tolerable.

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

There is something about the photographs that is endlessly disturbing. The fact that we like to think of them as torture actually hides what is really deeply offensive about them.

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

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.

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. People

Writing is a form of talking, although writing is such an odd thing in and of itself. People go about it in such different ways.

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 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 like to think that every movie emerges from the conversations.

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.

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.

[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.

Not suing others does not mean that others won't sue you.If people are desperate enough to think that they can gain some kind of financial advantage, they'll sue.

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.

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.

Truth and falsity is something that concerns language, it's a property of language.

Simply coming to the perpetrator and delivering the message is Nozick's definition of revenge. And in that sense, Adi is exacting revenge. When people ask, "Does Adi want revenge?" - they mean violent revenge. But in Nozick's formulation, it is revenge. That is the essence of revenge.

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.

When you start talking about the known knowns and the unknown unknowns, you're thrown into a crazy meta-level discussion. Do I know what I know, do I know what I don't know, do I know what I don't know I don't know. It becomes a strange, Lewis Carroll - like nursery rhyme.

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 think that anybody really makes films quite like mine. That's maybe true of any filmmaker.

Those who cannot condemn the past repeat it in order to remember it.

Maybe today I would call Fred Leuchter and there would be two or three other documentary filmmakers interested in his story simply because of the exposure.

The claim that everybody sees the world differently is not a claim that there's no reality. It's a different kind of claim.

You can't tell by looking at a film-clip whether it is a drama or a documentary without knowing how it was produced.

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!

There's a line I love in Conan The Barbarian where someone says, "That used to be another snake cult, now I see it everywhere." That's certainly true of documentaries. I wouldn't say it's ubiquitous, but it's become close to ubiquitous. It's everywhere.

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.

You can't really trust anybody who doesn't talk a lot, because how would you know what they're thinking?

The way I go about making a movie... even the ones that are interview-driven, I go into them not knowing what's going to happen, and feeling my way through.

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.

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.

What is it that angers us?... We have been tricked. In essence, we have been lied to. The problem is not that the photograph has been manipulated, but that we have been manipulated by the photograph.

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.

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.

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?

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

One of the strengths of my interviews is that I really, honest to God, have no idea what people are going to say.

The smarter people I know declined to watch the most recent debate [with Donald Trump].

Philip Glass once told me, "They can always copy what you've done, but they can't copy what you're going to do."

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.

I've done interviews in one day that went on for fifteen, sixteen hours. And at a certain point, the control over what they're saying breaks down; it becomes different. It becomes really powerful, and for me, real. It becomes out of control.

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.

My stuff always starts with interviews. I start interviewing people, and then slowly but surely, a movie insinuates itself.

The first Polaroid ever took of someone in my family was my son when he was about four years old.

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.

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?".

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.

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.

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!

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?!

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.

The imprimatur of truthfulness does not guarantee truthfulness. People should know better. But they don't.

They say seeing is believing, but the opposite is true. Believing is seeing.

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.

My films are as much concerned with truth as anything in vérité. Maybe more so.

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

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.

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.

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!

I asked [Donald Trump] if he had any advice for Charles Foster Kane and he said, "Yeah, get yourself a different woman."

I used to work as a private detective years and years ago.

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

The pursuit of truth, properly considered, shouldn't stop short of insanity.

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.

Like all great documentaries, The Act of Killing demands another way of looking at reality. It starts as a dreamscape, an attempt to allow the perpetrators to reenact what they did, and then something truly amazing happens. The dream dissolves into nightmare and then into bitter reality. An amazing and impressive film.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 used to say that interviewing others was perhaps the way I could stop talking and start listening. It's a kind of enforced silence.

There is only one direction. (Down.) There is only one color. (Black.) And there is only one number (Zero.)

Nothing is so obvious that it's obvious.