Errol Morris Quotes & Sayings

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. — Errol Morris

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. — Errol Morris

But I can say what interests me about documentary is the fact that you don't know how the story ends at the onset - that you are investigating, with a camera, and the story emerges as you go along. — Errol Morris

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. — Errol Morris

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

Films are neither true nor false. That includes my films, as well as others. They may make claims that are true or false, but films are too complex. They have too many ingredients. — Errol Morris

I like to think that I'm nonjudgmental, that I can listen and be engaged by almost anything. — Errol Morris

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." — Errol Morris

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

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. — Errol Morris

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. — Errol Morris

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. — Errol Morris

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. — Errol Morris

But one of the amazing things about documentary is that you can remake it every time you make one. There is no rule about how a documentary film has to be made. — Errol Morris

Interviews, when they are just simply an exercise in hearing what you want to hear, are of no interest. — Errol Morris

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. — Errol Morris

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. — Errol Morris

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. — Errol Morris

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. — Errol Morris

When you're working for yourself and your own obsession with finding the truth, you're at your own mercy. — Errol Morris

Despite all of our efforts to control something, the world is much, much more powerful than us, and more deranged even than us. — Errol Morris

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. — Errol Morris

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. — Errol Morris

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

I think an interview, properly considered, should be an investigation. You shouldn't know what the interview will yield. Otherwise, why do it at all? — Errol Morris

I've never had any problem with crazy people. I like crazy people; I probably am a crazy person myself. — Errol Morris

Film is lies at twenty-four frames a second. — Errol Morris

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. — Errol Morris

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

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. — Errol Morris

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

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

A lot of stories that have fascinated me are tabloid stories that have come from other newspapers, like 'The New York Times.' — Errol Morris

If everything was planned, it would be dreadful. If everything was unplanned, it would be equally dreadful. — Errol Morris

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. — Errol Morris

My advice to all interviewers is: Shut up and listen. It's harder than it sounds. — Errol Morris

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

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? — Errol Morris

I taught my son to read with tabloids. We would sit to read the 'Weekly World News' together. — Errol Morris

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

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

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. — Errol Morris

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

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. — Errol Morris

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. — Errol Morris

Set up an arbitrary set of rules and then follow them slavishly. — Errol Morris

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

I believe it was probably less than ten minutes that went by from the invention of photography to the point where people realized that they could lie with photographs. — Errol Morris

If you think you're going to create an unposed photograph, think again. There is no such thing. — Errol Morris

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

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

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

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. — Errol Morris

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

I've never made any money off of any of my films. Statement of fact. So without commercial work, I would be in big trouble. — Errol Morris

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. — Errol Morris

If you're a journalist - and I think, on some level, I'm a journalist, and proud to be a journalist, or a documentarian, however you want to describe it - part of what I do has to be the pursuit of the truth. — Errol Morris

If we're reading a first-person account, we know that each and every one of us, myself included, have a great desire to be seen in a certain way, or to be perceived in a certain way. It's unavoidable. — Errol Morris

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. — Errol Morris

I feel as if I became a documentary film-maker only because I had writer's block for four decades. There's no other good reason. — Errol Morris

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 ... — Errol Morris

You're meant to think somehow that literature, in espousing eternal values, is kind of normal and balanced and reasonable. When it fact it's anything but. — Errol Morris

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. — Errol Morris

First of all, tabloid stories are some of the richest and most important stories that we have. There's nothing wrong, per se, with tabloid stories. — Errol Morris

You know, I actually like doing commercials. I don't like doing them to the exclusion of everything else, but I like doing them. — Errol Morris

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! — Errol Morris

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. — Errol Morris

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

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

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 — Errol Morris

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. — Errol Morris

I don't believe truth is conveyed by style and presentation. I don't think that if it was grainy and full of handheld material, it would be any more truthful. — Errol Morris

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

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

I've been writing a lot more, I believe, because of the Internet. I've been posting stuff that I've written and I've just been writing. — Errol Morris

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. — Errol Morris

Maybe existence is ultimately a lonely thing. — Errol Morris

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. — Errol Morris

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. — Errol Morris

When 'The Thin Blue Line' came out, I was criticized by many people for using reenactments, as if I wasn't dedicated to the truth because I filmed these scenes. That always and still seems to be nonsensical. — Errol Morris

Ecstatic absurdity: it's the confrontation with meaninglessness. — Errol Morris

Photographs attract false beliefs the way flypaper attracts flies. — Errol Morris

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. — Errol Morris

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

What's great about documentary, 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.' — Errol Morris

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. — Errol Morris

I think calling someone a character is a compliment. — Errol Morris

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. — Errol Morris

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

There are endless anxieties in putting a film together, and it's an enormous relief when you know it's working with an audience. — Errol Morris

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. — Errol Morris

Do I like tawdry, sleazy stories? Yeah, I do. — Errol Morris

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. — Errol Morris

Photographs can reveal something to us, and they can also conceal things. — Errol Morris

We all know that yellow journalism didn't just happen a week ago or a month ago, that yellow journalism has probably been with us as long as journalism has been with us. — Errol Morris

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. — Errol Morris

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

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

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

People lie, and they always are very very creative in finding new ways to lie. — Errol Morris