Errol Morris Quotes

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

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

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

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

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!

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Do I like tawdry, sleazy stories? Yeah, I do.

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.

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

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.

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.

War is such a peculiar thing - inaugurated by the whims of few, affecting the fate of many. It is a 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

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

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

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

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.'

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Photographs attract false beliefs the way flypaper attracts flies.

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.

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

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

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.

Ecstatic absurdity: it's the confrontation with meaninglessness.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think calling someone a character is a compliment.

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.

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

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.

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.

The Anosognosic's Dilemma: Something's Wrong but You'll Never Know What It Is

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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