Errol Morris Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

I think calling someone a character is a compliment.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

We live in a very litigious society. I've never sued anybody. I certainly can imagine a situation where I might sue, but it seems more or less in bad taste.

Maybe [killers] is one of my real passions. Why deny it?

Long, long before I became a filmmaker I was talking to killers. Filmmaking was an after thought.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Film is lies at twenty-four frames a second.

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.

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