Errol Morris Quotes

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

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've always wondered where explanations end and excuses begin.

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.

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!

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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'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.

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.

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

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

Ecstatic absurdity: it's the confrontation with meaninglessness.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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?".

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

[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.

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.

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

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

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