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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.