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.

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.

We imagine what this country is, but quite clearly, this country is a mystery. I mean, one of the reasons I did the election ads is, I thought I could learn something. Like, what the hell is going on? I think anybody - particularly a person of leftist persuasion such as myself - who stops and thinks even for a moment, realizes that something strange is going on and we don't quite get it.

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.

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.

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