Errol Morris
Errol Morris
Errol Mark Morrisis an American film director. In 2003, his film The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth5 February 1948
CityHewlett, NY
CountryUnited States of America
writing talking people
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.
thinking knows
You can't really trust anybody who doesn't talk a lot, because how would you know what they're thinking?
talking silence listening
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.
ideas people interviews
One of the strengths of my interviews is that I really, honest to God, have no idea what people are going to say.
thinking agendas stuff
I like to think that I differ from other interviewers in the sense that I hide my agenda more successfully, and I'm more open to hearing stuff that is surprising and unexpected. That I'm actually involved in an investigation, through monologue, at times.
believe ideas two
I believe we have two ideas about how movies are made in our heads. Idealizations. Platonic ideals. One of them is of a movie that is completely uncontrolled, and another is a movie that is completely controlled. The auteur theory vs. cinéma vérité.
people historical archives
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.
ideas people facts
I like to point out that people very often confuse the idea that truth is subjective with the fact that truth is perishable.
thinking film being-true
I don't think that anybody really makes films quite like mine. That's maybe true of any filmmaker.
writing envy different
I envy certain writers, because there are writers who do go into a kind of different zone, where the writing isn't controlled anymore.
film concerned
My films are as much concerned with truth as anything in vérité. Maybe more so.
believe thinking true-or-false
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.
horse elements cows
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.
hurt revenge book
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.