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Errol Morris
Errol Morris (born 1948)
- American documentary filmmaker
- Works: Gates of Heaven, The Thin Blue Line, Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, Mr Death: The Rise & Fall of Fred A Leuchter Jr., The Fog of War and more
Sourced
- The proper route to an understanding of the world is an examination of our errors about it.
- Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility.
- 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.
- I like the idea of making films about ostensibly absolutely nothing. I like the irrelevant, the tangential, the sidebar excursion to nowhere that suddenly becomes revelatory. That's what all my movies are about. That and the idea that we're in possession of certainty, truth, infallible knowledge, when actually we're just a bunch of apes running around. My films are about people who think they're connected to something, although they're really not.
- I didn't make Gates of Heaven so that Werner Herzog would have to eat his shoe. It's not as if I decided to realize my potential as a human being in order to get somebody to ingest something distasteful. I specifically asked Werner not to eat his shoe.
- You know, I have this version of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. God, in expelling Adam and Eve, kind of felt bad. He had gotten very angry, right? You know, you get angry and then you feel, 'Well, maybe I overreacted.' So, God was in that kind of mood when he expelled Adam and Eve from the garden. But his hands were tied. He had to go through with it; he had made the decision. God doesn't want to constantly second-guess himself. But he thought, 'I know. I'll give them self-deception. Things are going to be truly horrendous out there, but they'll never notice.'
- What if I could live for a hundred million years? The usual refrain is: With all that time I might really get something accomplished. But what if [it] turned out to be a hundred million years of telling myself I was going to accomplish something tomorrow - a hundred million years of equivocations, evasions, vacillations, procrastinations. What a nightmare. It's a great blessing that it all does come to an end. You know, the old saying, I guess I should attribute it to myself, 'Where there's death, there's hope.' Well, it's true."
- I believe that we face incredible obstacles in our attempts to see the world. Everything in our nature tries to deny the world around us; to refabricate it in our own image; to reinvent it for our own benefit. And so, it becomes something of a challenge, a task, to recover (or at least attempt to recover) the real world despite all the impediments to that end.
- There’s the Mike Wallace approach, or you can call it the Michael Moore approach, which is the adversarial approach. In the end, that is not in the service of finding out anything. It’s in service of dramatizing a received view: Namely, ‘This guy is an asshole, and now I will illustrate how this guy is an asshole by showing his inability to answer the questions I put to him.’ It’s not what I’m about. It’s not that one approach is good and the other is bad. They just have different valences. I like confrontation as much as the next guy. I’ll give you the best example I can think of for why I like my method. [During] my interview with Emily Miller, one of the wacko eyewitnesses in The Thin Blue Line, she volunteered that she had failed to pick out Randall Adams in a police lineup. It wasn’t me saying to her, ‘Emily Miller, how come you failed to pick out Randall Adams in a police lineup?’ Why? Because I didn’t know she failed to do it, because part of the trial record said she had successfully picked him out. When I heard this, not in response to some adversarial question, just her telling me her story, I asked her, ‘How did you know you failed to pick out Randall Adams?’ She said, ‘I know because the policeman sitting next to me told me I had picked out the wrong person and pointed out the right person so I wouldn’t make that mistake again.’
See also
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