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When you start talking about the known knowns and the unknown unknowns, you're thrown into a crazy meta-level discussion. Do I know what I know, do I know what I don't know, do I know what I don't know I don't know. It becomes a strange, Lewis Carroll - like nursery rhyme.

Errol Morris

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Errol Morris
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: February 5
Actor
Film Director
Film Editor
Film Producer
Non-Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Hewlett
New York
Errol Mark Morris
Start
Unknown
Known
Discussion
Talking
Thrown
Carroll
Like
Level
Unknowns
Becomes
Meta
Levels
Lewis
Strange
Nursery
Crazy
Rhyme

More quotes by Errol Morris

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Like all great documentaries, The Act of Killing demands another way of looking at reality. It starts as a dreamscape, an attempt to allow the perpetrators to reenact what they did, and then something truly amazing happens. The dream dissolves into nightmare and then into bitter reality. An amazing and impressive film.
Errol Morris
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Truth is a pursuit, it's a quest. And proof is certainly in the pudding in this particular instance, because the film, and the evidence accumulated in making the film, led to this man's release from prison. And that's hardly ever happened, if it's happened at all, in any other film that I can think of.
Errol Morris
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You know, anything more negative, anything more disparaging, anything more adversarial than what [Donald Trump] does already. The mystery is how he's gotten as far as he's gotten.
Errol Morris
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There is such a thing as truth, but we have a vested interest in not seeing it, in avoiding it.
Errol Morris
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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.
Errol Morris
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If you told me thirty years ago that people would be parodying documentary films, I never would have believed it. It wasn't clear that the films themselves even had an audience, let alone an audience for parodies of them.
Errol Morris
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The smarter people I know declined to watch the most recent debate [with Donald Trump].
Errol Morris
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But there's a big difference between, say, reporting on a story and simply making up a story.
Errol Morris
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It's so much easier to make a movie about someone who is so likeable that you just want to get out of the way.
Errol Morris
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I asked [Donald Trump] if he had any advice for Charles Foster Kane and he said, Yeah, get yourself a different woman.
Errol Morris
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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.
Errol Morris
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The fact that the world is utterly insane makes it tolerable.
Errol Morris
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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.
Errol Morris
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Mike Wallace's interviews may make great television, but they don't produce great evidence.
Errol Morris
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You can't really trust anybody who doesn't talk a lot, because how would you know what they're thinking?
Errol Morris
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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.
Errol Morris
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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.
Errol Morris
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I've done interviews in one day that went on for fifteen, sixteen hours. And at a certain point, the control over what they're saying breaks down it becomes different. It becomes really powerful, and for me, real. It becomes out of control.
Errol Morris
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The very idea of photography is as Oliver Wendell Holmes said in the 19th century, it's a mirror with a memory.
Errol Morris
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I used to live in New York City, then when my son was two years old we moved to Cambridge Massachusetts and we've been there ever since. My son is now twenty-nine years old, so we've been up there for a while.
Errol Morris