Quote

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
Levels
Lewis
Strange
Nursery
Crazy
Rhyme
Start
Unknown
Known
Discussion
Talking
Thrown
Carroll
Like
Level
Unknowns
Becomes
Meta

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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My stuff always starts with interviews. I start interviewing people, and then slowly but surely, a movie insinuates itself.
Errol Morris
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We falsely interpret the world around us. We ignore evidence that doesn't support our prior beliefs and we convince ourselves we know things we don. We think we know things we don't know.
Errol Morris
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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.
Errol Morris
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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.
Errol Morris
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I think we get into all kinds of difficulty by saying photographs should be taken in a certain way which guarantees their veracity. I think that's a slippery slope to hell.
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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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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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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Certain kinds of intimacy emerge on a phone call that might never occur if you were sitting right next to the other person.
Errol Morris
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The perfect war is started for obscure reasons, is hopelessly murderous, and accomplishes nothing.
Errol Morris
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Twenty to thirty years ago, who was making documentary films? Nobody. Well, relatively few people. It was an art form that had limited theatrical distribution, if any at all. Some television distribution, but relatively small audiences regardless. And in the intervening years it's become more and more popular with a lot of people.
Errol Morris
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I've had people turn me down. Not all that many, but certainly it happens.
Errol Morris
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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.
Errol Morris
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Nothing is so obvious that it's obvious.
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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I've been horribly depressed (lately), which, as you know, can be terribly time-consuming. I mean, if you're going to do it right, that is.
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
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I've always wondered where explanations end and excuses begin.
Errol Morris
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I am profoundly skeptical about our abilities to predict the future in general, and human behavior in particular.
Errol Morris