Quote

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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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
Doesn
Prior
Around
Interpret
Things
Ignore
Think
Convince
Thinking
Beliefs
World
Evidence
Support
Belief
Falsely

More quotes by 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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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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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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The proper route to an understanding of the world is an examination of our errors about it.
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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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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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.
Errol Morris
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Truth and falsity is something that concerns language, it's a property of language.
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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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 don't think that anybody really makes films quite like mine. That's maybe true of any filmmaker.
Errol Morris
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I remember on page one of The New York Times the article about Fred Leuchter. The heading was Can Capital Punishment Be Humane and it was the story about an electric chair repairman and execution machine designer. And then buried in the back of the paper was the fact that Fred Leuchter had also been involved in holocaust denial.
Errol Morris
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A movie is like a tip of an iceberg, in a way, because so little of what you do in connection with making a movie actually gets into the movie. Almost everything gets left behind.
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
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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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Photographs attract false beliefs the way flypaper attracts flies.
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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I'm really interested in self-deception. Really interested in how people live in bubble universes. How people can fail to see the seemingly obvious.
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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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