Quotes from Errol Morris

If you think you're going to create an unposed photograph, think again. There is no such thing.

Photographs can reveal something to us, and they can also conceal things.

My stuff always starts with interviews. I start interviewing people, and then slowly but surely, a movie insinuates itself.

One of the strengths of my interviews is that I really, honest to God, have no idea what people are going to say.

Right now, we live in bad times in this country, and the fact that there are filmmakers addressing political and social issues is to me a good thing.

If everything was planned, it would be dreadful. If everything was unplanned, it would be equally dreadful.

You know, I actually like doing commercials. I don't like doing them to the exclusion of everything else, but I like doing them.

I think calling someone a character is a compliment.

Ecstatic absurdity: it's the confrontation with meaninglessness.

I've been writing a lot more, I believe, because of the Internet. I've been posting stuff that I've written and I've just been writing.

First of all, tabloid stories are some of the richest and most important stories that we have. There's nothing wrong, per se, with tabloid stories.

A lot of stories that have fascinated me are tabloid stories that have come from other newspapers, like 'The New York Times.'

I taught my son to read with tabloids. We would sit to read the 'Weekly World News' together.

Despite all of our efforts to control something, the world is much, much more powerful than us, and more deranged even than us.

I've never had any problem with crazy people. I like crazy people; I probably am a crazy person myself.

I believe it was probably less than ten minutes that went by from the invention of photography to the point where people realized that they could lie with photographs.

If you're a journalist - and I think, on some level, I'm a journalist, and proud to be a journalist, or a documentarian, however you want to describe it - part of what I do has to be the pursuit of the truth.

A lot of the themes of my movies, the actual stories, come from tabloid stories.

When 'The Thin Blue Line' came out, I was criticized by many people for using reenactments, as if I wasn't dedicated to the truth because I filmed these scenes. That always and still seems to be nonsensical.

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.

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.

But one of the amazing things about documentary is that you can remake it every time you make one. There is no rule about how a documentary film has to be made.

Forty years ago this country went down a rabbit hole in Vietnam and millions died. I fear we're going down a rabbit hole once again - and if people can stop and think and reflect on some of the ideas and issues in this movie, perhaps I've done some damn good here!

But one of the amazing things about documentary is that you can remake it every time you make one. There is no rule about how a documentary film has to be made.