Errol Morris
Errol Morris
Errol Mark Morrisis an American film director. In 2003, his film The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth5 February 1948
CityHewlett, NY
CountryUnited States of America
phones might next
Certain kinds of intimacy emerge on a phone call that might never occur if you were sitting right next to the other person.
confrontation absurdity ecstatic
Ecstatic absurdity: it's the confrontation with meaninglessness.
differences stories bigs
But there's a big difference between, say, reporting on a story and simply making up a story.
errors understanding world
The proper route to an understanding of the world is an examination of our errors about it.
movie stories tabloids
A lot of the themes of my movies, the actual stories, come from tabloid stories.
self people deception
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.
war accomplish-nothing perfect
The perfect war is started for obscure reasons, is hopelessly murderous, and accomplishes nothing.
thinking opposites ideas
You can think of my films as cautionary tales, but you might even think of them as despairing tales, because at least in a cautionary tale, you have this idea that by listening to the story you can assure a better outcome. Whereas I'm not at all convinced that's the case. In fact, if anything, I'm convinced that it's the opposite.
people listening important
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.
mean trying quests
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.
excuse ends explanation
I've always wondered where explanations end and excuses begin.
hero opportunity long-ago
I gave someone a perverse argument not so long ago about why advertising is better than movies. You want to hear it? Movies operate from a really disingenuous premise, that people are heroes. I know a lot of people and have had an opportunity over the years to observe them. Are they heroes...? Let's put it this way. Advertising tries something simpler and more believable: Products as heroes. I guess the idea is: When all else fails, put your faith in conditioner.
men thinking pudding
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.
gray-matter brain mind
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.