ERROL MORRIS

I don't believe truth is conveyed by style and presentation. I don't think that if it was grainy and full of handheld material, it would be any more truthful.

I've never made any money off of any of my films. Statement of fact. So without commercial work, I would be in big trouble.

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.

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

Films are neither true nor false. That includes my films, as well as others. They may make claims that are true or false, but films are too complex. They have too many ingredients.

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

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility.

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.

My advice to all interviewers is: Shut up and listen. It's harder than it sounds.

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.

But I can say what interests me about documentary is the fact that you don't know how the story ends at the onset - that you are investigating, with a camera, and the story emerges as you go along.

I like to think that I'm nonjudgmental, that I can listen and be engaged by almost anything.

You're meant to think somehow that literature, in espousing eternal values, is kind of normal and balanced and reasonable. When it fact it's anything but.

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

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.

Certain kinds of intimacy emerge on a phone call that might never occur if you were sitting right next to the other person.

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

I feel as if I became a documentary film-maker only because I had writer's block for four decades. There's no other good reason.

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

I think an interview, properly considered, should be an investigation. You shouldn't know what the interview will yield. Otherwise, why do it at all?

But there's a big difference between, say, reporting on a story and simply making up a story.

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.

Interviews, when they are just simply an exercise in hearing what you want to hear, are of no interest.

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

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.