Errol Morris Quotes

I'm a big fan of documentaries. I've always loved them, and I've just never had the opportunity or the time to make a feature.

You're always looking for good scripts and when they're not always forthcoming you go mad.

I make films about stories that I get interested in.

I did documentary film for a long time, and I spent a lot of time behind the camera, fervently wishing that the reality I was filming would conform to my narrative propriety. But you can't control it.

You don't make a movie, the movie makes you.

I have my ideas of what a good documentary is, but drama is a different animal because you're arranging everything.

I didn't dream about being a director. I didn't know I wanted to do something with film until the summer between my sophomore and junior years at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia.

I grew up when I was 15 when I had my first opportunity in movies. I watched every great movie for a year and a half, and since then I've asked myself how I can emulate such artistry. That's really my motivation. I want to do something as good as my heroes have done.

I grew up loving films and making stupid movies with a good friend of mine, who now actually has a career in a really prominent special effects house, so he's still doing it. We just started messing around with a camera.

I became paralyzed as an artist with writer's block.

Jet was very busy. I've been inspired by a lot of his movies.

Well it kind of is project to project because as a writer I think you always write to some degree about things that you know or things that happened - but my favourite filmmakers, my favourite movies of theirs tend to be the personal movies.

When I sit down to write, I don't think, 'OK, what is the next David O. Russell film I can write, or what is Harvey Weinstein going to want to buy?' Or even, 'What are filmgoers going to want.' I try to think, tell a good story. Just do what you do.

I really want to do film, but I want to do the right film. The truth for me is that I'm really driven by stories. So there are stories I want to tell, and if it's a good story then I want to do it, whatever genre it is.

My heart is in independent film-making. For me, it's where the fun, gritty storytelling is being told.

I stopped writing short fiction early on - I was never really good at it, and I never liked the results. So I stopped trying to fit the material I was working with into these tidy little short fiction packages.

Television? It's a gateway to writer's block, isn't it?

I know the movies that I've liked, and I know the experience that they've given me, so the goal is always to try to create a movie that I would like myself and that would knock me out, challenge me or intrigue me in some way. That's been my criteria for figuring out what I want to do, or also when I'm writing something or creating a scene.

As far as the balance between being a journalist, being an artist, being a storyteller - documentary filmmakers are all three of those things. The balance between them is affected by the film itself, the topic of the film.

Never in the history of cinema has a medium entertained an audience. It's what you do with the medium.

The thing about this business is that you always end up finding these amazing stories and these amazing people who make amazing films. I just want to work with good people and keep challenging myself with different kinds of characters.

I wish I could write easily. I'm one of those guys who's visited by the muse when things are dire.

We all need to be huge supporters of the theatrical documentary.

Deciding to write a novel about something - as opposed to finding you are writing a novel around something - sounds to me like a good evocation of writer's block.

Hollywood is a film industry, a film business. I don't approach my career in that way. I see it as 'art,' and I become involved in films that ring my bell.