Errol Morris Quotes

You always want to do something different. I enjoy the process. I like making movies, and it's increasingly hard to find a movie you'd want to make.

I love working with actors. I love to see what they're going to do. There's just something very thrilling and satisfying with being involved with something, all the way through the process [making movie].

It's all about this abstract entity called the story. It's all about the best way to tell the story, and to make a movie about the issues that this story is about. Filmmaking is storytelling, for me.

You make a movie to entertain audiences. That's why you make a movie. The product sales is because people love the characters, and to me, that is a testament to how our movie has become so ingrained in family's homes all around the world and that's why I make movies.

The actors make the film. They're the ones that take this theoretical movie that's in your head and make it real. The success of a film is entirely on their shoulders. I admire them, because acting is such a difficult thing to do, and I personally can't understand it.

In the film industry you never really know if all the various ingredients will come together - sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't. As an actor, you don't have much control over those things. It's a director's medium in that sense. All you can really do is minimise the risks of being involved in something that might not work and look for something that also suits you.

It's all movies for me. And besides, when you say documentaries, in my case, in most of these cases, means "feature film" in disguise.

I remember in The Conversation, they brought all these coats to me, and they said: Do you want him to look like a detective, Humphrey Bogart? Do you want him to look like a blah blah blah. I didn't know, and said the theme is 'privacy' and chose the plastic coat you could see through. So knowing the theme helps you make a decision when you're not sure which way to go.

You don't just see and feel the movie, you see and feel every day you worked on it.

I think one of the reasons that Steven (Spielberg) and I have been as successful as we have is because we like the movies. We like to go to the movies. We enjoy movies and we want to make movies like the ones we enjoy.

When I'm making a movie, I never watch the dailies. I see the movie once and that's it. It's really not about that for me. It's not about the externals. When I'm on a set, I don't want to see it. I want to be subjective in it. That's my habit now.

I just want to make films that are personal, but interesting to an audience.

I want people to see my movies. My talent, my sensibilities are what people want to see in the movies... While I have the talent to make the kind of movies people want to see I want to continue to do that, keep making big pictures and make what I love. I’m really just making the films I want to see. There’s not a strategy.

I'm working on a project called Lemons, produced by Killer Films. The director has a great perspective on character development.

That's the magic of moviemaking. You clearly identify one scenario with the other, and it's a completely different experience.

When I'm making a movie, it's making use of my creative juices, and it fills me up with what really is - I think my purpose here is to tell stories.

I'm really glad to have made a movie that way on Superbad, because I learned a lot about what can be done and what the limitations are.

I've always seen it to be a privilege to make movies. It's a really expensive, creative medium.

With 'Hail, Caesar!' it was about all the skill sets I had to learn, but each movie requires a different way of working. You're a piece in a new world, and there is always a difficult part within that world. For me, it's not consistent from movie-to-movie, each film has a central challenge.

The movie doesn't do what you want it do. It just grows and then you have a movie at the end of it, hopefully.

Making a film, you're in a really dark tunnel and the only kind of illumination is the shared experience you're having with your fellow cast and director.

Making a movie is like making an ocean voyage, and the script is your ship.

I love the editing process of making movies. I just wish that life had one.

Fundamentally, the most important thing is to get the film made for me and to get as many people to see it as possible. And if I help that, then - I know I help that, let's put it that way. I do know that I help that. It is called show business.

I definitely want to do films. To see a character out from beginning to end in a matter of a hundred somewhat pages and then move on to the next role, is fascinating.