Errol Morris Quotes

Film has to reflect the real world.

The only obligation you have as a film-maker is to tell your version of the truth and to use your film to illuminate reality. Whatever that means.

I do not believe in the Cinema verite. Sometimes a really good lie is better than any truth.

I'm a moviemaker, not a documentarian. I try to hit the truth.

Cinema for me only has meaning when it has a relationship with what I see outside on the street.

When you make a film that is based in reality, reality will come up all around it.

I began to feel that the drama of the truth that is in the moment and in the past is richer and more interesting than the drama of Hollywood movies. So I began looking at documentary films.

The best movies are rooted in reality.

I think documentary filmmaking is a braver way to make films because it's real, and you're really there.

In all my movies, be it 'Page 3', 'Chandni Bar' or 'Corporate,' I have tried to depict honesty and reality.

I think that truth is stranger than fiction, and it's nice to know the people you're making a movie about.

I've always been interested in how to present something that relates to our reality - which is not really... I don't even know if documentary itself does as good a job. It has its own problems in trying to get at the reality of the situation.

Cinema at its best can express something of the pure irreducible fact of things.

Cinema is not truth. Even when you make documentary films, you can choose to show this shot and not the other shot - this side and not the other side. In cinema, there's one truth - not 'the truth.' It's only 'my point of view.' Cinema is powerful because of that.

Documentary is reality. It shows the truth.

A documentary film-maker can't help but use poetry to tell the story. I bring truth to my fiction. These things go hand in hand.

An awful lot of filmmaking and playmaking is taken over by marketers and publicists, who set about to tell people what to think. And people feel safer that way. But it's not safe, and the whole wonderful thing that cinema and filmmakers can contribute is to go into the not-safe land of real life.

There is no realism in American films. No realism, but something much better, great truth.

The deeper I went into culture, the more confused I got. So I needed something more real. I said, "Okay, from now on, my country will be cinema."

Films can't change the society, they can simply open the space for the discussion which can lead to social change and can start new forms of social activism. I feel formally that I've scratched the surface of something very important about the nature of nonfiction film, about what we're very rarely honest about: When you film anybody, they start performing.

It has been said that I have three heroes: Christ, Marx and Freud. This is reducing everything to formulae. In truth, my only hero is Reality. If I have chosen to be a filmmaker as well as a writer it is because, rather than expressing reality through those symbols that are words, I have preferred the cinema as a means of expression - to express reality through reality.

There is this old thing that a lot of people say - that the worst experiences make the best films. I don't subscribe to it. But I've seen it happen.

My intention is to make interesting photographs. That's it, in the end. I don't make it up. Let's say it's a world I never made. That's what was there to deal with.

Public opinion which, to be sure, can at times be helpful, must never for an instant swerve us from what we know in our heart we are trying to convey. For honesty is the great requisite of art. If we remain honest with ourselves, art, which is always there, never lets us down.

If I can't make the kind of film that I want to make, then the hell with it.