Errol Morris Quotes

In TV we've used something that I love... it's called process. I love process.

Having spent a lot of time on sets, I was really interested in the overall storytelling aspect of shows and projects.

Learning to make films is very easy. Learning what to make films about is very hard.

Every stage of filmmaking's important while you're doing it, so I spend most of my time figuring out how to tell the story. I have all these stories and ideas, but it's how to tell the story.

I recommend to any of you, that's always a good way to make a film: use the interesting bits.

My first narrative films developed out of a documentary process - finding someone who was willing to be filmed, watching, listening, taking copious notes and many hours of video footage.

Movies, to a large extent, stand or fall on the strength of their scripts. But a documentary is a collection of found objects: fragments you've collected, accidents of interview and happenstance, pieces of stock footage that surface in the course of six to nine months of research and production.

I think I'm drawn to films more as a director with a directorial mind even as an actor. I make movies to make the films, not to act.

You do a film and you know where you're going, you have this material to stretch and play with as much as possible because you know how it ends.

The technology available for film-making now is incredible, but I am a big believer that it's all in the story.

At Pixar, we do a million versions of the movie, and every one of them goes through their awkward teenage phase where it's terrible and doesn't make sense, and we just keep working on it.

Every Pixar film, when we start developing the story, it takes about four years to make one of our films.

Film-makers must decide what story to tell and how to tell it.

When you make a film you usually make a film about an idea.

When you're making a television show, it's about the story and arc of the show rather than any particular episode or director.

It is perhaps both a blessing and a curse that fictional worlds spring into my mind nearly fully formed and it takes quite a while to sift through everything to find the story.

I'm developing the stuff all the time. There's a film in my head. I'm imagining a film.

There's nothing more important in making movies than the screenplay.

The great thing about films is that you have access to this whole world of experts who teach you the skills your character's supposed to have.

I had written for the theater and didn't know that I knew how to write for film. Ultimately, I think it's just trusting your voice, trusting your characters, and then telling them in a different medium.

What I realized is that it doesn't matter how big or small your film is. The actual filmmaking process, the actual storytelling, it's still the same thing. It's still all about creating characters that you like and creating moments that get you excited or get you tense.

I actually think storyboards are great. I don't draw well enough to do them myself. I've only used storyboards a couple of times. We used two storyboards in 'Margaret': one for the bus accident and for the opera sequence at the end.

I went to journalism school, so sometimes writing the script of 'Being Mary Jane' is me putting my journalism hat on.

'Just' writing is every bit as important as any other creative part of a film.

There's some good films, there's some films that could be improved. So we keep trying until we get it right. That's the nature of storytelling, whether it's on paper or on film.