Errol Morris Quotes

I'm more into kind of real stories, psychological movies.

The telling of a good story, especially one that is real and true, is always exciting.

Documentaries have always inspired me in narrative filmmaking.

I'm uninterested in superheroes. I am only interested in real stories, real people, real connection.

I really like writing from real-life experiences. Audiences seem to prefer the stuff I couldn't have made up.

I've done quite a few things based on real events or real people, and I think that's always really interesting that you can read about them or, if you're lucky, you can meet them.

So much of what I write in fiction is based on true stories.

When you get to do something based on a true story, it always raises the level of excitement.

All the stories I write come from someone I've met or some anecdote I've heard.

I don't really distinguish between a fictional hero and a real life hero as a basis for any comparison. To me, a hero is a hero. I like making pictures about people who have a personal mission in life or at least in the life of a story who start out with certain low expectations and then over achieve our highest expectations for them. That's the kind of character arc I love dabbling in as a director, as a filmmaker.

For right now, I'd like to tell stories that I want to tell. I haven't wanted to use someone else's material yet, but I would with the show. It's become an integral enough part of me now, that I could definitely tell a story in this.

In drama, the characters should determine the story. In melodrama, the story determines the characters.

That was always my hope that that is exactly what I would do. It was always part of the dream of this story - to write the novel and then direct the movie.

Every real story is a never ending story.

It's cool to tell a real story.

I like [that] there's a certain inherent drama to those jobs that is exciting to tell stories about and it's still real life. I'm a little less interested in the current fad of being obsessed with superheroes and things that are so out of the box.

It's a little bit like talking about the life of writing. The life of writing may be about many things, but it always begins with the writer. With the kernel of an idea, or a character, or an idea or a theme, or even an outcome. But for documentary photographers, photographs begin at that intersection of the real world and the imaginative inner world.

I like to think that one of things I've done with non-fiction since the very beginning is to find new ways of telling true stories.

I tell the stories in the way that feels natural to tell them.

The beauty of the world of Unbreakable is that you're playing it for reality. It should never feel like a comic book movie. It feels like a straight-up drama. It's real. You're confronting the possibility that comic book characters were based on people that were real.

I am a director and I think actually they're not that different - dramas and docs aren't that different. When I'm doing a drama I'm trying to make things feel as believable and real as possible. The hair, the make-up, the costume, the design, you're trying to make it authentic. And when you've got a documentary it's all authentic, so what story are you going to tell and how do you make it dramatic and exciting? It's the same thing.

I always try to write about something that's actually happened or it doesn't always have to have happened to me, but it has to have happened at some point. So every single lyric that you hear comes from some kind of story that I've come across in my life. I like to think that that maybe helps me mean it a bit more and if you don't mean it, it ceases to be soul music.

The best stories are often true...The narrative of human life is most beautiful when told truthfully and without boundaries.

All of the good, weird stories I’ve written are based on things I’ve dredged out of my subconscious. That’s the real stuff. Everything else is fake.

It is the melody and the rhythm that are by far the most important and then words and imagery and stuff, story bits will start to stick to a melody and that is the way I write.