Errol Morris Quotes

I've never seen myself as a documentary filmmaker. I see myself as a filmmaker, period, and I am interested in drama as well as in documentary.

At times doc filmmaking feels more rewarding creatively. Because you are creating something out of pure cinema - instead of narrative cinema, where you've got a script and a cast and you build from your foundation, whereas in documentary, you're building out of chaos.

A lot of the distinctions that we make between drama and documentary are spurious. We're deeply confused about these issues. About the difference between the two, about where documentary ends and drama begins.

You either ignore the comic book and make a great movie or you stay very close to the comic book.

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

I try not to look for messages in films.

I don't think of Storefront Hitchcock or Stop Making Sense as documentaries, I think of them more as performance films.

I don't have a horror film in me just because I don't like to be scared. But I definitely have a documentary in me, and I certainly have dramas.

I think it is a mistake to identify a movie according to its language, as if movies were literature.

I am a big fan of Jim Jarmusch, and I do love big screen documentaries.

You have to nail the right tone because sometimes when you just see his films cold, you're not quite sure. It's the same in - I'm trying to think of other directors with a similar sense - David Lynch's films, Tim's films, some of Cronenberg's stuff.

So slowly in my mind formed the idea of melodrama, a form I found to perfection in American pictures. They were naive, they were that something completely different. They were completely Art-less.

Once you're directing, you're kind of in a certain mode, where you're taking whatever is on the page and forming it into the film that you think it might want to be. So whether it's my writing or not, I still try to work with it in the same way.

To make a documentary is one thing, to make a feature film is quite another.

I see horror as part of legitimate film. I don't see it as an independent genre that has nothing to do with the rest of cinema.

“One picture is worth a thousand words,” said an ancient Chinese; but it may take ten thousand words to validate it.

I believe that the difference in genre of movies is a small thing.

In film, I believe things should either be documentary or drama.

I think we shouldn't be shy of thinking that we can interpret text like a movie again, depending on the point of view and what we do with it more than anything else. Of course a lot of remakes of important films, particularly of horror films, they suck.

Very honestly, I don't feel 'Munnabhai' is a comedy film. I seriously feel it is a very emotional film.

When I became a film-maker, all my favourite films, they weren't comedies.

People keep referring to 'Sing Street' as a musical, but I really never felt it was that. I can't really define it as a musical.

I think Jack Nicholson in 'Chinatown' is a very funny character, but I would never call that a comedy.

You don't necessarily need a script or actors to tell a compelling tale. Finding a person at a key moment in his life and rendering the truth as you see it - that's the truest form of drama.

There is a porous membrane between a documentary that doesn't use interviews and what you would call a neorealist hybrid film.