Finding truth involves some kind of activity. As I like to point out, truth isn't handed to you on a platter. It's not something that you get at a cafeteria, where they just put it on your plate. It's a search, a quest, an investigation, a continual process of looking at and looking for evidence, trying to figure out what the evidence means.
They say seeing is believing, but the opposite is true. Believing is seeing.
I like to point out that people very often confuse the idea that truth is subjective with the fact that truth is perishable.
The claim that everybody sees the world differently is not a claim that there's no reality. It's a different kind of claim.
If you asked me what makes the world go round, I would say self-deception. Self-deception allows us to create a consistent narrative for ourselves that we actually believe. I’m not saying that the truth doesn’t matter. It does. But self-deception is how we survive.
My stuff always starts with interviews. I start interviewing people, and then slowly but surely, a movie insinuates itself.
I'm really interested in self-deception. Really interested in how people live in bubble universes. How people can fail to see the seemingly obvious.
People can burn archives; people can destroy evidence, but to say that history is perishable, that historical evidence is perishable, is different than saying that history is subjective.
If you want to trick someone with a photograph, there are lots of easy ways to do it. You don't need Photoshop. You don't need sophisticated digital photo-manipulation. You don't need a computer. All you need to do is change the caption.
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.
The proper route to an understanding of the world is an examination of our errors about it.
I believe we have two ideas about how movies are made in our heads. Idealizations. Platonic ideals. One of them is of a movie that is completely uncontrolled, and another is a movie that is completely controlled. The auteur theory vs. cinéma vérité.
There is a documentary element in my films, a very strong documentary element, but by documentary element, I mean an element that's out of control, that's not controlled by me. And that element is the words, the language that people use, what they say in an interview. They're not written, not rehearsed. It's spontaneous, extemporaneous material. People
People think in narratives - in beginnings, middles and ends. The danger when you edit something too severely is that it no longer makes sense; worse still, it leaves people with the disquieting impression that something is being hidden.
The imprimatur of truthfulness does not guarantee truthfulness. People should know better. But they don't.
Interviews, when they are just simply an exercise in hearing what you want to hear, are of no interest. And many, many, if not most interviews have that character. The interviewer who comes in with a list of bullet points they're going to address one after the other. Interviews, properly considered, should be investigative. You should not know what you're going to hear. You should be surprised.
We falsely interpret the world around us. We ignore evidence that doesn't support our prior beliefs and we convince ourselves we know things we don. We think we know things we don't know.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility.
Philip Glass once told me, "They can always copy what you've done, but they can't copy what you're going to do."
One of the strengths of my interviews is that I really, honest to God, have no idea what people are going to say.
I think we get into all kinds of difficulty by saying photographs should be taken in a certain way which guarantees their veracity. I think that's a slippery slope to hell.
There's this crazy thinking that style guarantees truth. You go out with a hand-held camera, use available light, and somehow the truth emerges.
You can't really trust anybody who doesn't talk a lot, because how would you know what they're thinking?
All alone - shorn of context, without captions - a photograph is neither true nor false.... For truth, properly considered, is about the relationship between language and the world, not about photographs and the world.
People like nonfiction presented to them in a certain way, so that they don't have to think about whether it's true or not. They like it to have that imprimatur of respectability, of genuineness.
