Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility..

If you told me thirty years ago that people would be parodying documentary films, I never would have believed it. It wasn't clear that the films them….

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 ….

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..

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 ca….

What's interesting is that Citizen Kane was meant as an anti-fascist/anti-capitalist melodrama and for Donald Trump it becomes just another kind of m….

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 unco….

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 th….

My films are as much concerned with truth as anything in vérité. Maybe more so..

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, t….

A lot of the distinctions that we make between drama and documentary are spurious. We're deeply confused about these issues. About the difference bet….

They say seeing is believing, but the opposite is true. Believing is seeing..

People can burn archives; people can destroy evidence, but to say that history is perishable, that historical evidence is perishable, is different th….

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..

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 ….

Philip Glass once told me, "They can always copy what you've done, but they can't copy what you're going to do.".

I like to point out that people very often confuse the idea that truth is subjective with the fact that truth is perishable..

The proper route to an understanding of the world is an examination of our errors about it..

The imprimatur of truthfulness does not guarantee truthfulness. People should know better. But they don't..

My stuff always starts with interviews. I start interviewing people, and then slowly but surely, a movie insinuates itself..

You can't really trust anybody who doesn't talk a lot, because how would you know what they're thinking?.