You gotta love someone who says: “If you continue to be boring, I will hire an actor in New York to pretend that he’s Errol Morris. If you have any casting suggestions, I’d appreciate that.” RIP Miramax.

Earlier in the evening Kohn had spoken about how he felt that Werner Herzog and Errol Morris had been making films in response to each other, in a kind of unintentional dialog. There’s an interesting conversation between Herzog and Morris in the latest copy of The Believer. They talk a little bit about Herzog’s ideas about “ecstatic truth,” a lot about serial killers, and Morris finishes with some great thoughts on the tension between planning and spontaneity in documentary:

I feel that element of spontaneity because so much of what I do is controlled. The element of spontaneity is not knowing what someone is going to say to me in front of the camera, having really no idea, of being surprised. I know that there’s this moment in all of the interviews I’ve loved where something happens. I had this three-minute rule that if you just shut up and let someone talk, within three minutes they will show you how crazy they really are. And it has happened time and time and time again.

If everything was planned, it would be dreadful. If everything was unplanned, it would be equally dreadful. Cinema exists because there are elements of both in everything. There are elements of both in documentary. There are elements of both in feature filmmaking. It’s what makes, I think, photography and filmmaking of interest. Despite all of our efforts to control something, the world is much, much more powerful than us, and more deranged even than us.

Jason Kohn accepting his award. Photo courtesy of IndiePix.

Read the long list of comments for some rigorous debate about the nature of truth, meaning and context.