Listening to what people were saying wasn't even important. But it was important to look as if you were listening to what people were saying. Actually, listening to what people are saying, to me, interferes with looking as if you were listening to what people are saying.

Vernon was nicknamed "Nub City" because its residents participated in a particularly gruesome form of insurance fraud in which they deliberately amputated a limb in order to collect the insurance money. There was Road a story about an interstate highway in Minnesota; a project about Robert Golka the creator of laser-induced fireballs in Utah; and the story of Centralia Pennsylvania the coal town in which an "inextinguishable subterranean fire" ignited in 1962. MacArthur Fellowship (1989)
Washington Post Best Film of the Year for The Thin Blue Line (1988)
KFC "Breakout Bucket" Award (2009)
New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics Best Documentary for The Thin Blue Line (1988)
Golden Horse for Best Foreign Film at the Taiwan International Film Festival for The Thin Blue Line (1988)
Edgar Award for Best Motion Picture from the Mystery Writers of America for The Thin Blue Line (1989)
Gates of Heaven (1978) has long been on Roger Ebert's list of the ten greatest films ever made.

McNamara won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. In 2003 The Guardian put him seventh in its list of the world's 40 best active directors.