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CommentsVolume 2/Issue 10
- Download this document in PDF
- About Errol Morris
- Errol Morris in Transom Talk
Intro from Jay Allison
When you watch an Errol Morris documentary, the stunning visuals seduce you. Then you realize you can close your eyes if you want, because the heart of the film is in the voices. Years ago, in fact, I got a call from Nonesuch Records asking about getting the CD soundtrack of “The Thin Blue Line” broadcast on public radio, just as is. For whatever reasons it never happened, but trust me it would have worked pretty well.
At Transom we’re interested in the relationship between story and image, because as radio producers we’re responsible for the images in the listener’s mind. That’s why we like to hear from television journalists and photographers and filmmakers, who know things about imagery that we don’t. Plus, as the Internet brings all non-fiction workers into contact, it makes sense to talk, right?In this case, we asked our friend Nubar
Alexanian, documentary photographer and former
Transom Special Guest, to talk to his friend Errol
Morris about image and spoken word for our audience
of storytellers. An edited version of their conversation
follows, accompanied by audio clips and pictures by
Nubar. We may sprinkle in some of the outtakes over
the coming month. Errol cautioned that he’s busy finishing
his new film (McNamara) and traveling about the world,
so his participation may be irregular. That’s okay.
We can still ask questions. Some may be answered,
and some may remain mysteries.Errol Morris
Interviewed by Nubar
Alexanian (October, 2002)
Edited by Sydney LewisThe Bedrock of Language
Listen to a Quote in Real Audio or MP3Nubar:
Do you orchestrate for the ear independent of the eye?
Errol:
This is a difficult question.
When you’re putting a film together you’re so much aware of both it’s hard to
extract them independently.
Nubar:But you’re a classical pianist, a cellist. Your knowledge of music is very deep and it plays a really big part in your films. It’s important in all movies, but with yours it’s particularly important.
Errol:
I don’t know if it’s more important in my movies than it is in anyone else’s.
I do think that language is the bedrock of everything I do. And this kind of
strange language, language that comes out of people talking. It’s spoken language,
as opposed to written language, and heavily edited spoken language. But the
music, obviously, has to work, or maybe it’s not so obvious, but the music has
to work with the spoken language. It can’t be independent of it. I mean, it’s
been the cause of I don’t know how much trouble in just getting music to work
with my films. Often, when you have a sequence that’s purely visual, without
dialogue, music can drive the sequence and music can take on almost a dominant
role. It can’t in my movies. I first started using music in my movies with The
Thin Blue Line with Philip Glass. And we had terrible difficulties finding
music that would work with what people were saying — with the spoken word –
that wouldn’t undermine what they were saying, wouldn’t interfere with what
they were saying, that would enhance what they were saying, but would not overwhelm
it, would not efface it. That’s very, very difficult. So I would say that the
music in my films has always taken a back seat to the spoken word.A Person, a Tape Recorder, and Time
Nubar:
I want to talk about interviewing. You often conduct long, long interviews. I know, for example, like when I shoot a portrait, of someone, I have a three-role minimum because I don’t feel like people can sustain their own view of how they’re supposed to look for a camera for three rolls of film.
Errol:
Three role maximum or minimum?
Nubar:Minimum, three roll minimum.
Errol:Oh, you mean they lose control.
Nubar:Right. Is that what the twelve-hour interview is about?
Errol:Yeah. Loss of control. That’s when things start to happen. The marathon interviewing style started years and years ago when I was interviewing people with just audiotape. I did this before I became a filmmaker. I would do these lengthy interviews. I started with a tape recorder – no camera – and I was interviewing murderers and their families in California and in Wisconsin.
Nubar:When are we talking?
Errol:I started interviewing people in 1973. Criminals and their families… I started with killers and graduated to serial killers and mass murderers.
Nubar:Toward what end?
Errol:
I was interested in writing books based around this material. And I had all
kinds of ideas about how the material was to be organized and how the interviews
were to be conducted. I developed a style of interviewing where I tried not
to say anything in the interview. I tried to say very, very few things… If
possible, nothing. And I was very proud of the interviews that I had done where
you can barely hear my voice on the tape. The interviews would go on for hours
and hours and hours and hours and it would be people talking. It was part of
the idea behind Gates of Heaven. Gates of Heaven came out of audio
interviews extended to film. But the origin of it is a person sitting in front
of a tape recorder.“Everywhere I Go There’s Murders… ”
Nubar:
So how did you make the leap into film from that?
Errol:I don’t know, my fascination with movies. The idea that I could create something even more complex with pictures. But since then, all of my work, regardless of what I’ve done, has been driven by audio; it’s been driven by interviews. The interviews are the script, the interviews precede everything, or they have preceded everything. I’m planning to do a number of features with actors, but I’m basing these ideas for drama on interviews, oddly enough.
Nubar:
So they’re driven by audio then?
Errol:They are driven by the spoken word.
Nubar:This interests me. Years ago, you were interviewing people with a tape recorder. But you ended up in film not radio.
Errol:I could have very easily ended up in radio if I had thought that was an option. I never looked at them as radio ever. I looked at them as books and then as movies. I never thought of Studs Terkel as a model… I had my own idea of what these books would look like. And then of course, it became something very different, it became interviews into film. I still have all of these tapes, and it might be very interesting to do something with them as just audio tapes. You know, I’ve never even thought of it until, until you mentioned it right now.
Everything that I’ve done has its origin in the spoken word. My favorite examples…
? From The Thin Blue Line. Emily Miller talking about her love of old
detective movies — Boston Blackie. She actually says, “Everywhere I go there’s
murders. Even around my house.” Lines like that. “Everywhere I go there’s murders.
Even around my house.” These interview fragments give you a perspective on how
she sees the world and what she’s thinking. A friend of mine says you can never
trust people who don’t talk a lot because how else would you know what they’re
thinking. My art is based on that principle. It’s based on people’s willingness
to talk a lot.The Weird Laboratory
Listen to a Quote in Real Audio or MP3Language is unendingly interesting. My belief is that we invented language so that we could lie more effectively. That language is a vehicle of self-deception and evasion. I used to transcribe all of my audiotapes myself. And there were these exciting moments where you would become aware of patterns of speech, the way people talk, the way they use language, the way they express themselves, the way they don’t express themselves. When you sit and transcribe interviews you become aware of things that you would never notice ordinarily. Because you’re going through it, you’re listening to it in a completely different way as you actually put these words down on the page and then look at them as words on a page. How much you can actually learn about a person just from their patterns of speech about how they communicate? And it goes well beyond the surface content of what they’re saying.
I’ve always been amazed by this fact, that you sit and transcribe and transcribe and transcribe, and then you get this huge pile of material. You transcribe an interview that goes on for eight, nine, ten hours — you have a small book. And you look at all of this stuff. How different it is reading it from actually looking at the film material. How the content of it changes once again when you see it associated with picture. It’s always remarkable. It’s like being in this weird laboratory of language, doing this kind of work, because you get to isolate various aspects of communication. It seems like an odd thing to say, but it’s absolutely true. You get to hear the audio, you get to transform the audio into the written word, you get to see it once again as film.
Nubar:You’re saying by looking at the text?
Errol:No, no, no, not just the text. It’s the whole deal. You get all of these levels. You get to hear the interview for the first time around when you’re actually conducting it. And you get to hear the audio and to transform the audio into written material. And then you get to edit the film. And the difference between each of these different elements is endlessly fascinating. When you read something you can always imagine a voice. You could imagine the words as being spoken by some ideal speaker that you have in your head, or as being spoken by yourself, or meaning certain things depending on how they’re delivered. And it’s always interesting to set that reading experience up against looking at the person, once again, saying the stuff on film.
Lost On The Page
Nubar:
You do these interviews and the tapes are transcribed, the film is transcribed to audio. You edit from there, no?
Errol:No, I don’t edit from the transcripts, ever. I edit from the film. We transcribe the material, we write in time code, and it’s a way of creating an index for the material. While you’re editing you can quickly find pieces of material from the transcript and in the transcript.
Nubar:
But the form doesn’t come from the transcript then? In other words, you don’t edit down…
Errol:Paper cuts? No, never, never. Paper cuts give you a very false idea. That’s what’s so interesting about this. In my first two films I was very much involved in creating the transcripts of the material. I no longer actually do them myself. Someone else does them for me. But you see these various representations of the material: there’s the interview initially; there’s the audio, just audio divorced from the image; there’s the transcription of the spoken word on the page; and then there’s the film. The track plus picture.
I’ve been aware since the very first film that I made that there’s an enormous difference between the paper cut —- essentially you have the transcript in front of you and you cut and paste together the sections that you like. And it never works in film. It really doesn’t. Somehow you need to hear the person talking, you need to actually see the piece of film and cut it against another piece of film. That something complex happens that is lost on the page. And that all of the editing, all the editing that’s done away from film is a waste of time. Literally a waste of time. It’s going to have to just simply be redone. It’s a different, different ballgame. And I think there are many, many, many reasons for that. But I also think that when I edit voice in my films, that there’s a kind of talk that emerges that is really different from Brand X. I was told by somebody, and it was something that I took as an enormous compliment, that people sound different in my films, there’s a different kind of discourse. And I think it is connected with music, it’s connected with editing the spoken word in a very different kind of way.A Linguistic Thing
Listen to a Quote in Real Audio or MP3Nubar:
I’m so taken by the visual elements in your films, but now that I hear you say that they’re about language, it makes perfect sense to me.
Errol:You’re sold a bill of goods about what art is supposed to look like, or what art is supposed to be about, or how it is supposed to be made. And I’ve always been attracted to images. Images interest me. Don’t get me wrong. You often hear about scripts that, you know, scripts shouldn’t have voice-over, voice-over is kind of a failure, it’s a mistake. Well, I started to think, this is maybe within the last year or so, what if I just do these interviews, use them as voice-over and construct a completely fictional movie with actors based on it? I can preserve what really interests me about this linguistic element as being the foundation for it, and I can move my film-making in a completely different direction. It’s odd, because for many reasons I look at this distinction between fiction and nonfiction as being nonsense.
Nubar:How do you mean?
Errol:We talk about feature film-making and documentary film-making as if there’s this rigid line of demarcation between the two, that we can say, OK, this fits into category one and this fits into category two, and it’s clear to me what the difference is. The differences are very, very important, but they are different than what people imagine them to be. People love to talk about truth. Truth-telling. Truth in advertising. Try that oxymoron on for size. Most of the time I have no idea what people are talking about when they start talking about truth. They somehow imagine that it truth-telling is connected with style or presentation. If its cinema verite or it appears in The New York Times, it must be true… And then the nonsense over the Rodney King videotape where people can agree that it was a videotape of a real event but they can’t agree what that real event was…
Truth is not guaranteed by style or presentation. It’s not handed over on
a tray like a Happy Meal. It’s a quest. It often is as interesting to chronicle
people’s persistent avoidance of the truth as their pursuit of it. But in any
event, whatever truth is, it is a linguistic thing. It’s not a visual thing.
To talk about a photograph being true or false is utterly meaningless. Words
give you a picture of the world and visuals take you into the mystery of what
is out there and whether language has captured it or not. When the characters
in The Thin Blue Line are talking about the events on that roadway in
Dallas [where the police officer was shot and killed], and then you see images
of that roadway, you start to think about the mystery of what happened, the
mystery of our attempt to really grab a hold of the world with words and images.Believing Is Seeing
I do not believe that the truth is subjective, that the truth is contextual,
or that the truth is up for grabs. To me, the real story behind The Thin Blue Line, and I think
this is an important story to be told in general about the world, is not that
truth is unknowable, but that often people are uninterested in the truth. They
don’t seek the truth, but they seek some series of answers that make them feel
comfortable or answer to certain needs that they might have.When people talk about photographs being true or false, I have really no idea
what they’re talking about. But if people ask me, “Is it true that David Harris
was the driver of the blue Comet, and was stopped by police officer Robert Wood,
and pulled a gun from underneath the seat and shot and killed him, true or false?”
To me, you know, those statements have truth value. And I believe that… The
Thin Blue Line is involved in two separate enterprises. One is to show you
what the underlying truth most likely was. And to show you how people came up
with conclusions that were at such variance with the truth.
Nubar:
And then you do those recreations on the road.
Errol:
I did it in a whole number of ways. I did it with the reenactments and I also
did it with just the stories, the individual stories of the people who were
supposed to be witnesses to the event, the people who testified at the trial.
It becomes clear as the movie unfolds that the stories that these witnesses
were telling are not so much stories about what they saw, but about what they
wished to see. My belief that believing is seeing and not the other way around.
And that’s one of the very strong themes for me in The Thin Blue Line.
Nubar:That believing is seeing.
Errol:
That believing is seeing. If there’s enough pressure, if there’s enough reason
to believe something, then people will believe it, no matter what the underlying
truth might be, no matter what the evidence against their believing it might
be. If there’s enough pressure of one kind or another. Take The Thin Blue
Line. This is a crime that went unsolved for a month. They didn’t even have
any suspects. Dallas officer is shot in cold blood. Someone has to pay the price.
And so, when David Harris pointed the finger at Randall Adams, here is something
that the police can jump on, you know? We have the perfect witness to the crime
because he claims he’s seated next to the perpetrator. We have a case which
we can build around his claims. Now you would think, well, a moment of reflection
tells us that this guy’s testimony is unreliable because he might be the killer!Stories About Belief
At the center of The Thin Blue Line, there’s this question. How did
it happen? How did it happen that the guy who committed all of these crimes
walked away scot-free so that he could commit other murders and other crimes,
and the guy who hadn’t done anything wrong ended up sentenced to death? Now
we would call this a perverse outcome. You know? The innocent party gets the
hot seat and the guilty party walks away. Isn’t our system of law, of justice
designed to prevent outcomes like this? To me the real question was — did the
Dallas police knowingly frame this guy? Did they convince themselves that he
was guilty and then manufacture evidence to support that conclusion? Once I
had convinced myself that in fact Randall Adams was innocent and that David
Harris was guilty, then the real issue was — how did they get there? How did
they arrive at this point? What was going on in people’s heads, what were they
thinking? What lead them to this perverse, bizarre conclusion? Was it a conspiracy…
? Or the blundering of dunces who were under pressure to believe something that
they had no trouble believing. The only drawback — it just happened to be wrong.A lot of what I do as a filmmaker is this concern about conspiracy versus
human incompetence, confusion and infallibility. And The Thin Blue Line
is very much a story not of conspiracy, but a story of just how incompetent
and how easily seduced we are into believing anything. That is at the heart
of the movie, and some of my other movies as well. I like to think of these
movies as stories about belief, about what people believe, how they see the
world, set against what the world might be. And The Thin Blue Line is
very much a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too movie. It wants to tell two stories.
It wants to tell an investigative story, just in plain language, a story about
what really happens. But it also wants to tell a story about the massive confusion
and error that produced this incredible miscarriage of justice. And I am very
proud of the movie because I think that it does work on both levels.Born To Babble
Listen to a Quote in Real Audio or MP3Nubar:
When you go into an interview… do you do tons of research?… do you prepare heavily?
Errol:Yes.
Nubar:
You do?
Errol:I never talk to the people in advance. But I prepare heavily.
Nubar:Well, I want to ask– really? You never talk to them?
Errol:Try not to.
Nubar:Because?
Errol:Because I think that there is a real need that people have to talk. I used to think that if I ever had a tattoo, my tattoo would say Born to Babble. People have a need to talk. And if they’ve already told you a story, they have dissipated that need.
Nubar:You want it all to happen on camera.
Errol:I want it to happen on camera. And over the years I’ve found from painful experience that talking to somebody about what you’re going to talk about with them is counter productive.
Nubar:Do you want them to get to know you before they talk to you? Is that important?
Errol:Um, no.
Nubar:It’s not?
Errol:It’s not important. They’ll get to know me soon enough, in the process of actually doing the interview. It’s not about them knowing me, it’s about their need to tell me something. And my interest in hearing it. I have not had very good success– I mean, maybe it’s become a kind of superstition on my part. You know, I just won’t allow myself to go there. I just won’t allow myself to talk to people in advance of actually interviewing them. There’s also a tendency, it’s a natural human tendency, you hear something good, and then you want someone to repeat it. “Oh! That thing you said was really good. Could you please repeat it for me.” Well, that’s not how it works, it does not work that way. We’re all familiar with the phenomena where you try to do something again and it’s never as good as when it just happened the first time, when it happened spontaneously.
No Other Voice
Nubar:
I’ve been in lots of interview situations with you where you will go over and over the same material in hopes that what… ? That something will open somewhere? That you will learn something new?
Errol:
I don’t know. Often it’s just the hope that I will understand something. You
know, the traditional idea of how documentaries are to be put together is that
you talk to some twenty people and you inter-cut the interviews. “A” says such-and-such,
and then “B” says, that’s wrong… And “C” says something else altogether. And
supposedly you gain perspective on an issue by listening to this interplay of
characters, in effect, arguing with each other. Well, what if you tried something
completely different. What if you created a movie about one character’s perception
of history? About one character’s attempt to understand himself through history?
I have been playing with the idea for several years now — creating things around
one interview, one person being interviewed, no other people. I tried that with
Fred Leuchter in Mr. Death, but failed for a whole number of reasons.
Nubar:You feel like that film failed?
Errol:I don’t feel the film failed, but the film was to be based on Fred Leuchter’s interview alone and it did not turn out to work with Fred Leuchter alone. So I had to supplement the Leuchter interview with — I don’t know how many additional interviews there are in there — but there are six, seven, eight interviews. So in the end it was not this one voice, first-person story that I had envisioned when I set out to make it. It had evolved into something quite different. And what was so appealing about the McNamara project was this opportunity to try that same thing again with one person, no other interviews, just one person being interviewed: Robert S. McNamara, and Robert S. McNamara alone. No other interviews. No other voice.
The Mess Of Reality
I like to think of myself as an investigator. I was an investigator at one time, a professional investigator if you like. And I think that there has been a very strong investigative element in all of my movies. There certainly is in this newest movie. The McNamara movie is investigative.
Nubar:
But you’re a storyteller, and yet you use investigation as the way to tell a story?
Errol:Yes and no. I think investigation and story telling work in opposite directions from each other. Stories, by their very nature, have to be tremendously simplified versions of reality. Reality is too complex; it’s too chaotic. We tell ourselves stories, so we don’t have to deal with reality. We create stories out of the mess of reality by eliminating material, by reinterpreting material, by rearranging material. But the investigative element is what connects the stories to the world. It’s what makes stories interesting to me.
The only way that people can make sense of experience, of the world, of history,
whatever, is by picking and choosing from a myriad of details and facts. And
when you make a movie, I mean, that after all is the enterprise that I’m involved
with, you have to carry the audience by something. You are telling a story as
a means of taking people through a series of events. The Thin Blue Line
is very much a story, but it’s a story also dotted with these absurd, picky
little details that fascinate me and which inform the story. But if you looked
at the work that I had done in Texas, I spent two plus years investigating this
crime, and I have volumes. And one of the saddest things for me is that ninety-nine
per cent of my investigative work in Texas in connection with this case is invisible.
It’s not in the movie. I mean, you see the tip of the iceberg, you see the results
of all of this effort that I put in over the years. But it’s not really in the
movie. And the reasons are pretty straightforward. Because if you put them all
in the movie, the movie would be confusing and no one would watch it.Errol Morris, P. I.
Nubar:
When you were a private investigator– That’s how you made your living, right?
Errol:
Yeah, ’cause I couldn’t make my living otherwise.
Nubar:Yeah, but so, like, who were your clients?
Errol:Well, I worked for one of the best private investigators in America. So I was working on huge corporate cases. This was not matrimonial investigations. This was Wall Street investigations. And I’m still– I know this sounds really cheesy, but I’m still not at liberty to talk about the work. [pause] But it was great. It was absolutely terrific.
Nubar:So you were a private eye.
Errol:Yes.
Nubar:I think that is so cool.
Errol:And what do you do as a private detective? There’s all of this mystery connected to detective work, or this image of what I must have been: Errol Morris, comma, P. I., the guy who’s sitting in a car late at night looking at the entrance or exit to some building. Or a person watching someone, tracking them, following them. In fact, almost everything that I did as a detective is stuff that I do as a filmmaker. There was, if you were to do the Zen diagram of the overlap between the two, there was enormous overlap. And what is the essence of private detective work? It’s talking to people and learning something about them from it. That’s it. Period.
An Odd Place Of The Unexpected
Listen to a Quote in Real Audio or MP3Nubar:
When you’re shooting in the field it’s a very organic process. You know something of what you’re doing, but you’re looking for things to happen.
Errol:People discount the out of control element in art as if somehow — You see it in the auteur theory, you see it in the sort of idea that great art is completely under control. Someone has this exact picture of what they’re going to do and they realize it faithfully. It’s sort of like the Howard Roark idea in The Fountainhead. And my experience is that art is a very different kind of affair. And maybe this just points out certain infirmities that I have as a filmmaker, but I think one of the most exciting things about making a movie is not knowing what’s going on, of actually being in an odd place where unexpected things are happening. Where you’re learning things that you could not have imagined you were going to learn in advance.
I think the worst thing that you can do as a filmmaker is just go through a recitation of received material, and illustrate it as if somehow your job is to provide the illustrated news. My tendency as a filmmaker is to keep going, to keep gnawing at some bone until I finally come to a conclusion that satisfies me.Hunger Artist
Nubar:
The courage that you have which I haven’t seen in other filmmakers that I’ve watched is that you’re willing to leave it open and learn even while your labor costs are twenty thousand dollars an hour when you’re in the field.
Errol:That’s just cause I’m insane, self-destructive…
Nubar:… But honestly, there’s an element of courage there.
Errol:
Well, I always liked the idea of courage that is embodied in Kafka’s “Hunger
Artist.” Kafka wrote this story about a professional faster who in the
end fasts himself to death. He starts off fasting for great audiences who just
love watching him fast and revel in the idea of his ability to discipline himself,
quote unquote —- to do without food for weeks at a time. But he comes really
into his own when people stop watching him. And he fasts himself to death. And
he makes it quite clear at the end, maybe this is what I take away from the
story, that– Um, he does it, not out of some great discipline, but out of some
weird persnicketyness and obsessiveness. That, as he puts it, he fasts because
he could never find any food that really satisfied him.Willing To Listen
Nubar:
You don’t give yourself enough credit. But if what you say is true, and I think it is, that the worst thing that a filmmaker can do is simply illustrate, what’s the best thing a filmmaker can do?
Errol:I don’t know, create something that is really unusual, that’s unique, that has emotional power, that says something. Says something unexpected. I remember going into this McNamara movie knowing full well that there are millions of people in this instance who have very strong views about who McNamara is and what his role was in the U. S. government in the 1960s. And my goal notwithstanding was to try to find out something about him, to learn something about him. To be interested in him, in the sense that this is a person who has something very important to tell, and that I should be willing to listen.
The Shadow
Nubar:
You have a way of telling stories that is uniquely yours. You work in a narrative medium, which is linear. Think of it like a tape: you start at the beginning and you go to the end. But the way that your mind works is much more…
Errol:Confused?
Nubar:Not confused but, you know, all the information is accessible at any given point. I’ve watched you take that non-linear way of thinking, and try and adapt it in a medium that has a beginning, a middle, and end. How do you do that?
Errol:
It’s always difficult. It has been difficult in every single movie that I’ve
made. But there’s been two movies in particular which do not have, in any sense
of the word, traditional stories. And that’s Vernon, Florida, and Fast,
Cheap, and Out of Control. I hate to use the term non-linear because I’m
not really sure what it means. To me there are stories in there, linear stories,
however you want to describe them. And the real task was how to take something
that really resists in every way imaginable, being put in some traditional form,
figuring out how to tease out a story line, a narrative structure from this
mass of material. I think that there very much is a storyline in Fast, Cheap,
but uncovering what that was and making it work was no easy matter.
Nubar:So this comes after, the structure?
Errol:While I was making the movie there was an idea of what the structure in the movie would be and what the story would be. But actually putting that into practice, making it work… Thinking it is one thing and actually making it work and editing is something else altogether. Between the intention and the act falls the shadow.
A Kind Of Experiment
Nubar:
What about influences in your work? Or even just your approach to storytelling.
Errol:Documentary filmmakers. Wiseman. The surrealists. Vigo, Vertov, Franju. I’ve been influenced by all kinds of directors. Sirk, Lang, Bresson… I imagine film as a kind of experiment. I hate the idea of film as just boilerplate, and often it seems that film today has become boilerplate — people making the same movie. Movies sometimes seem horribly unambitious to me. My brief experience with Hollywood was disastrous. I guess it’s not so surprising. I guess what’s surprising to me is that I could have thought it would be otherwise. But I’m lucky. I’m a very, very lucky guy. I get to do my own kinds of films in my own way. I have my own kind of laboratory of filmmaking, and I love it.
A Different Kind of Animal
Nubar:
What are the kinds of things you would be able to do with an unlimited budget on the movies that you make?
Errol:Well, creating visuals. It’s part of the problem of being in this no-man’s land, or gray zone of filmmaking. Yes, I make documentaries, but no I don’t make documentaries like other people. I’m not a documentary filmmaker that just runs around shooting with handheld camera and available light. I do that on occasion as part of what I do, but that’s not the deal.
I like to point to the end of Fast, Cheap, which is a scene shot in
a topiary garden at night where we had to bring in massive amounts of lighting.
We were shooting at a hundred and twenty frames a second. We’re shooting five
times the speed of sound, so we need five times as much as light. We’re lighting
at night. We have rain machines. You know, we’re talking about something that
is a really substantial deal with a crew of forty people. And it’s stuff that
just can’t be accommodated on a documentary budget. And even though I have been
very fortunate, I get not insubstantial budgets, the budgets are never enough
to cover the cost of the film. Part of the reason why I would like to abandon
documentary, or at least what I’ve been doing, is because it’s not clear to
me that the budgets will accommodate what I want to do. The idea of endlessly
going into debt to make my movies is not an appealing one. I’ll do it if I have
to, but I just would prefer not to. [long pause]
For example, salaries of actors and so on and so forth. I mean, that’s what’s interesting about documentary. If you look at the budget, the money that people are actually being paid, that they take away from it, is a virtually insignificant amount of the budget versus the amount of money that just goes into the physical production of the elements of film. Which are expensive. And commercials are even further in the other direction than feature film, because the amount that’s spent to actually produce a commercial is such a small percentage of what the client will eventually spend on buying media. Perhaps the client will spend two, three, four million dollars on a set of ads, thirty-second spots. But they could just as easily turn around and spend some thirty, forty, fifty, sixty millions dollars putting those spots on cable and network television. That’s where the real money is spent. So it’s just all driven by certain production models. You know, all this may sound very boring but it does inform on some simple level your work as a filmmaker. And I’m not a guy who is a sixteen millimeter handheld guy, I’m some different kind of animal. And a more expensive, needy kind of animal.Fast, Cheap, And Out Of Control
I’m creating movie-like themes in all of my work. I mean, on some level you have to find a story that people can understand as a story. And then play with that idea. And I often chastise myself for not going far enough in playing with how a story is told. There’s this worry in filmmaking. Who’s going to watch them?
I would like my movies to be seen by more than half a dozen people. I’ve never been able to attract as large an audience as I might like, which is depressing. There could be lots of reasons for that. I tell myself that my movies haven’t been marketed well, but it could be just simply the way that I put them together or the nature of the films themselves that restricts their audience. Or maybe I’m not that good. That could be another possibility. But the goal is to reach a larger number of people. That’s what’s so fascinating about film: the idea of making films for half a dozen people is not an appealing notion. And regardless, even if it was, it’s not a viable financial model because no one would ever give you the money, the wherewithal, to make them. That’s what’s so weird about filmmaking… How expensive it is, how complicated it is, how involved it is. You can’t do it without at least having some idea of an audience in mind. Unless you’re independently wealthy and can just pay for these things on your own accord, you have to have some kind of audience. That’s true of all art. You can’t make it without some real or imagined audience.I remember someone asking me if Fast, Cheap was a cold calculation
on my part to make something that was commercial. And I thought: are you insane?
What? Oh, right, yeah, that commercial model — mole rats, topiary animals,
lion taming, and the robotic scientist. Yeah.
Nubar:That’s funny.
Errol:
Proving once again that people can say anything.
part 2 >>
Errol Morris in Conversation with the Transom Community
>But isn’t your answer about manipulation. That is, how you can better manipulate your audience and get away with it…?
Ah, now we’re talking. This is where guilt, discretion, responsibility, and truth meet the road. I’m sleepy now, but let’s all talk more about manipulation in the morning… after my shift on the pledge drive.
On the guilt thing, well, helplessly, I do feel pretty good about my line of work. Maybe I should feel guilty about that.
Guilt derives from things done or things undone. Harm caused to those who didn’t deserve it, or perhaps no harm done to those who did. I’m going to take an inventory.
To Errol or anyone: Do you feel guilty about your work? If so, why? If not, why not?
Thanks for not identifying me as a "misanthrope."
I like to think of myself as a secular anti-humanist.
Errol
trying to catch up with this conversation.. post 48 made me laugh out loud.. because in the end.. a good interview is one where you don’t get ‘caught’ and its one thing to slip something past the audience – but what about the subject?
I am curious about what happens (and what you do) when a subject becomes aware that he or she is being manipulated or set up -
What about slipping something past oneself…?
Gitta Sereny wrote an entire book about trying to convince her subject — Albert Speer — that he knew about the Holocaust.
By the end, she clearly believes that Speer has admitted (to her) that he knew about the Holocaust.
But I don’t think Speer ever admits anything of the sort — to Sereny or anyone else, including himself…
After all, Speer’s "defense" is to admit responsibility for things he claims to know nothing about. It’s an idea he developed at Nuremburg and never had occassion to modify.
So, whose self-deception are we talking about here…?
Sereny’s…?
Speer’s…?
Mine…?
There is the wonderful assumption thart we are in control of our relationships with other people – in interview situations or otherwise, that we know what we’re doing much of the time and have a clear idea of our motivations and purpose.
It’s a wonderful assumption.
It suffers, however, from one minor infirmity.
It’s false.
Errol
I am disturbed about being misrepresented and misquoted.
A good interview is not about "not getting caught" or "slipping something by past the audience."
It is about trying to discover something about another person.
As for manipulation. To say that "manipulation" is part of every relationship is not to say that "manipulation" is the goal of every relationship.
Errol
Errol
I definitely did not mean that your films and you are all about ‘trying to get away with something’
I was just trying to get you to elaborate on this manipulation that takes place in every ‘discovery process’ er interview..
manipulation is an ugly word but there are ugly forces at work in situations – especially ones where the power dynamic is screwy..
Errol,
Can you talk about your McNamara project? I have lots of questions about it. In some ways it seems different from your other work, in someways not. I wonder what the attraction was for you. You must have had a moment of thinking that this guy has said what he’s going to say but then what were you hoping to do that would be different? What’s the process like? What’s he like? I’m also thinking about the interview and your thoughts about it in light of the discussion here. I can’t wait to see it!
Can’t resist plunging in again.
First, I want (somewhat guiltily) to identify myself with the Janet Malcolm and Errol Morris suspicions about journalistic truth, and especially with their jaundiced view of the ambiguous and, yes, manipulative relations between interviewer and "subject." Most interviews are power struggles, and many are righteously stacked and blatantly unfair. One of my own interviewing tricks, I’ve noticed, is throwing out a variety of questions, four and five and a time, maybe to encourage an uneasy guest and give him/her some avenues to travel. But of course it’s also a way of setting out my boundaries on what we’ll talk about. That’s the bad me. The good me is always waiting for the strong spirit in a guest to crash through my framework and shout me down with irresistible ideas. We count on our favorite caller, "Amber," to do that; calling into The Connection, Amber could win most of our power struggles–or her own power struggles on the air with the likes of Camille Paglia and Bill Safire, no small accomplishment.
Errol makes the key point that a great interview is not one in which the investigator ferrets out the truth. No, the great interview is a dance in which both partners lead and follow; both educate each other; both are revealed, both are changed. The great R. W. Emerson caught a lot of this when he wrote: “We mark with light in the memory the interviews we have had with souls that made our souls wiser, that spoke what we thought, that told us what we knew, that gave us leave to be what we inly were.” It’s a complex interaction!
Second, I just rejoice in Errol’s saga of transcribing interviews–not looking for the bite, really, but listening for subtleties in vocal sound, puzzling about what’s really going on, tuning in on patterns and subtexts, noticing evasions and euphemisms, waiting for the defenses to go down, or for the skeleton to pop out of hiding, that sort of thing. It becomes a treasure hunt, in which all the little evidences of accent and pitch and tempo and feeling tell you something! I am in the thick of this myself on a self-assigned project recording an oral history of a great heroine of the civil rights movement in North Carolina. She was also a church musician, a pianist and prayer leader. Maybe, Errol, you will coach me in selecting and editing this abundant and moving material. Suffice it to say for now that my favorite of all moments comes with a woman who regularly sang solos with my subject. Without warning I asked her in her living room if she’d sing their favorite song, and she broke immediately into her own gorgeous version of "Climbing Higher and Higher." The intonation was perfect, the delivery professional, the spirit intense. She told the whole story in a minute or two. I felt "truth" in that moment.
Third, like Mary McGrath I want to hear more about Robert McNamara. But my question is not about why Errol is doing McNamara. My question is: what is McNamara doing with brother Morris. I want to tie the question back to what’s been said about language as lying. In the case of McNamara, who always presented himself as the hyper-rational numbers guy, this compulsive talking through his 35 post-Vietnam years cannot be taken straight as a rational or analytical activity. All the books, all the speaking tours, all the approaches to confession and apology seem to have delivered McNamara nowhere near a new realm of understanding. He seems to be trapped in an endlessly repetitive monologue of self-justification and denial. What I’ve heard sounds like many, many accounts I’ve heard in prison–habitual, circular "prison raps" in which guilty guys reconstruct and repeat their stories, unto eternity. The first step in any writing program was to help guys get out of their "prison rap." The difference with McNamara is that he is so remarkably bright, and furthermore that there’s no doubt whatsoever: who dunnit? he dunnit! So just what is going on in front of Errol’s camera? Should this be classified as auto-therapy? Errol-assisted therapy? A con job? Pathetic tugging at our sleeve? A Dostoyevskyan spectacle of the last guilty survivor’s suffering? A lie that won’t end this side of death? What is going on here, Mr. Director?
I’ve been following Errol’s and Jay’s and everybody else’s conversation these past several days with increasing absorption–you are all obviously onto important stuff here, trampolining, as it were, on the very nub of the problem. Just a few thoughts to add:
As for the "discretion" etymology. As Jay recalls, we were speaking of trespass and Malcolm and so forth at Third Coast, and I had occasion to recall a lesson from my own college days. Actually, it was Donald Nicholl, a marvelous English historian (of Russian mysticism, among other things) and lay Catholic theologian, who first broached the subject for us. He mentioned how a few days earlier in the cafeteria line he had overheard one of the students sagely commenting to another (this was in Santa Cruz in the early seventies), "If you can learn to eat shit, well, you can get just about anywhere and do just about anything," or some such, and it had got him to thinking about the St Benedict, the great medieval founder of the Benedictine monastic order, and how for Benedict, perhaps the greatest virtue of the monk was that of discretion. Disecretio. Whereupon, he (Nicholl) offered the following gloss, that the word "discretio" derives from the Latin, to wit, "dis-excretio," which is to say, "to be able to discern the difference between food and shit," to know, precisely, that shit is something you ought not eat–or serve–and yet to know as well that shit has its uses, worthy uses at that, as in manure, for example. it is all a question of proper relation.
And it indeed seems to me that discretion, understood in this sense, is a relevant category in this discussion. (Incidentally, in this sense–and only this sense–I consider Errol to be a profoundly discreet filmmaker.) These issues of course also came up on the occasion of the release of Janet Malcolm’s "The Journalist and the Murderer." At the time, the Columbia Journalism Review convened a vast print-conclave on the scandal (see their issue of August 1989), and some of what I wrote then might also be pertinent to this discussion….
You know about all the weird JM business in this story, with Janet Malcolm writing about Joe McGinniss writing about Jeffrey MacDonald and herself having written about Jeffrey Masson and the piece being called “The Journalist and the Murderer”? Well, I was telling someone you could have called the piece Les Jouissances Meurtrieres—Deadly Pleasures or Murderous Orgasms—because the rhetorical tone of the piece is straight out of Les Liaisons Dangereuses . It is out of the Age of Reason, when people took perverse situations and derived from them immutable laws of human nature. Freud, of course, comes out of that tradition and Janet in turn gets a lot out of her rhetorical tone from Freud.
The marquise in Les Liaisons Dangereuses has all these elaborate theories about the complicated power relationships in love, and she looks down on the ordinary people who think of love as something really quite simple. Janet’s piece in a way, is the sort of piece about journalism the marquise might have written.
The marquise’s analysis is spellbinding. But in Les Liaisons Dangereuses it falls apart the minute real love enters the scene. Janet’s thesis is spellbinding, too, and I want to emphasize that I think it’s a remarkable piece of writing but it falls apart in the same way. While the dynamic she describes is potential everywhere in journalism, it doesn’t inevitably have to materialize. There are journalistic equivalents of love—compassion, engagement, conscience.
I am still on far more than talking terms with all the people that I have done profiles of. And I think that I have portrayed some fairly complicated individuals, and portrayed them as both admirable and also demonical and all sorts of other things. My ideal for a profile is that I want it to be as if you were meeting this person. The highest thing that I aspire to is fairness and transparency. Even when I do a profile of someone I am critical of I aspire to do it so fairly that he or she will say, “Yes, that’s me.”
I mean I don’t want to sound Pollyannaish. I’m all for devastating pieces, but I prefer to devastate institutions rather than people.
Now some people might feel that if you portray somebody transparently, you’re betraying him. The marquise might feel that way, but I don’t.
Let’s say, for example, that I am describing someone who, as I get to know him, I realize is an alcoholic. I don’t think I need to say the guy is an alcoholic. I can portray him in bars, talking about being thirsty, or do other things that will provide a kind of feeling about that but not a label. Later on, if someone says, “God, you know, he’s an alcoholic. You didn’t say that.” I can say, “Well, go back and read the piece, it’s in there.”
To label is in some cases to betray. Whereas if you show things I think you are being fair.
By the way, sometimes in my political reporting I get into situations directly analogous to what Janet was talking about. In fact, there was one particular incident during my reporting recently in Uruguay when I dealt with these issues in the body of the text, but ironically the paragraph was taken out in part because the editors at the New Yorker did not want to call further attention to the Janet drama. My article ran only two weeks after hers.
I was interviewing General Hugo Medina, the former junta head who was now the defense minister. He said that sometimes when they were interrogating people during the military dictatorship, they would do so “energetically.”
And I said, “Energetically?”
And the way I originally wrote it is as follows: “He was silent for a moment, his smile steady. For him, this was clearly a game of cat and mouse. His smile horrified me, but presently I realized I’d begun smiling back (it seemed clear the interview had reached a crisis: either I was going to smile back, showing that I was the sort of man who understood these things or the interview was going to be abruptly over.) So I smiled, and now I was doubly horrified that I was smiling. I’m sure he realized this, because he now smiled all the more, precisely at the way he’d gotten me to smile and how obviously horrified I was to be doing so. He swallowed me whole.”
That is how the text read. And what is interesting about that passage is it displays exactly the kind of transparency that I am talking about. It describes the situation.
But, of course, when I write, “He swallowed me whole,” I swallowed himwhole. So I have the last word. I get to have the Cheshire-cat grin.
Errol, where have you gone? Come back. Would it help if I said something to upset you?
Funny, when I watch an Errol Morris movie, I don’t brood about who’s manipulating whom or how’d Errol get the guy to say that, or is it true or what is truth or any of those things. I just sit there being jealous.
I get this sense (I may be imagining this; I don’t know the man, just his work)that Morris loves, really loves, what he’s doing. Ferretting into people’s heads suits him. And when he gets deep, deep inside and his person begins to undress, I imagine Morris getting happier and happier unbuttoning each button, not just for the ‘kill’ as so many of these postings suggest, but for the chance to know more, to get, as the poet Paul Celan has written, "all the way to each other."
Is Errol a manipulator? Sure.
But is there an excitement, a joy, an athlete’s pride being the fox chasing down the hare? There’s gotta be, and in Errol’s films, the joy trickles out…I can sense it..especially when the hare is a wierd tangle of strangeness like Dr. Death or Robert MacNamara. With hares like them, who wouldn’t want to be the fox?
I would.
I don’t have the moves, or the patience, or that odd-ball camera thingy that Errol has, but I can sit there and be jealous that he’s having such a good time.
Thank you so much.
It is a great pleasure to receive questions that I have not already answered…
You wrote, "Errol makes the key point that a great interview is not one in which the investigator ferrets out the truth. No, the great interview is a dance in which both partners lead and follow; both educate each other; both are revealed, both are changed…"
I’m not sure I said any of these things. But I do like the part about leading and following…
You then quoted Emerson, "The great R. W. Emerson caught a lot of this when he wrote: “We mark with light in the memory the interviews we have had with souls that made our souls wiser, that spoke what we thought, that told us what we knew, that gave us leave to be what we inly were.” It’s a complex interaction!"
But are we reading the same quotation…?
Emerson opens up with his “we mark with light…” So far so good.
But look at what follows!
Interviews that “spoke what we thought…”
Interviews that “told us what we knew…”
Interviews that “give us leave to be what we inly were…”
Is irony intended here…?
I have to thank you again for your kindness to me on these pages. In particular, pointing out my obsession with spoken language. Listening, reading, transcribing an interview is properly considered, an investigation. And like most investigations doesn’t really have an end.
There is something endlessly fascinating about how people use language… What it reveals… What it hides…
There have been several questions about my McNamara movie. I’m sorry, but I would prefer to wait until the movie is finished to talk about it and/or McNamara.
Cheers,
Errol
Ren,
I don’t want to get into the business of attacking or defending Janet Malcolm. [Although I must confess I am an admirer. Even a fan. She is the only true Chekovian journalist.]
But I do believe that she has been endlessly criticized because it is assumed she was talking about conscious mendacity, conscious journalistic ill-will. .
In such a view, the journalist imagines himself (or we imagine the journalist) to be in control of an interview and can manipulate it to his own advantage.
The point I wish to make. Is that we often have the idea that we are in control of what we’re doing when we are not…
Call it self-deception.
Perhaps consciousness, itself, is nothing more than a crude device that allows us to deceive ourselves about our own motivations…
Perhaps that’s the only purpose of consciousness.
Ren (as usual) makes the unassailable point that the Marquise does not take love into account…
I would recast this in a different form.
The Marquise fails to realize that despite his own tortured, convoluted explanations – none of them may be correct.
Ultimately, it may be that our conscious explanations do not take into account the hidden layers of motivation, intention and belief that determine what we do.
We observe at best one percent of ourselves. Maybe zero percent.
I have always wanted to recast the Cartesian cogito… How about, “I think therefore I think I am…”
Allow me to fall back on one of my favorite quotations. It is from the last living member of Zoar, a failed utopian community in Ohio. In her nineties and on her death-bed, she said,
“THINK OF IT…
ALL THOSE RELIGIONS…
THEY CAN’T ALL BE RIGHT…
(This is where I imagine a death-rattle. She summons up all her strength for one last line…)
…BUT THEY CAN ALL BE WRONG.”]
Why do I like this quotation…? Because I believe that we should always entertain the possibility that everything we think is wrong.
Yours analysis presumes that we are completely aware of what is going on… Conscious of what is going on. And can plan accordingly. And you believe that by faithfully recording the nature of the transaction that you avoid falling into a trap. But the best traps are those that we are not even aware of…
What makes you (and Janet Malcolm) a great journalist is that you try to be aware of these hidden layers and to capture them in your writing…
More later.
Errol
P.S. I hang out near the Degas. You look at the ceiling with a worried expression on your face as if there’s some gigantic insect on the crown molding. You then scream out, “What is that…?” I think you know what happens next.
P.P.S. You are right to point out that the most important philosophical distinction is the shit-shinola distinction. Also known as the ass-hole-in-the ground distinction. Often overlooked.
Cheers,
Errol
Hi there,
I was thinking about the Morris films I’ve seen, and I started to see them in a bit of a progression, kind of the way Chuck Close uses an image over and over as a way of developing an idea that has nothing to do with the image. Mr. Morris has a way of making a movie and a especially a way of interviewing people, and applies it in a rather detached scientific way to different subjects. It’s as if Mr. Morris poses a question and applies his technique to produce an answer. "A story of small significance to most of its characters?" — Heaven’s Gate. "A story of great significance to it characters?" — Thin Blue Line. "A story of great significance?" — Mr. Death.
Then there’s the level of sympathy toward his subjects. Sometimes it’s clear that the subject is contemptible, but usually it’s not, and we’re forced to constantly re-evaluate and resolve contradictions. I was thinking I’d like to see Mr. Morris do a character study on somebody who is totally sympathetic, like a person dealing heroically with a fatal disease, and then realized he made the Stephen Hawking movie.
not sure if it’s been discussed thus far on this site, but i’m quite disappointed to find an interview w/errol morris that is printed, but not available for LISTENING, in entirety, or in more than the 1:25 clip provided. seems silly to me, given the nature of the site.
chris
There is audio for quite a few of the posts in the Interview. Look for the links.
Originally Nubar wanted to do the interview on video. Errol preferred audio and wanted the chance to do an edit on the written transcript for his final offering. Each Guest here gets to pick their method. The audio in this case is to be illustrative of the transcript.
It’s true, though, that this on-screen discussion echoes interestingly, if silently, off Errol’s earlier comments about spoken word, image, and transcript. Certainly audio and visual clues would change the dynamic we perceive here, if indeed we’re all perceiving the same thing, which, no doubt, we’re not. Without hearing we have no sighs, pauses, laughter; without seeing, we have no shrugs, smiles, eyes. As Errol points out, more information is not necessarily more truth. Those clues can lead us closer to truth or to deception.
There is an intriguing form/content element in this online interview about interviewing. This Internet way of communicating is distinct from the radio/tv interview, esp. in areas of control — one can choose which questions to answer, take days in responding, pick a personna. Manipulation can still occur, but there’s no editing. Everything is on view, if in word only. It’s a performance piece, vaguely theatrical although it occurs over days and weeks. Each of these conversations — e.g. Terkel, Vowell, Krulwich, Morris, all of them — has widely various personalities made of call and response, audience and performer, together, mingled. Even without seeing or hearing each other.
Sorry, I missed you guys at the Niemann conference.
I don’t think I’m either… [OK. OK. Stage Manager or Nathan Detroit...? Of course, it has to be one or the other. Let's see now... I'd pick the one who's less in control. Nathan Detroit. OK?]
How about: Am I an elm or a maple…?
And, oh, the "death" thing. It comes from my familiarity with the living.
Errol
I transcribed your interviews with Nubar and to me the tone of your consciousness in those felt different than the tone you’ve shared in these exchanges. When you interview people, do you create a certain persona? Or do you speak with them as Errol? And if so, are you more the sparring Errol, or more the conversational Errol?
And, should you choose to respond, if possible, please do not speak of trees…
I’m not sure… Except that (when I am interviewing people) my tone is not confrontational…
And I guess it is confrontational in these exchanges…
Isn’t this a very different situation…? I’m not interviewing anyone… I’m not really being interviewed by anyone…
You said that my tone in the interviews with Nubar is very different. I think I understand what you mean, but tell me more….
Errol
Hi Errol.
Instead of talking about the interviewing process I’m interested in how you perceive the viewer. How does your perception of the viewer shift when you make films from when you make commercials ? Or does it? Does the filmgoer differ from the potential consumer? And if so, how? And if not, why?
Many thanks, Chelsea
I have four different Errol Morrises in my head. Will the real Errol Morrises please stand up and tell me which ones he recognizes…
1) the careful listener that made the thin blue line possible
Like a film director/I.F. Stone. I imagine you saying, "Let’s be careful. that’s the only way we can get to any truth. Let’s be as fair as possible. It’s important to listen"
2) the funny entertainer at the Nieman conference. I appreciated the lack of pretensions. Here’s how you ended your amusing keynote session: the previous organization had left a video on fashion or make up in the player."Let’s play that video!" you said. A technical difficulty got in the way of the full hilarity. But we got the point, I think "It’s all crazy and absurd. Let’s party!"
3) the director of the Apple ads. The only two or three I’ve ever seen were those shown at the Nieman conference. Some friends assured me that based on the other ads they’d observed, you were not making fun of the speakers. The audience, they assured me, was laughing WITH the subjects. I was uncomfortable, watching the subjects look so awkward, like specimens so starkly lit on the white jerking background… In reality, in any context, there’s be more warmth and they’d fit in more.
I thought the director was saying "Look at how pathetic they look."
4) Finally, here, confrontational. I’m surprised. Robert Krulwich said it took him awhile before he realized people here were friendlier than some of the people who send him mail. Does it feel like YOU"RE the specimen now? called up before the congressional committee, in front of the cameras?
or are you just in the mood for confrontation
or do you think that’s the best way to exchange information?
I’m really just curious as to how this forum/medium works for people
I expected this to be more comfortable, but sometimes it seems less intimate than when I heard you on stage. Perhaps it’s just what happens when people are busy and have to be quick… or have to last a month…
Do I have to be one of the four…? Can’t people be a variety of things…?
I try to be a careful listener. It’s part of what I do… But presumably, these postings are from people interested in my views. I’ve tried to give them. It’s not about listening per se… I’m not interviewing thepeople who write in to this group, I’m responding to them.
I intended something quite different in my concluding remarks at the Niemann conference… That the attempt to control everything is doomed to failure and a lot of interesting stuff comes in unexpected (and uncontrollable) ways. I suppose that includes the Liz Claiborne video. By the way, I took it home and tried to get it to play. No luck. I still would like to know what was on the tape.
As for my Apple ads making fun of people. I think your nuts. (For what it’s worth, the people in them like them. )
I have indeed been confrontational at times. I’m sorry. But there has been stuff that seems worth confronting. Sobeit.
Errol
I like the question. And I’m not sure this is a simple answer… Although there might be.
How about this…?
Do I look at the viewers of my commercials in some different way than the viewers of my films…?
I’m still thinking about it.
But I don’t think I do. I think a viewer is a viewer is a viewer. I think the goal is to create something interesting in the time available — even if it’s only 30 seconds.
I sometimes think of commercials as "American haiku"… Expressing ideas in a very short span of time.
For example, I directed a series of commercials for United Airlines. This was shortly after 9.11… It seemed that task was not about advertising a product but expressing something real about that historical moment…
I could argue that there is no clear line between advertising and anything else, but this is not the point I want to make here.
Simply, I try to do good work. Interesting work. No matter whether it’s advertising or anything else. And part of that is not pandering to a client or an audience. But trying to create interesting things… No matter what.
And, yes, I imagine that I am in a crazy kind of dialogue with my viewers.
Thanks.
Errol
Maybe Nannette was responding to the background music in the ads. (By the way, you can see a lot, if not all, of them at the Apple web site < http://www.apple.com/switch/>.)
I can’t recall if it’s the same musical theme that Apple has been using for a number of years, but it does seem to lighten the tone somewhat, maybe give it a bit of a smirk or something. That plus the stark lighting, I think I can see how someone might react unsympathetically.
But when I have seen the ads (only on a computer screen — I don’t watch TV enough to have seen them there) the most impressive part to me is the "American Haiku" quality Errol mentioned — they have a rhythm and a form, and the person stating their name (or the feat they just recounted) brings everything to a graceful stop.
errol,
has the director in you ever interviewed the subject matter in you? in other words, have you ever turned the camera on yourself and done a personal exploration on some theme in your life for a documentary? even as an exercise?
i would like to be a fly on the wall in that laboratory.
i wonder how many producers on this board have ever done that? if any have really, truly taken a risk and put their own life out there in the way you expect your subjects to. what was the experience like? how did the producer and the subject matter inside of you confront each other during the process? at what point did it feel dangerous? what happened after it was out in the world?
now lets talk about really confronting self-deception head on.
anybody?
>To errol & all: has the director in you ever interviewed the subject matter in you? in other words, have you ever turned the camera on yourself and done a personal exploration on some theme in your life for a documentary? even as an exercise? … I wonder how many producers on this board have ever done that?
I’ll take a whack at this, if you don’t mind, because I’ve been thinking about it in relation to this topic and Errol’s thoughts.
Yes, I turn the mic around sometimes. Not too often, but enough to remind myself what it feels like to be out there. Of course, I’m only subjecting myself to my own authorship which is quite different from being in someone else’s hands. Still, I put some part of my life on display for the millions and feel the repercussions.
For instance, last month I did a piece about my marital separation and new house and relationship to my kids (it’s the last piece in This American Life show, "Classifieds"). It’s personal, my kids’ voices are in it. Sure, I have control over what I included, so there’s some safety in that, but there is still risk. I tried to be "honest" in what I said, but obviously didn’t say everything. Finally, though, I told enough so that my kids and the people who know me and work with me would be able to tell if I was deceitful or self-deceiving, to the degree any of us can know such things (ref. above).
Much of my work demands that others reveal themselves, either to the tape recorders I loan them or when they let me into their lives. Then I put them on stage. Doing it to myself occasionally seems important, like a self-portrait–marking a given time, going on record. I even like doing it. And hate it. And fear it.
I would say also that this website and even this topic, is some attempt to conflate the interviewer/interviewee, veteran/newbie, performance/critique, process/product, producer/subject–so that we experience it all together, mixed.
It is also an attempt to give out the tools we use to those upon whom we use them. Seems fair.
I’d also like to sneak in a question for you, Errol, if you have time. I know you’re leaving the country and your stint here is almost at an end…
Do you watch or listen to much public television/radio? What do you think is good or bad about it? What would you change?
I’m glad you asked.
I never watch PBS. When I watch TV I usually watch with my son… Now, fifteen. It used to be Nickelodeon and Fox. Now, it’s Fox and Comedy Central.
I listen to NPR all the time… I used to listen to "The Connection," but since Chris Lydon left, it no longer seems interesting.
And I loved Robert J. But that’s a thing of the past. And I listen to "Classics in the Morning." But what happened to "American Songbook"?
And I know you asked me very early on… But I would love to do radio.
Errol
>But I would love to do radio.
This seems a fitting place to stop, or at least pause, and thank Errol Morris for his time and challenging conversation… and also Nubar Alexanian for his interview and remarkable photographs.
Transom is built around an intent to help citizens and producers get their voices out there. That help often takes the form of supportive encouragement and sharing of tools, but not always. Sometimes it is more helpful to confront. It is also less boring. Thank you, Errol, for being here.
As with all Transom topics, please feel free to continue the conversation as long as you want, although I believe Errol is about to start traveling for work soon. A new guest topic will show up in a few days. Stick around.
Well, well, well…
I have been interviewed for a number of programs…
And, yes, I have tried several times to "interview" myself.
For example, I tried to interview myself for "The Thin Blue Line". I was having trouble editing the movie, and I thought, if I introduce myself as one of the characters (after all, I was involved in the investigation), then maybe it could help make sense of the narrative.
It really didn’t work. And I ended up stripping it out of the movie…
I tried to pretend as though I was talking to another person… That it wasn’t me talking to myself… But it didn’t work. Try as hard as I might I was always aware that it was "I" interviewing me…
But, I’m not sure this is what you mean by "interviewing" myself…
OK. There are these various parts of my personality involved in some crazy internal dialogue… But I’m not sure they’re interviewing each other. (Is this the difference between a true psychosis and a mere neurosis…? That is, if I really had multiple personality disorder, my personalities would be truly interviewing each other; whereas if I was just neurotic they would be involved in an internal dialogue…?
But isn’t that different from an "interview," as well…?
Isn’t "interviewing myself" an oxymoron…?
Doesn’t the idea of an interview contain the idea of one person talking to another person…? I think it does.
But there is something else in your remarks that I find really interesting. This idea that people are being put on the spot, that they are taking a risk… I suppose in some sense, yes, everytime you talk to another person you are taking a risk. You may be misinterpreted. Your words may be taken out of context… But it is a risk that we all repeatedly take — as social animals.
People can write diaries. They can create first-person narratives based on their own experiences. They can write autobiographies. But that sort of thing is different from an interview.
Errol
jay,
thanks for being open and honest about your experience of turning the mic around on you and your family. it gives some insight to hear about the process. i am fascinated by the constant flux of that boundary between producer/ subject and where it can take you internally. it’s a great piece.
viva conflation.
errol,
thanks for sharing your experience about (potentially) casting yourself as a character in the “thin blue line.” the idea of interviewing oneself as an example of an oxymoron made me chuckle. now i‘m a little haunted by the vision of you talking into a camera and saying, “so tell me about myself.”
point well taken.
for me, the idea of exposing yourself as a character in your own documentary must be a very difficult and frightening process to go through. it must challenge you in important ways, especially in regards to the idea of truth and honesty. even if, as jay so aptly wrote, you are submitting yourself to your own authorship. it’s still a risk far greater than daily social interactions.
you wrote. " I would suggest there is a responsibility to the truth."
lately i’ve been wondering if one can be honest without being truthful? or can be truthful without being honest? if truth deals with the “facts”. and honesty deals with thoughts, feelings and emotions. how do you arrange and rearrange them to tell a story? that is murky territory.
it’s my perception that every story you receive from a subject must be a gift. whether it is a story from a convict or your mother. (or, sadly, if the convict is your mother) they’ve opened up to you, and allowed you to “view” the parts of them that are damaged, deranged or wonderful. that’s kind of an honor, right?
it is my understanding (because i just googled it) “interview” is derived from the french word, “entrevous.” meaning to enter and view. that can be a powerful moment when two strangers come together and a honest viewing takes place.
i sometimes wonder if the character’s story is just a reflection of the author’s story (in some hidden recess). a shared story. but, of course, the author has the opportunity to reshape her/his contribution in the safe confines of the edit room. reissue it — and then the story becomes the author’s gift, albeit a safer one, to offer others.
in that sense, does the final storytelling reveal more about the author’s psych and pathos than the subjects?
so many questions, so little time.
i truly appreciate your honesty (thoughts and feelings). and your truths (ref. oxymoron)
both have been invaluable, not only to me, but i’m sure to others peeking in.
good night, mr. morris, and god speed in europe.
I’m thinking interviewing oneself is probably bullshit. Because you ALREADY KNOW. …what you’re scared to say, want to say, don’t want to say, would or wouldn’t say. The view is FROM the INSIDE. That’s just a sort of exposing oneself, allowing revealment on one’s own pre-determined terms. Altogether different view from the OUTSIDE viewing IN. You can see things a "subject" hasn’t thought about in years.
Both scenarios are equally uncomfortable for the subject, but they’re two different ball games.
Good interviews, when they’re working, contain a scintilla of spontaneity which I don’t believe we have with ourselves. Maybe, and just maybe, choosing an ice-cream flavor at 2 am, yes, but not "interviewing ourselves".
if good interviews contain spontaneity then i’m left wondering why most journalists strip themselves out of that dynamic? why do they choose to write narrative vo for themselves while leaving their subject in the raw light?
just questions. no answers.
"That’s just a sort of exposing oneself, allowing revilement on one’s own predetermined terms. Altogether different view from the OUTSIDE viewing IN. You can see things a "subject" hasn’t thought about in years."
yes, sometimes.
but aren’t they (journalists) just processing what they view in me (subject ) through their own perspective of the world? and aren’t i still in control as to what i reveal to them? perhaps with the right tools, a safer environment, and a willingness to risk – - i would reveal a far deeper story about my own life or community – and on my own terms.
being latina i have a difficult time buying that "another" can tell my story or my communities because they have "perspective" or "distance." i say, move in a little closer and give me that new fangled mic. then you’ll see perspective – something real and honest. someone who has real access to questions you never thought to ask. no one can tell my story no matter how insightful his/her interview questions are. they can only tell their story about me. vise-versa.
and anyhoooo…don’t we want to reclaim our own stories. be the author of our own lives. give voice to our own voicelessness? how do we do it without starting here – with hard questions to ourselves.
i suppose i used the incorrect terminology "interviewing oneself." sure, i just made it up. i guess i was trying to point out how unnerving it must be for the "subject "to be in the hands of a potentially guiltless storyteller. if you’ve been there, you’d know. so i was trying to say, have empathy for the lives and stories you hold – they are gifts. they were offered to you whether you respect the gift bearers or not. in a very round ’bout way i was trying to express — "walk a mile in their addidas in front of the camera…."
maybe i should say instead, at times take stock of yourself in the form of questions and tell your own story? let your own voice loose once in awhile. embrace it’s spontaneity and humanness outside of your constructed vo’s. it might be a great awakening in regards to all of our connectedness.
and if you are brave – and don’t ask yourself questions you already have answers to -and don’t censor yourself to a degree of being self-deluded – than it can be a journey of discovery as honest, surprising and compelling as any other ‘s story.
yes or no?
thanks . i love this discussion. i hope i’m not pissing anyone off?
You asked: Does the final storytelling reveal more about the author’s psychology and pathos than the subject’s? An important question.
Are interviews just projection and transference…? Do we really see the world, or are we just holding up a mirror to ourselves…?
And if there’s something more, where does all that projection and transference end and reality begin. Or if you prefer, where does the "self" end and the "other" begin…?
I’m not sure.
But things get even worse than this. What about the problem of knowing whether an interview is an interview with a real person…? Or an imaginary one? And who is the real author of it…?
I followed your example. I went to Google. Typed in "interview…" And came up with the web page, "Interview with God."
Have you seen it?
It seems as though God very much interested in self-help. He likes to offer all kinds of advice. He also likes to display what he has to say against a backdrop of nature scenes, particularly mountains and mist.
I noticed that the "Interview with God" was also available in book form. And so, I went to amazon.com and started reading the various comments on and reviews of the book.
One person, in particular, became quite nasty — taking exception to the claim that "Interview with God" was an actual interview with God.
They said, "while there is nothing inherently wrong with the sentiments expressed here, to attribute the words as quotes from God is a VERY dangerous practice. God did NOT say these things — they are only the imaginations of a created being (the unknown author) attributed to the Creator. You’d do far better reading the Word of God Himself, the Holy Bible. That DID come from God."
The Bible.
Well, then… Could the Bible be the first interview…?
Errol
errol,
i cautiously approach that last question. i fear a trap door has been set by a secular anti-humanist.
let me preface this response with, “God’s" a toughie. the most (unintentionally) spiritual book i ever read was “the lonely hearts of the cosmos, the story of the scientific quest of the universe.” comforting.
but you trotted him out here.
and it’s an interesting topic. it gives me brain cramps.
is the bible the first interview with God? or a least one, in only a handful of “interviews” that God’s PR person has set up during the entire history of the world?
no. but….
the concept of interviewing (to enter and view) “God,” and documenting that exploration by recording stories is everywhere and always has been. it may even be at the very heart of why humans tell stories.
ancient people didn’t sit under the stars. they sat among them. they were surrounded nightly by spectacular views (or entrevous) of the galaxy. a world with zero light pollution. they recorded and passed down the answers they retrieved from the universe in various storytelling art forms.
i am left wondering in the context of this idea – if the concept of interviewing “God” is really so very different than you asking fred leuchter about his profound denial of the atrocities of the holocaust? even in the face of overwhelming evidence? isn’t that really a question you are asking God?
and maybe in regards to this (larger) interview you are having with the universe – the answers have revealed themselves in the most unlikely of places. in the look of a man wrongly convicted. in the confession of an unrepentant murderer. in the profound denial of genocide. in the entropy of a black hole.
when you edit together the answers you discover. which are not always fact, not always fiction but somewhere mysteriously between called storytelling. maybe you are just adding your questions to this never-ending eternal interview we are all having with the universe?
i mean, are you an investigator or an explorer? which one is it?
okay, that’s my best shot. anyone else?
WHen my daughter was in 3rd grade, living in overwhelmingly Catholic Italy she said: so who says the Pope is God’s voice?
or that any of these priests are God’s choice? THey are ALL chosen by people. So then God is me too.
- out of the mouths of babes.
everything is a manifestation of mankind. including the bible.
(but Jesus, was a walking soundbite.) To follow the pure logic of a 7 year old, if we are God and God is us, then author is subject is author and together they procreate and it is called:
THE WORK.
Hi Errol,
First of all, thanks for doing this. It’s really great to be able to interface with someone whose work I’ve long admired.
You say you don’t speak with your interviewees before filming. Do you tell them what they are getting into? I mean how do you butter them up for the "loss of control"? What is your pre-interview ritual?
Thanks for your time and for all your great work.
Kerry Seed…
PS My favorite scene from all of your movies is near the end of Gates of Heaven – the cemetery rock concert. I think of it often.
You’ve probably found it by now, but we just posted this:
http://www.transom.org/guests/review/200312.review.morris3.html
===========================================
From the Editor’s Letter:
* FEATURE – Errol Morris: Interviewing McNamara *
Last year on Transom, when Errol Morris was interviewed about interviewing, he spoke first about interviewing Robert McNamara. At the time, he asked us not to use that part because he was still in the midst and concerned about upsetting the dynamic by talking about it. As his remarkable new documentary film, Fog of War, is about to open, we asked if we could publish his comments about that dynamic now. You’ll find them interesting.
http://www.transom.org/guests/review/200312.review.morris3.html
Drop over any time,
Jay Allison
Atlantic Public Media
Woods Hole, Mass.
=========================
We finally got him to agree to come up and be interviewed over a two-day period of time, that he’d give me two hours on each day. And then he called me several days before he was to come up and said, "I agreed to do this, but I’ve thought it over. This makes no sense. I really shouldn’t be doing this. There’s really no good reason for me to be talking to you. And so I really can’t do this. I don’t want to do this. I shouldn’t be doing this. But I said I would do it, and so therefore, I will do it." I was telling this story to my friend, Ron Rosenbaum [the writer and newspaper columnist] and he said, "Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. That’s the story of Vietnam."
– Errol Morris in a Transom interview with Nubar Alexanian
After seeing a screening of this public service work of art film, I spoke with a fellow viewer who just happens to be involved in creating a fabulous teacher’s guide, a copy of which I hold in my hand. Here’s a link:
http://www.choices.edu/fogofwar
Big congratulations to Errol Morris for his Oscar. Well earned.
I second that! And if their was an award for best acceptance speech, he’d get my vote.
just saw Fog of War: essential viewing.
Morris is a gifted storyteller. he takes a statesman talking history, adds some archive footage, and makes a masterpiece.
One lesson McNamara forgot to mention:
12) Keep lying until you die.
One question Errol Morris forgot to ask:
" Mr McNamara, where were you when the US military sprayed millions of dioxin/Agent Orange over VietNam that still hurts the Vietnamese people, the VN Vets, the allies and their families up until today? Were you on vacation the whole 10 years of spraying? In the restrooms?…"
Errol Morris also forgot to tell McNamara to "stop it" when the Man cried on camera denying his responsibility over the spraying.
"9. In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil"
Would the devil think the devil evil?
"11. You can’t change human nature", remember?