For close to thirty years, Academy Award-winning documentarian Errol Morris has consistently churned out some of the most provocative inspections of the American psyche ever put on film. His work is always profound, whether it's existential, political or personal: He uses animal death to explore the transience of all life in Heaven's Gate, explores the psychology of working in Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, and launches straight into the concept of war criminality with The Fog of War, which finally won him an Oscar.
Now, he's back in the ring of topicality with Standard Operation Procedure, an in-depth study of the 2004 Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal with testimonies from practically all the soldiers featured in the infamously photographs. A highly stylized work of forensic cinema, with a haunting score by Danny Elfman, Standard Operating Procedure (which opens on Friday) gets a special screening tonight at the Tribeca Film Festival, where Morris will attend and take questions. I caught up with him at a Manhattan hotel yesterday for a pointed discussion about the way new technology has affected his work.
You have ambitious plans for this film's website, including an interface that allows users to examine background information of 1,500 photos from Abu Ghraib. How did this come about?
Well, the film, of course, is based on the photographs. The question I kept asking myself over and over again was, "What if you could walk into history with a photograph? What if you could walk through a photograph, into that environment, and then started to look around?" That was the starting point. We developed a website for the movie, which is a Sony website designed by One Trick Pony. They did a good job--it was based on this idea, but only partially realized. It was a starting point. We've talked about taking the template of this website and expanding it greatly. I have between a million and a half and two million words of transcript from interviews--I've done many, many interviews, many more than appear in the movie. I've accumulated piles and piles of documents.
Do you consider content on the site to be an intrinsic part of the film?
I think it is an intrinsic part of the film. I like the idea. Say I'm doing an investigation--and I think I am doing an investigation--I can call attention to that investigation in different ways: I can make a movie, I can write a book with Philip Gourevitch, I can create a website where a lot of material is put online and made available to the public. I can do a lot of things. It's a different world--and, actually, it's a very exciting world. The ways in which you can tell a story are just multiplying right in front of our eyes. I like being a part of this.
You see, it used to be a marketing ploy. There would be the Broadway show, the movie, the book, et cetera. I don't think of it that way. I think of it differently. Philip said, from the very beginning, "I don't want to make a book of the movie, or the making of the movie. I'd like to take this material you've collected and try to create something completely different. A different take, a different look." I'd like to keep going in that vein.
Is your blog for the New York Times also a part of that expansion?
It is, actually. It wasn't intended as such--a blog connected to the movie. Things have changed so radically in the last five years. Five years ago, if you asked me if I was going to be writing for the New York Times, I would have said, "Don't be silly." Someone calls me out of the blue and says, "Would you like to write for the Times online?" I said, "Well, I don't know if I can. I don't if I can just manage to do all that writing." Then they said, "Just do six of them and see if you like doing it." I said, "Well, I'll try and see if I can do it." So I started writing. They had suggested I write about photography--the suggestion came from the New York Times, not from me. so I wrote a couple of essays. Then, I had gone to the Crimea in the fall, a little over two years ago, investigating two pictures by Roger Fenton called "In the Valley of the Shadow of Death." I wrote these essays, and they got a lot of attention. They were about my idea of history--walking into a photograph. I've just written my first essay explicitly about one of the Abu Ghraib photographs, which is going to come out on Monday or Tuesday.
At first, I thought, "I didn't do this writing because I want to promote the movie. I did this writing because it's about things that deeply interest me." I hope to continue in that vein. I never anticipated that I would do this, but I have done it. So yes, it's fantastic, it really is, the fact that the New York Times will put this stuff out. The Fenton essay, which was in three parts, got somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 responses. It was incredible. They were high-level responses. People were intellectually engaged by what I had written.
Now, Penguin has asked me whether I want to put the essays together as a book. So I'm doing a book of those essays, which is coming out in the fall. It's been crazy. It's really different from the last time around. Fog of War was only four years ago, and it seems like a different world now.
It's interesting that you mention the comments on your blog, because that's a direct involvement with your audience than you could never achieve before.
I used to do a lot of Q&As. It was one of the things that I loved doing. When I would do a Q&A following a screening, it would be a way of discussing the ideas in the movie. I loved doing that. I used to joke that I make movies so I can talk after them. This is an expression of that. The movie, the investigation--I can capture it now in a thousand different ways.
Yet your basic technique hasn't changed: You have your interview subjects look directly into the camera, which is still a rare approach. Have you patented the "Interrotron," your method of projecting a video image of yourself over the camera lens while you conduct the interview?
I didn't patent it in time. I lost my opportunity. I don't know if someone else has patented it, but you only have a year from the first public announcement that something exists to patent it.
In this movie, the technique is very important because it serves to personalize people familiar to most Americans as headlines.
Talking to them, of course, is a way of humanizing them. If they're just sound bites, blips, the evening news--you can say anything you want, imagine anything you want about them. It's much more interesting to see them presented as people.
Isn't the personalization separate from the photographs on display? They have two different impacts: The former serves to make you comfortable with these people, and the latter vilifies them.
You can't think of them that way, because there would be no story without the images. They're inextricably connected.
I was reminded of the 1971 documentary Interviews with My Lai Veterans, where Vietnam soldiers discuss the raping and pillaging of innocent Korean civilians. You end up studying the subtleties of the interviewees' faces to see how they react when the atrocities are brought up. Certain facial ticks are quite revealing.
Yes.
In Standard Operating Procedure, there's a similar effect when you explore the reason behind one of the soldiers giving a thumbs-up and smiling in several photos.
In fact, I just wrote this essay on (Abu Ghraib soldier) Sabrina (Harman)'s thumb. It's 9,000 words--or maybe 10,000 words now--on that one question: The meaning of that smile. I think it's a really important issue. All of these things fall out of it. It's very much on my mind at the moment.
How do you feel about tackling this story now, rather than when it was initially pertinent?
It's still pertinent. First of all, I couldn't have done it then, because these people were shut away immediately. They were court martialed and then imprisoned. I had to wait a year and half for Lynddie England to get out of prison. I interviewed her a month after she got out. There was just no earlier time to do this, regardless of what I wanted.
But if you were, by some miracle, able to make this film when the story broke, you obviously would have influenced the trial and the rest of the fallout.
Well, sure.
Now you have a full story, since the issue has mostly been resolved, at least in terms of the legal ramifications. Do you still consider the film to be a work of activism?
Just because it's done three, four, five years after the fact doesn't mean it's not activism. I do consider this to be a form of activism. I think it's trying to make people think about the damn war and the bad apples. It's making people think about the fact that the wrong people got blamed, and it's making people think about the propagandistic uses of photography.
What's your reaction to the so-called genre of Iraq war documentaries?
I haven't seen all of them, but I think that, if this is in fact boring to people, it's become so political that everybody thinks they know what the story is, and they don't want to hear it anymore. It's going to be a representation of something they already heard. Nobody wants to hear something they already know. They want to be lectured to about something already know, or think they know. This is different. It's a surprising story that people do not know. It's not told in the same way.
I feel like I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't. If I make the same standard movie about (David) Addington, Bush, torture memos...then what have I advanced, really? Preciously little. If I make a completely different movie, people will say, "Why are you making a movie about this?" I'm trying to look at something people haven't looked at.
Michael Moore has proposed that multiplexes devote one screen a week to documentaries. Do you think this sort of hand-holding is necessary?
I think it's great that there are more and more opportunities to show nonfiction. So I'm in favor of all that. I've been fortunate. Every single film I've made has gone into theaters. That's, I don't know, luck.
--Eric Kohn