![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/227\/1997\/11\/errolmorris.jpg\" "\\"errolmorris\\"")
<\/a>Date: November 12, 1997\nPlace: Cambridge, MA (him) and Surrey, BC (me)<\/b><\/p>\n
I conducted this phone interview as part of my research for an article I wrote for <\/i>Books & Culture. I have liked the films of Errol Morris<\/a> ever since I saw <\/i>The Thin Blue Line in 1989, and the film which occasioned this article, <\/i>Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, was easily my favorite film of 1997. I had heard that Morris lets his interviewees ramble without interruption, the better to see what they reveal about themselves, so I tried a similar approach.<\/i><\/p>\n EM:<\/b> Hi.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Hello.<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> How are you?<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Alright. Is this Errol?<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> Yes.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Hi, I\u2019m alright, how are you?<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> I\u2019m fine.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> How much time do we have, would you say?<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> I don\u2019t know. I\u2019ve been running around doing stuff, so it\u2019s hard for me to say.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Twenty minutes, would you say? Would that be alright?<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> Yes.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Alright. With Fast, Cheap & Out of Control<\/a><\/i>, how did you choose your subjects, plural, as in the interviewees?<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> I don\u2019t think there\u2019s one criterion that I can point to, like this was the principle by which these four people were chosen. I wanted to make a movie like<\/i> this for some time, namely a movie that would integrate four separate stories, weave them together into one movie. I had known about the lion tamer for many years, and then the other three stories I found relatively quickly, two of them in the area where I live \u2014 I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, so one of these stories comes from Rutherford, Rhode Island, which is about an hour and a half south of here, and another one of the stories comes from MIT, which is about a ten-minute walk from where I am, and I\u2019m looking out the window at the Earth Science building as we speak. I was interested in finding a topiary gardener for the movie, and when I found out there was a topiary garden of animals, wild animals, out of privet, that certainly attracted my attention. The robots came from an article that my wife read in Connoisseur<\/i> magazine, and I was attracted again to the fact that Rodney<\/a> had a whole number of different robots in a robot bestiary.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Okay. Another question which will sound rather similar to the last one, but is kind of different: How did you choose your subject, singular? Or what is the common link between these four?<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> Well, there\u2019s this idea that there\u2019s one common link, as if I\u2019ve set up some kind of puzzle that\u2019s supposed to be resolved by a simple answer, and I don\u2019t think that\u2019s the case. I don\u2019t think there is<\/i> one common link, I think there are many thematic links between the characters.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Well, not necessarily a simple answer, but how about a complex answer?<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> A complex<\/i> answer! That\u2019s even worse! Now I have to do all the work! I mean, there\u2019s lots of different themes: the control of nature, our ideas about animals as a way in which we project an image of ourselves on the world, ideas about mortality and immortality, obsession.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> You mentioned animals as a way that we project ourselves onto the world, and someone like Ray Mendez would perhaps argue the opposite, that we\u2019re learning something or extracting something from the animals.<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> Well, in fact, he says at one point in the movie, \u201cIt\u2019s a form of self-knowledge,\u201d which sort of belies that characterization.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Okay. You don\u2019t think that that could be a two-way street?<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> What?<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> That we could learn something from the animals just as much as we might be imposing something on them.<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> Well, that\u2019s the question. Yes, I think it could be a two-way street, but the way it\u2019s expressed in the movie \u2014 there does seem to be an odd paradox in what he\u2019s saying. There is this interest in what he calls \u201cthe other\u201d, defined as that which has nothing whatsoever to do with ourselves and how we live, the mole-rat perhaps being the quintessential example. And then he says that it\u2019s self-knowledge, a learning about who we<\/i> are. Yeah, it\u2019s a mystery, I would say. It\u2019s a mystery about whether or not we\u2019re looking at the world or looking at ourselves, which I think is part of the entire movie. How does that sound?<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Oh, it sounds good.<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> Good.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> There seems to be a theme running throughout your documentaries, at least, anyway, that whole notion of self-knowledge, going back to, say, Gates of Heaven<\/a><\/i>, and in Vernon, Florida<\/a><\/i> there\u2019s the man who, the first time you see him, he says, \u201cHave you ever seen a man\u2019s brains?\u201d and he goes on from there, and there\u2019s an interesting moment in Thin Blue Line<\/a><\/i>, where most of the film is dealing with this murder investigation, or whatever you want to call it, but there\u2019s that interesting aside near the end, where we\u2019re not really dealing with the murder case any more, but where David Harris begins to explain \u2014<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> \u2014 his own behaviour.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Yeah. So this seems to be a recurring theme throughout your films.<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> And I really like you commenting on it for a whole number of reasons, because it seems to me that The Thin Blue Line<\/i> \u2014 take that example and the example of David Harris talking at the end of the movie. There\u2019s one mystery \u2014 there\u2019s the sort of obvious mystery, the whodunit, who killed police officer Robert Wood? was it Randall Adams or was it David Harris? \u2014 and that whodunit is resolved, for all intents and purposes, at the end of The Thin Blue Line<\/i>. It\u2019s David Harris, and not Randall Adams. But there are all of these lingering mysteries, which are not resolved, and really can\u2019t be resolved. Why did it happen? Why did they happen to meet on the road that day? Why did David Harris do what he did? Why wasn\u2019t it more obvious to all concerned at the time of the murder that he was the culprit? And on and on and on and on. The last line before the tape recording at the end of the movie, I think, is one of the most ironic lines I\u2019ve ever put on film, and people never comment on it.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Which is that?<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> This strange epiphany, where David Harris says, \u201cI came to realize I was only hurting myself.\u201d And whenever I hear the line, I think, \u201cNot quite, David. Others as well.\u201d This moment of self-knowledge seems to be a moment of self-deception.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Interesting. Do you think that\u2019s the case with any of the characters \u2014 listen to me, I said \u201ccharacters\u201d \u2014 any of the people in Fast, Cheap & Out of Control<\/i>?<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> Well, they are<\/i> characters and they are<\/i> people. I think that\u2019s one of the things that makes my films interesting.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> How do you mean they are \u201ccharacters\u201d?<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> I think they\u2019re characters because we feel them as part of a theatrical piece, as well as real people. And I don\u2019t think that the two are incompatible at all. I think that the two can certainly exist side-by-side.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Okay\u2026<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> But in answer to the question, I think it\u2019s the human condition. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s true of my characters any more than it\u2019s true of myself or anyone else, for that matter, that the world is a very difficult thing to see. At the very beginning of Vernon, Florida<\/i>, for example, Albert Bitterling, my Cartesian philosopher in the swamp, says, \u201cYou mean this is the real world? I never thought of that.\u201d<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Of course, one comparison that can be made is between the people in your film who study things \u2014 like mole rats and robots and whatever \u2014 and yourself. You, in the film, are studying them. Is making the film a form of self-knowledge for yourself?<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> I think it is. I think it\u2019s an attempt of discovering some aspect of the world, and I think it is, in part, an attempt to understand myself, understand who I am. I like to think that there\u2019s a lot of me in this movie \u2014 and all of my movies \u2014 this movie in particular, I think this is more a personal film than anything I\u2019ve done before.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Well, it certainly \u2014 the word \u201cinterference\u201d comes to mind, I don\u2019t mean that in a bad way, but you\u2019re not just recording people talk. You\u2019re, I think, arguably, more than with any of your other films, you\u2019re mixing in a lot of, say, experimental photography and stuff like that, and it\u2019s very much a work of art in that sense, it\u2019s not simply a document of people talking. Is that sort of what you mean when you say it\u2019s one of your more personal films?<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> I think that, too, but I think that \u2014 I feel the themes are maybe the themes that I feel most acutely in the movie. Y\u2019know, I\u2019ve talked about the movie so much it worries me, in truth, because part of me truly believes that movies should stand alone, and that I\u2019m engaged in a form of special pleading by, y\u2019know, serving this sort of exegetical function in terms of my own work. So I\u2019m confused about what to do with this movie. I mean, I certainly have talked about it a great deal, and I think about it a great deal. The movie seems to me very mysterious, the way these characters describe their worlds, or these worlds that they\u2019ve created for themselves, seems to leave really no place for any of them. It\u2019s one of the things that\u2019s sort of, I find, endlessly fascinating about the stories. Maybe it\u2019s just a happenstance of how these people were picked, or how they were edited, but I often think that, for both the lion tamer and the gardener, these are stories about worlds that are coming to an end \u2014 it\u2019s not just that their careers or their lives are coming to an end because they\u2019re older or they represent an older generation than either the mole rat guy or the robot scientist, it\u2019s that they see their worlds ending with them, and the younger guys, the younger generation, see worlds of the future of which we\u2019re not a part. I mean, it\u2019s most explicit, of course, in the robot scientist, who simply says that, if he\u2019s successful, there won\u2019t be a place for us in the future. I think that\u2019s fairly explicit. So you wonder, where are we supposed to go in all of this? It\u2019s like, I remember this scene in Once Upon a Time in the West<\/i> I\u2019ve always liked, where this guy is groveling in the dirt and Henry Fonda, the bad guy, is standing in this railroad car and looking down at him. Guns are drawn, and the guy says, \u201cHow am I going to live?\u201d The response is, of course, \u201cYou should learn to live as if you don\u2019t exist,\u201d and he shoots him.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Interesting. One question I was going to ask is, in A Brief History of Time<\/a><\/i>, the punchline in there, or one of Hawking\u2019s mottos anyway, is, once he\u2019s sort of explained the universe, is, \u201cWhat place, then, for a creator, or a God?\u201d And one thing \u2014 and I hope this doesn\u2019t seem like it\u2019s coming from too far out of left field \u2014 but one question that comes to mind, looking at some of the things in Fast, Cheap & Out of Control<\/i> is, y\u2019know, if humans are just more complex collections of feedback loops or whatever, what place then for the soul? is one question that comes to mind. Do you see a parallel there as well?<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> Well, the Hawking book also \u2014 It\u2019s interesting to me, you know, there\u2019s a series running on Public Broadcasting as we speak, which I happened to look at a couple of nights ago, because I met, during the making of A Brief History of Time<\/i>, a professor of theoretical physics at Harvard who I\u2019ve remained close friends with, Sidney Coleman<\/a>, and he asked me to watch part of this \u2014 I kept hoping he would appear in this, he\u2019d been filmed, but I didn\u2019t see him, at least in the installment that I saw \u2014 and looking at it reminded me of what I didn\u2019t want to make quite clearly. And it seemed based on this confusion about the book. I know this is a longwinded answer, but it does address the question. Stephen Hawking<\/a> would characterize his own book as the most widely sold and least widely read book since the Bible, which may or may not be true, but one thing is pretty clear. The book is perceived as some work of science pedagogy \u2014 this is Hawking\u2019s attempt to teach physics to the multitude \u2014 and I never saw the book that way. From my first reading of it, it always struck me as a romance novel: elements of personal biography, attempts to characterize his relationship to his science. If you read essays on 19th century poetry about the pathetic fallacy, well, A Brief History of Time<\/i> is the pathetic fallacy writ large: inanimate nature endowed with lifelike characteristics \u2014 birth, life, death \u2014 and it goes on and on and on. So what became deeply fascinating about the book was the world as dream, the connection of Hawking with his science and his work, not the science and the work itself per se. And so, when you ask me about lines in Brief History of Time<\/i>, for example, the line about \u201cfirst cause\u201d or \u201cwhat need for a creator\u201d, I think these lines all have some kind of deep resonance in terms of his own life. I mean, there was perhaps no need for a creator in Newtonian mechanics as well. It\u2019s wrestling with this idea of our place in the scheme of things. Even the last line of the book, it interested me that some professor in Maryland had taken me to task for being some New Age guy, and I think implicitly taking Hawking to task for being some New Age guy, for the last lines of the movie, which were the last lines of the book, talking about knowing the mind of God, where everyone<\/i> knows the mind of God! A time will come when not just specialists have this knowledge, but we all<\/i> will have this knowledge! And I hear these lines, and I think, literally speaking, of course they make no sense! I mean, what are we talking about here? A phalanx of garbage collectors, cleaning ladies, luncheon counter workers, all with books on quantum electrodynamics? It\u2019s a dream of somehow being one with the universe. I think it\u2019s a very complex dream. I think there\u2019s something very mysterious also in that book as well, which I tried in part to capture, because if Hawking isn\u2019t some kind of simple theist, nevertheless these questions about God run through the entire book. \u201cWhat place, then, for a creator?\u201d to me is \u2014 well, the creator is the Old Testament creator, in the sense of Genesis, of setting the world in motion. His theories, as he sees them, have no need for such a figure. And then, what does creation mean? What does life mean? What is the purpose of it all? It\u2019s not something that resolves all of these questions, I think it just examines them. I like the book, I like Stephen Hawking very, very much, by the way, and I remain in contact with him and I still<\/i> like him a lot. He\u2019s a funny guy, among other things. Is that a bad answer? You have to tell me if I\u2019m being responsive.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Well, it was good, but I was trying to draw a parallel between that and Fast, Cheap & Out of Control<\/i>, where I think Rodney Brooks talks about the danger of overanalyzing life \u2014 well, \u201cdanger\u201d is perhaps my word for it \u2014 he talks about how if you analyze life too much, it becomes meaningless.<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> Right, there\u2019s this feeling of despair lurking there, isn\u2019t there? Like, just all the automatons, and we all might in fact be \u2014 I mean, one of the reasons I like some of the shots in the circus is that that world does look robotic in nature, or the insect world looks robotic in nature, or the mole rat world looks robotic in nature, or even \u2014 this is not to denigrate the characters, because I think that all of these stories overlap and there\u2019s many different ways of seeing each one of them \u2014 but even if the world were meaningless in that sense, if we were all robots, then there\u2019s something deeply mysterious about each one of us in the process of trying to replicate and create life, as if there\u2019s some kind of progress into the future, as if that\u2019s our destiny. Our destiny is to be a kind of Doctor Frankenstein, collectively. But I like the speech very much, there\u2019s something horribly sad about it, it\u2019s that sense of loss of who we are, what I was talking about before about the future will not include us, and maybe, y\u2019know, who we are, even of ourselves, is an illusion. There\u2019s something so despairing and sad about it. \u201cI don\u2019t want<\/i> to reflect this way,\u201d he says, \u201cbecause it\u2019s like you can\u2019t live that way!\u201d It\u2019s almost like, you know, a speech about the need for illusion in order to \u2014 To me, it\u2019s like another image of one of my favorite lines in the movie, which comes from the lion tamer, when he says, \u201cOutside the cage is the cage. Inside is their world.\u201d Y\u2019know, inside is our world, in Rodney\u2019s musings, of mind and soul and intentionality, where outside the cage is maybe this kind of cruel reality of simple feedback loops.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Is that something yourself would espouse then, or would that be your position?<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> No, I don\u2019t look at these people as, sort of, this-guy-is-a-spokesperson-for-myself. What do I<\/i> think? I probably do incline somewhere in the direction of Rodney Brooks. I know that I was very depressed during the making of this movie. My mother and stepfather had died. I was very close to both of them, I love them both very deeply and still love them both, and I keep mentioning these Yeats poems in connection with this movie \u2014 I did at the end of my Q&A at the New York Film Festival \u2014 \u2018Lapis Lazuli<\/a>\u2019 in particular, and also \u2018Circus Animals Desertion<\/a>\u2019, and this woman came up to me after the screening and said she had read \u2018Lapis Lazuli\u2019 at her father\u2019s funeral. Now, there\u2019s something\u2013 I don\u2019t know if anyone ever asked Yeats to explicate his poem. I\u2019m certainly\u2013 I\u2019m having a discussion with a friend of mine; I went to see a Wiseman film on Friday at the Harvard archive, and there was a Q&A with Fred Wiseman afterwards, and someone was saying to me, \u201cThe director shouldn\u2019t be put in this position, where they have to answer questions about their work.\u201d And I thought, \u201cWell, there is<\/i> something interesting about it. They can\u2019t plead the Fifth, you don\u2019t have to Mirandize them before you ask them a question, you can just go at \u2019em and see what they come up with.\u201d But in \u2018Lapis Lazuli\u2019, there\u2019s something also\u2013 I like this mixture of a kind of despair, a feeling that the world is just some gigantic tapestry of people just going through the motions of life, that really has no inherent purpose or meaning, but there\u2019s somehow some enormous romance and dignity in it notwithstanding. There\u2019s something very odd about the world evoked in that poem, and maybe something about, sort of, the rhapsody of the human enterprise, and I can\u2019t quite put my finger on it. But I like Fast, Cheap<\/i> because I think it is a kind of mysterious movie. Even embodied in those last two images of the gardener, the one of him almost in heaven, clipping his camel, and in the other, of him in his garden in the rain and the fog.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Okay. Also, a couple of more minor questions. Things like the Interrotron, are you sitting in a different room altogether from the interviewee when you do those?<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> I could be, and I have been, on occasion. I wasn\u2019t in the filming of this movie, I was in the same studio with them, but I was not within eye contact with them, if only because of the fact that it creates this diversion. You don\u2019t want them looking at me, the person, you want them looking at the virtual me, the image on the mirror \u2014<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Because there is that one point where you hear your voice just before the end of the film. <\/p>\n EM:<\/b> Well that\u2019s just simply recorded separately.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Alright. Did you try getting Philip Glass to do the music for this one as well?<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> I did not want to use Philip Glass in this one. Not because I don\u2019t like Philip, I do<\/i> like Philip! I like him and I like his music, it\u2019s just that I wanted something different. <\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> You have made one fictional film [The Dark Wind<\/a><\/i>] \u2014<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> Yes.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> \u2014 and I hate to say, it\u2019s the one film of yours I haven\u2019t seen yet. I\u2019ve looked for it all over video stores in Vancouver here, and the specialty stores that are supposed to cover all the things you never find at normal stores don\u2019t seem to have it. Has it been released on video? <\/p>\n EM:<\/b> I believe it has been, but it\u2019s a movie that I was not involved in editing, which in and of itself is sort of strange for me, because I am very much involved in film editing. It\u2019s part of what I do. Although I don\u2019t take editorial credit in my movies, I\u2019m there in the editing room every day. It was a very weird experience. It\u2019s a good reason why people who are used to doing their own work shouldn\u2019t find themselves in a situation where they are totally out of control, quote-unquote, where my ability to actually create a movie is so circumscribed and so limited it\u2019s not clear why I was even hired to actually work on it, let alone be the director.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Would you ever want to make a fictional film again?<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> Yeah, I do, but I don\u2019t want to ever do it under those circumstances.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> This may be a silly question, given that you\u2019ve made five documentaries and only one fictional film, but do you prefer one or the other, or are there any advantages to a fictional film that \u2014 ?<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> I think there are<\/i> advantages to a fictional film, in some instances. I mean, there are some stories that need to be told that way, and other stories that need to be told using real people. I don\u2019t think I prefer one over the other. I really prefer working, as opposed to not working, and it\u2019s been easier for me to make movies that really cost somewhere in the vicinity of $1.5 million to $2.5 million, rather than movies that are nine or ten or eleven million dollars or more. But there\u2019s several fiction projects that I have which I would like to see get made in the near future.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Okay, I don\u2019t want to raise any \u2014 well \u2014 Entertainment Weekly<\/i>. Can I ask a question about that? <\/p>\n EM:<\/b> Sure.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Have you seen their review of it<\/a>?<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> I have.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Okay. What would your response be to Owen Gleiberman\u2019s description of the film? In particular, his remarks that it is \u201csmug\u201d, \u201ccallow\u201d, \u201csnide\u201d and \u201ccondescending\u201d \u2014 those sorts of adjectives?<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> Well, let me ask you, what do you<\/i> think?<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Well, a friend of mine and I came to the conclusion that he was very insecure. We didn\u2019t think that you were necessarily saying anything about those subjects yourself, about them being dehumanized, but the question was a more broad human question, and perhaps Owen didn\u2019t like that, was our guess. But I didn\u2019t agree with him.<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> I\u2019m puzzled by it. I\u2019ve heard remarks like this about Gates of Heaven<\/i>, it was absent altogether from The Thin Blue Line<\/i> and A Brief History of Time<\/i>.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Well, it reminded me of some criticisms I\u2019ve heard of Werner Herzog, whose films yours do resemble to some degree, that he exploits his subjects or \u2014<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Well, it wasn\u2019t just your movie that he responded to, he was responding to the critics who like your movie, too, which was \u2014<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> Yes! He attacked the people, not just me! Like, those assholes who have had the impertinence to actually like my work! Fuck \u2019em!<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Yeah, it was an unusually nasty approach to take \u2014<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> Yeah, I think somewhat vitriolic, would be a description. But, you know, he\u2019s entitled. He\u2019s a reviewer, he\u2019s entitled to his opinion. I just respectfully disagree. And I would cite this example \u2014 his example of Ray Mendez \u2014 and the underlying story, which is true! You know, there\u2019s this idea somehow that documentary filmmakers are supposed to be making commercials for humanity. It\u2019s like you\u2019re hired by some exclusive advertising agency to sell humanity to itself, that you should provide some kind of life-affirming, valetudinarian portrait of the world, and people can say, \u201cAh! How wonderful life is! What a finely wrought thing is man!\u201d Y\u2019know? To me, I guess my response to that idea would be, \u201cWhy!?\u201d<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> [laughs] Okay, that\u2019s an interesting way to look at it.<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> Y\u2019know, I\u2019m a filmmaker, a film worker<\/i>, not a creative director at some kind of advertising agency for, y\u2019know, mankind. It\u2019s started even annoying me about the whole sort of, like, documentary business, that we become confused somehow, that any movie about a good person has to be a good movie, y\u2019know? Mother Teresa \u2014 any documentary about Mother Teresa has to be a good documentary because, after all, Mother Teresa is a good person. And any documentary about a bad person would have to be bad by some similar argument.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> No, it could be a good documentary if it took an appropriate moral tone, don\u2019t you think?<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> Yes.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Okay. Oh, but you mean if you let the subject speak for themselves, or how do you mean it would be a bad movie?<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> Well yeah, I just worry about, certainly in connection with my current film.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> You mean the one you\u2019re working on right now?<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> Yes.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Oh, what is that.<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> I don\u2019t really want to talk about it, because I can\u2019t see how it does me any good at this point, and I\u2019d like to finish it first, and it\u2019s a complex movie, and I think it could be my best movie, and it sort of addresses a lot of these themes. [It turned out to be Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.<\/a><\/i> \u2014 a film which Gleiberman praised<\/a>, incidentally.]<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Okay. Is this going to be like Thin Blue Line<\/i>, where you get a guy off a murder rap, except he did<\/i> do the murder?<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> Well, The Thin Blue Line<\/i>, there\u2019s a lot of luck involved there. I mean, I don\u2019t think it\u2019s every day that you get to investigate a murder, get the killer to confess and get the fall guy out of jail. I mean, there\u2019s an element of luck, of the fortuitous, and I think it would be hubris to sort of try it again. Although, having said that, there is another story \u2014 not the one I\u2019m working on now \u2014 the one about Jeffrey MacDonald, the Green Beret doctor who was the subject of Fatal Vision<\/i>, that does deeply interest me. And yes, I think he might be innocent.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Another question that may just seem a little unusual. The magazine I\u2019m writing for, actually, is a Christian magazine \u2014<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> Uh-huh.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> \u2014 and one thing I\u2019ve noticed in your films is that a lot of them do have this sort of theological content, for lack of a better description, and I\u2019m just wondering if you yourself have any background or affiliation, anywhere at any time, with any sort of religious group or anything like that.<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> Well, I certainly am obsessed with religious questions, but I don\u2019t have any affiliation.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Any sort of religious upbringing?<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> I actually don\u2019t want to talk about it at the moment, if that\u2019s okay.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Oh, that\u2019s okay. Yeah, sure. Your last three films \u2014 well, not including the fictional film \u2014 your last three documentaries have all had scenes from, for lack of a better description, cheesy adventure movies.<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> Yeah.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> What role does that play for you, in your films?<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> Um, entering into, sort of, people\u2019s dreams, that are informed, in part, by cheesy adventure movies. Certainly in the case of Dave Hoover in Fast, Cheap<\/i>, it\u2019s informed by looking at Clyde Beatty when he was a kid in these cheesy adventure movies. Part of his dream, he says at the beginning, is being Clyde Beatty \u2014 not being a lion tamer, but being all that that name implied to him as a child, which was in part this creature that existed on celluloid, of wanting to be part dream, part real lion tamer.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Is there a cheesy movie, so to speak \u2014<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> \u2014 that I\u2019m in?<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Yeah.<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> Um, God, well I\u2019ve always loved film noir<\/i>, so maybe I see myself as some kind of film noir<\/i> character too.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> I know, for my part, there\u2019s two kinds of scenes in a movie that I always love. One is of somebody making a movie, the other is of people watching a movie, cuz for some reason a movie, no matter how bad it is, it gets easier to watch the instant they show the characters watching a movie. I don\u2019t know why that is, but \u2014<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> Well, because it allows you the sort of necessary distance from it, and you don\u2019t feel that you\u2019re trapped or engulfed by its cheesiness or its badness, but you sort of like look at it with a certain kind of ironic bemusement or ironic detachment.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Right. So, film noir<\/i>, you figure, but you don\u2019t have any particular film that you see yourself being in?<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> Well, I\u2019m thinking about it. Not off-hand. I should go back to my editing, if that\u2019s okay.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Yeah, this has probably gone on far, far longer than it should have. But thanks very much, though, for the interview.<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> Oh no, thank you for \u2014 thanks for calling.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Oh, okay, no problem.<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> Okay.<\/p>\n PTC:<\/b> Okay, bye.<\/p>\n EM:<\/b> Take care, bye.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Date: November 12, 1997 Place: Cambridge, MA (him) and Surrey, BC (me) I conducted this phone interview as part of my research for an article I wrote for Books & Culture. I have liked the films of Errol Morris ever since I saw The Thin Blue Line in 1989, and the film which occasioned this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,3532],"tags":[588,589,595,597,596,591,581,582,584,592,594,601,598,587,586,590,583,585,593],"class_list":["post-4933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","category-interviews","tag-albert-bitterling","tag-brief-history-of-time","tag-circus-animals-desertion","tag-clyde-beatty","tag-dark-wind","tag-dave-hoover","tag-errol-morris","tag-fast-cheap-out-of-control","tag-gates-of-heaven","tag-george-mendonca","tag-lapis-lazuli","tag-mr-death","tag-owen-gleiberman","tag-ray-mendez","tag-rodney-brooks","tag-stephen-hawking","tag-thin-blue-line","tag-vernon-florida","tag-william-butler-yeats"],"yoast_head":"\n<\/a>EM:<\/b> Well, Owen Gleiberman\u2019s specific example was the bow tie being worn by Ray Mendez, but Ray Mendez showed up wearing that tie. So then the question becomes, am I supposed to tell him to take the tie off? What am I, a filmmaker or a social worker? And why would I ask him to take the tie off? Ray Mendez is possessed of a sense of \u2014 and particularly, I\u2019m talking about him, and this is not true of all my characters \u2014 but he\u2019s possessed of a sense of irony and of the fact that he\u2019s funny, and he\u2019s a really, really funny guy, and intentionally so. Citing him as example\u2013 I mean, what\u2019s so funny about it, it makes it even more ridiculous, is there\u2019s only one time in all of my filmmaking that someone has refused to sign a release following filming, okay? And that was Ray Mendez. And the reason he refused to sign a release is that, years before, he had appeared in a documentary film where he felt that he had been horribly abused and ridiculed and taken advantage of, okay? And he refused to allow it to happen to him again, so he refused to sign a release until he saw the completed movie. Well, I did this interview with him, I liked the interview and I thought, \u201cWell, I\u2019ll take a chance.\u201d Not realizing how long it was going to take to make<\/i> the movie, how involved the process was going to be, how much I would have invested in it personally, financially, however, emotionally, however you want to describe it. When the movie was finished, I sent an Avid lay-off to Ray to look at it and to release. He loved the movie, and he signed the release and returned it immediately. So here\u2019s a person who was extremely sensitive to these issues, and yet he is cited as the one example of my debased filmmaking technique, so I think it\u2019s preposterous. That\u2019s what I think. And with all of those, I always wonder, \u201cWhat is he really saying? What is this about? Is it just that I-don\u2019t-like-your- movie? I-don\u2019t-like-you? I-didn\u2019t-respond-to-the-movie?\u201d<\/p>\n