Errol Morris: Writing the Documentary in Your Head
By Brad Schreiber

The average screenwriter has enough of a chore getting plot and characters on paper successfully. Errol Morris has a similar but even more daunting task: Conceive the idea, write it in your head as you assemble footage, then create a documentary that redefines the genre.

In fact, Morris, whose startling, iconoclastic vision has resulted in such esteemed, feature length docs as The Thin Blue Line, A Brief History of Time, and Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, has belatedly received his first Academy Award this year for The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara.

Complementing Morris on his unique approach to filmmaking will elicit a heartfelt “awwww,” and generous smile, but, indicative of the complexity of his work onscreen, the reply tends to be a miniature essay that shifts and deepens.

“There’s diary films, there’s verite, there’s narrative slide shows, there are essay films and on and on and on. Just like there are all kinds of narrative fiction films. And I’ve heard people say to me my documentaries aren’t really documentaries, although they are never altogether clear about what they are. I mean, for what it’s worth, someone once asked me, ‘Well, why do this sort of thing?’ My movies are costly, I’m very fortunate that I earn a living through commercials, and don’t have to earn a living through my films. I benefit from that enormously and it gives me a certain luxury to do what I want to do but I like the idea that it’s an experimental form of filmmaking, that every time I do it, I can redefine it, I can reexamine what I do, I can rethink the underlying assumptions and premises, I can try something heretical, perverse, different.”

In addition to the 23 hours he spent interviewing the former Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, Morris found massive amounts of archival footage and utilized newly declassified audio recordings of McNamara. Morris uses a camera he calls the Interrotron, which allowed McNamara to see Morris’s face even while looking directly into the camera lens. The result is the immediacy of a man in his 80s staring straight at us, simultaneously non-apologetic and yet insistent that we foolishly came to the brink of nuclear annihilation three times in the 1960s.

In a way, Morris has expanded the idea of a the documentary by including feature film techniques, including re-enactments and what might be described as “visual analogies.” In the case of The Fog of War, it is the sumptuously shot image of dominoes falling in slow motion across a colorful map of Southeast Asia. Along with these inserts, Morris returned to the use of the hypnotic, propulsive music of Phillip Glass, a composer he has described as personifying “existential dread.”

Like a screenwriter crafting an antagonist who shows signs of humanity, Morris reveals layers of McNamara. The former Defense secretary is a man who orchestrated the firebombing of 67 cities in Japan during World War II, oversaw a major portion of the Vietnam War, which claimed more than 58,000 American and 3.4 million Vietnamese lives and now, controversially acknowledges the futility of the latter and advocates nuclear non-proliferation. 

Morris, similar to the good writer who creates dimensionality in character, comprehends that the notion of pure evil, in either a historical figure or written character, is stereotypical, inherently limited and a dishonest depiction of human nature. Just as the title The Fog of War refers to the difficulty of making carefully considered decisions in battle, it also connects to Morris’s feelings about political decision-making in times of war. 

"This is not a world of Iagos," he says. "This is a world of bumbleheads, of people who think they know what they’re doing and don’t, people who misjudge situations, people who see things that don’t even exist because of ideological beliefs."

“For me, the meaning of the story,” Morris contends, referring to the lessons imparted in his Oscar-winning documentary, “is that when you have a predisposition to see something, you can ignore endless evidence to the contrary. And you can even imagine confirming evidence. That’s the worst of it. It was in service of this theme, believing is seeing, which as we all know has currency for our particular time in history, because regardless of whether this (occupation of Iraq) is a replay of Vietnam or something very different, there are identifiable themes here. And they relate to many of the things that McNamara is saying. Empathize with your enemy... It’s to try to put yourself, as he says, in their shoes.”

Morris, who first decided to do The Fog of War after reading McNamara’s deeply conflicted memoir In Retrospect, still feels that in a world of “reality TV,” film “mockumentaries” and the like, that definitions need to be established. “I think people are always confused about the difference between drama and documentary. They think its fiction and nonfiction. I would describe it differently. I would say its film that’s in control, film that’s out of control.”

While he admits to considering a couple feature films as director, Morris is unrestrained in his love for and expansion of the field of documentaries. And it is not only in his abilities as a filmmaker but his choice of subjects that he finds complex, idiosyncratic and fascinating people to rival the most well drawn of fictional characters. 

“I think what’s documentary-like about me... is my obsession with investigation, that many documentary filmmakers do not share. And my obsession with unconstrained monologue, of putting people in a place where they’re trying to tell you who they are and how they should be understood in their own words. I couldn’t even begin to script any of these movies. These movies have been cut and edited and directed by me but when Emily Miller, in The Thin Blue Line, the wacko platinum blonde eyewitness says, ‘Everywhere I go, there’s murders, even around my house,’ I could not come up with such a line. And that is documentary-like in the sense of it’s uncontrolled. It is out of control what people are going to say when put in front of the camera.”

Brad Schreiber is Vice President of Storytech Literary Consulting (www.thewritersjourney.com) and his latest book is What Are You Laughing At?: How to Write Funny Screenplays, Stories and More (www.brashcyber.com).

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