Dialog Box

Errol Morris: Revealing unexpected realities

A conversation with the advertising icon and legendary director

by Megan Cunningham

Within the entertainment industry, Errol Morris holds a chameleon position. To the commercial production world, he's established as a highly successful director, both innovative and intelligent. (He's one of the only, if not the only, director of TV commercials who has written an opinion-page article published in The New York Times.) Within talent and advertising agencies, he is known for his exceptional off-kilter vision, and honored in ways usually reserved for noncommercial artists. (In November 1999, his work received a full retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. In 2002, the organizers of the Academy Awards asked him to direct the short film that introduced the annual Oscars ceremony; it featured a series of real-life characters — some well-known, some everyday citizens — describing their passion for movies.) In a 2004 Adweek article honoring Morris's contributions as someone who “rises above the fray to create work that resonates and inspires,” Weiden and Kennedy producer Jesse Wann said Morris has a talent for “finding things in the moment. He's not a storyboarder. He has a certain unusual eye, and you see it in the stylized sequences of his films and his commercials.” In fact, his commercial work includes several of the best-known television campaigns: a venerated post-9/11 campaign for United Airlines; the famous Apple Computer “Switch” campaign; a corresponding testimonial-style campaign for MoveOn.org, featuring voters who voted for Bush in the prior election but planned to cast their votes for Kerry in 2004; an Emmy Award-winning commercial (“Photo Booth”) for PBS; Miller High Life's popular “anti-beer beer commercials,” and countless others for ESPN, American Express, and Intel.

Figure 1: Film critic Roger Ebert says, “After 20 years of reviewing films, I haven't found another filmmaker who intrigues me more. Errol Morris is like a magician, and as great a filmmaker as Hitchcock or Fellini.” Photo courtesy of Errol Morris.

But to the documentary world, Morris is firmly planted among the ranks of feature-length documentary makers. He makes the directorial shortlist of any nonfiction theatrical, television, or festival programmer. Morris tells me, “Last month I ran into a filmmaker in L.A. who said, 'I love your work.' I asked him which films he liked and he said, 'The ones you did for Miller High Life.' No one in the commercial world even knows I make documentaries, and vice versa!” That perception gap says more about both Morris's versatility and unusual productivity in two seemingly disparate arenas than it does about his stature in either. In fact, the balance between commercial spot and long-form documentary work provides what he sees as “cross-pollination” between the forms, one that contributes to his ongoing innovativeness in both arenas.

One example of how Morris has come up with original solutions to fundamental creative filmmaking problems — across all his productions — is found within a key narrative component: the standard interview. In films such as 1997's Fast, Cheap & Out of Control or 2003 Oscar winner The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, Morris has taken the uninspired talking-head interview and transformed it. To conduct his interviews, he invented a piece of equipment he calls the Interrotron, which is described by his company as “a modified TelePrompTer ... that allows Morris to project his image on a monitor placed directly over the camera's lens. Interviewees address Morris's image on the monitor while looking directly at the camera.” So, rather than looking off camera to converse directly with the interviewer and indirectly with the audience, the Interrotron allows both Morris (the interviewer) and the audience to make eye contact with his interview subjects. The resulting footage enhances the intensity of the interviewees' answers; the intimacy of many of these exchanges is unsurpassed. “It's the difference between faux first person and the true first person,” says Morris. “The Interrotron inaugurates the birth of true first-person cinema.”

To that end — the pursuit of lush, well-crafted, cinematic documentary — he has employed many original approaches to the form, including the creative use of historical audio recordings running behind both original live action and rare archival film footage. Furthermore, the visuals are brought to life with abstract close-ups, unusual cuts, and bold color-correction treatments. All of his films draw upon the best in fine art and film history, as Morris develops his story lines with extremely high production values, photography, and strong, hypnotic scores, many by Phillip Glass. In watching his films one comes away with a sense that this is a director who aims high — and is seeking something more: beyond the development of his own prolific body of work towards a larger ambition. Perhaps he hopes to supplant the low-budget reputation of documentary film — born out of photo and news journalism — with high culture panache, to raise the bar for the medium.

In content selection as well as in form, Morris pursues avenues of the weird and wonderful. He has been determined to follow the beat of his own drum from the very beginning, always seeking eccentric real-life characters. In 1978, he was inspired to direct his first nonfiction feature after discovering a headline in the San Francisco Chronicle: “450 Dead Pets To Go To Napa.” The resulting documentary, Gates of Heaven, follows the surreal startup story of two entrepreneurs — through the launch of two competing pet cemeteries — and makes for an entertaining, rich, and wry commentary on American culture and capitalism.

His second documentary, Vernon, Florida as originally conceived featured the residents of a Florida town who made their income by undergoing radical self-mutilation and filing for compensation through an insurance fraud scam. In discussing the film, Morris observes, “They literally became a fraction of themselves to become whole financially.” Outside of these residents's highly bizarre mind-set, the most unusual aspect of Morris's filmmaking is his careful narrative tone: accepting of the truly peculiar events he records, while simultaneously commenting on them. Regardless of his caution, some subjects prove too provocative and sensitive for exposure. According to Morris's production company, the insurance fraud film had to be reimagined when “his subjects threatened to murder him. Forced to come up with a new concept, he created Vernon, Florida, about the unconventional residents of a Southern swamp town.” Even with its less litigious focus, Vernon, Florida — like all of Morris's films — features unforgettable characters. In Gates of Heaven, one elderly woman has taught her poodle to sing. Viewing this scene, one cannot help but become transfixed: As they sit in her kitchen, after parroting her voice, the poodle joins the woman to perform a duet. To watch a Morris documentary is to enter a dreamlike reality.

The Thin Blue Line

The Thin Blue Line, released in 1988, took up the case of Randall Adams, who was wrongly convicted for murder in Dallas County, Texas. The film, and Morris's investigation of the case, is credited with Adams's conviction being overturned.

In The Thin Blue Line you combined traditional interviews with Philip Glass's mesmerizing score, and then used 35mm film and commercial cinematography to illustrate and reillustrate the different characters's contradictory versions of what happened the night of the murder. It's a very controlled approach to the documentary form. Many of your visual techniques — such as the theatrical reenactment — which are used frequently in nonfiction television today, were first conceived of in this film. What was the reaction when it first came out?
When The Thin Blue Line came out, the use of reenactments was considered heretical. The movie was endlessly criticized, and then endlessly imitated! People see it today and they say, “Well, what is so unusual about this? I see this everywhere.” Well, yes, it is everywhere, but it wasn't everywhere when The Thin Blue Line was made!

Did you have a clear vision of the final film before you started? Was using Glass's music, and stylish reenactments to illustrate the flaws in the eyewitness testimony, part of your initial concept?
No. The Thin Blue Line is a perfect example of a movie that found itself as it was being put together. It was started with an entirely different project in mind. I knew nothing about Randall Adams, nothing about David Harris. In fact, no one knew anything about Randall Adams or David Harris. For all intents and purpose, this was a closed case. It had been solved to almost everybody's satisfaction. Randall Adams had been tried and convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of Dallas police officer Robert Wood. And that was that. There were a few scattered people who felt that there had been a miscarriage of justice, but they were very few and far between. I stumbled on the case purely by accident.

How did you meet Randall Adams?
I was planning to make a movie about a Dallas psychiatrist, and had started the movie. And at the suggestion of Dr. James Grigson [featured in the original concept for the film] I went and interviewed over a dozen people that he had helped put on death row. Randall Adams was one of them. And the intention, of course, was not to uncover miscarriages of justice; the intention was just to interview, as Dr. Grigson described them, “cold-blooded killers” who are, quote unquote, “different than you me.”

You weren't looking to tell Adams's story—a failure of the justice system.
No. To illustrate some of the things that Grigson was saying, I met Randall Adams again. I picked a dozen or so names, but the choice of those names was random. It could have been another dozen or so. Grigson had been responsible for putting 30, 40, 50 people on death row. So I read about the other stories as well, but as I read about Adams's story I slowly but surely became convinced that there had been a terrible miscarriage of justice. And then the movie changed. It was no longer a movie of Dr. Grigson. It was a movie about Randall Adams. It was The Thin Blue Line.

Figure 2: Images from The Thin Blue Line. Photos courtesy of Miramax Films.

After you stopped filming your original concept about Dr. Grigson, and decided to start from scratch and focus on Randall Adams, how long did the filmmaking process take?
Well, when I met Adams, that was the beginning of over a year and a half, close to two years, of tracking people down, interviewing them, of doing research. I've pointed out many times, I believe this is true. You don't always know about the claims you make on behalf of yourself.

Aside from the stylistic innovation, what makes The Thin Blue Line a film that so many filmmakers refer to for inspiration?
Well, The Thin Blue Line is unusual. It may even be unique. It's not telling the story about a murder case, it's not about an investigation. It is an investigation! The investigation was done, in part, with a camera — culminating with David Harris's confession to me. It was on tape — following the malfunctioning of my camera in my interview with him — the tape on which he essentially confesses to the murder!

I read all the time that The Thin Blue Line is the movie that got an innocent man out of prison, saved an innocent man from death row. But what's forgotten is that it's the movie and the investigation that did it. You were a filmmaker, and a detective. How did your approach allow that to happen?
The material I uncovered in the interviews was investigative in nature. Interviews often take the form of a set of questions that people ask, and they already know the answers that they're looking for. They are not investigative. And I try very, very hard to make the interviews that I do something other than about the things that I want to hear, or expect to hear, or think I'm going to hear. I try to be at least open to the possibility that something unexpected is going to happen. And that was certainly true in The Thin Blue Line. It's an investigation I'm very, very proud of. I'm proud of the movie, I'm even prouder of the investigation.

You said earlier that you started to discover “slowly but surely” when you were talking to Adams and Harris that there had been a miscarriage of justice. What tipped you off that perhaps the wrong man was in prison?
Randall Adams, of course, told me he was innocent, but, of course, I didn't believe him. The first red flag was when I went to Austin. By statute every capital murder trial in Texas is appealed to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. You can go to that court, and in the basement they have the transcripts of every capital murder trial. You can sit there, and you can read. And I was reading. I could see the frame but I couldn't see the picture, and that was true of the transcript. There was some thing wrong with that story.

Why did you sense the story was wrong?
It all centered on David Harris, on the star prosecution witness who claimed to be in the passenger's seat of the car, and to have observed at close range Randall Adams's murder of Robert Wood. There was just something wrong with it. Then I started to uncover more and more material about David Harris. And as more and more stuff accumulated, it became clear that I was dealing with a guy with an incredible history of violence—particularly to authority figures. He had tried to kill his commanding officer in the army. He had tried to kill another police officer in California. He had been on a crime spree the week that the Dallas police officer was killed, even though he was 16 years old. Then, of course, I met David Harris and started following him around. And he had just been paroled from prison. He had been in prison in California; he'd just been paroled to his parents in Vidor, Texas. And we met, and we continued to meet. Then I was scheduled to film him, and he didn't show up for his appointment to be filmed! He had disappeared, and within the week he turned up in Jefferson County Jail in Beaumont, Texas, indicted for the murder of Mark Walter Mays, and was subsequently convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death. He was actually executed earlier this year.

How was your investigation conducted? Was this a team of people you were working with? Or was it you in your apartment, going through files?
It was principally me, interviewing people, going through files, doing research of one kind or another.

Each night, you're weighing the evidence of your suspects?
Yes. When the material accumulated, I [was considering the likelihood of] two stories going on at once. One is a story about inculpatory evidence and another is a story about exculpatory evidence. You're looking at two things, if you like, at the same time. You're looking for evidence that shows you that Randall Adams did it, or that David Harris did it, and you're looking for evidence that Adams didn't do it, or David Harris didn't do it. And as I went through the case, slowly but surely, the mountain of evidence connecting David Harris with the murder grew and grew and grew, and the evidence connecting Randall Adams with the murder just continued to shrink. Until there was scarcely any left.

Tell me about the impact The Thin Blue Line had on the case, and the aftermath once the film was released.
Well, it had impact in one very definite sense: Material from the film — actually several interviews from the film — were submitted as evidence in federal and state court. Material in those interviews actually showed that the major witnesses against Randall Adams committed perjury, one by one by one. So eventually the conviction was overturned, and Adams walked. And [later] I would hear stories about how the Dallas district attorney's office was going to retry him for the murder, but of course that was just, in my view, idle boasting, because they had no case. The case was gone. There's no way to retry him because the case that they had made had evaporated.

During a lengthy filmmaking investigation like this, where does your point of view factor into the storytelling?
Ultimately, it's my point of view, that's part of the movie. I mean, these are all movies made by me in some capacity. I'm not sure exactly what you mean by “point of view.”

In The Thin Blue Line, and in many of your films, you are filming multiple points of view. But in the end you need to make a decision on how you present each of them to the audience. How do you make those difficult editorial choices?
In The Thin Blue Line there were people who thought they knew what happened, and thought they saw what happened. But did not know what happened, and probably did not see much of anything! Or, at the very least, were mistaken about what they saw. So the visuals are ironic in a very dramatic sense. They're illustrations of untruths. They're not dramatic reenactments of reality. They're dramatic reenactments of unreality. And you could say accurately that part of my point of view is to show how easily we can be deceived by visual images and by appearances. Part of it is that I'm telling a visual story, and telling you that the visual story is undermining itself at the same time. And it's one of the things that makes The Thin Blue Line a really interesting film for me.

You say it was “endlessly criticized, and then endlessly imitated.” Where?
I've been accused of having created reality television with that movie. And to have spawned a whole series of reality shows based on reenactment. What's interesting is, in The Thin Blue Line the reenactments are never purported to show you what really happened. They weren't a way of illustrating reality. They were telling you something quite different: that reality often is ineluctable. That it's very hard to grab a hold of. In this particular instance, filmmaking was used not in that standard documentary sense of someone running around with a handheld camera trying to observe a set of events, it was used as an investigative tool, if you like. All of those tools are in service of trying to figure out what is real or, if you prefer, what really happened. Whether it's interviews, or reenactments that bring you deeper into the mystery of what happened, or graphics that stress certain aspects of the story, which to me were important. Whether it's the movie times — times that the movies [Adams was watching at the time of the murder] ran at the 183 Drive In — or the strange mystery of Randall Adams, whose incomplete so-called confession was no confession at all. It's designed to take you into the story in a powerful and dramatic way.

A retrot to cinema verité

When you say “someone running around with a handheld camera,” you seem to have contempt for that school of filmmaking. Is the cinema verité approach something that you are reacting to, aesthetically?
That film [The Thin Blue Line] is a reminder — and I like it as such — it's a reminder that the claims of cinema verité are spurious.

Why?
It shows that style does not guarantee truth. The use of available light and a handheld camera does not mean that what you are doing is any more truthful than anything else. Truth is a pursuit, it's a quest. And proof is certainly in the pudding in this particular instance, because the film, and the evidence accumulated in making the film, led to this man's release from prison. And that's hardly ever happened, if it's happened at all, in any other film that I can think of.

Were you responding to the verité approach with Gates of Heaven as well?
Yes. Gates of Heaven was very much a reaction to verité. In fact, we used to joke while we were making it that we'll take all the principles of verité and stand them on their head. Instead of a handheld camera, I'll make sure the camera's always on a tripod! And instead of observing people, and being as unobtrusive as possible, I'll have people talk directly to the camera, I'll have them look directly at the camera, and be as obtrusive as possible! Instead of lightweight equipment I'll use heavy equipment! Instead of not staging anything, I'll stage everything!

I assume you're going to throw out sync sound, too?
No, there's still sync sound there. It's also what the people say, the language that they use. They use real language. It's not been scripted by me. That's the documentary element. And it shows, I think, in one very powerful way that you can tell a documentary story completely differently than in the verité idea, and produce some very, very interesting and powerful real stuff in the process.

Why did you feel the need to create a new aesthetic that was purposefully responding to the principles or claims of verité?
The claim annoys me. The claim seems to me clearly false. Self-evidently false. Style is not truth. Just because you pick a certain style does not mean that you somehow have solved the Cartesian riddle of what's out there, that you no longer have to think about anything. You just adopt a methodology. It's almost like thinking that because The New York Times uses a certain font, that guarantees the truthfulness of every sentence written in the newspaper. That's total nonsense.

The Fog of War

What about your approach makes your films innovative?
I suppose I like to think of what I do as an essay on the idea of nonfiction.

How so?
I think of my most recent film, The Fog of War. I was at a press conference at the New York Film Festival and a journalist asked, “Are you aware you only interviewed one person?” And I said, “Yes, I am.” It was a stylistic choice! Of course, one could easily imagine a film about Robert McNamara that took on a completely different character than The Fog of War. A documentary where you would have had an array of experts, or people who had been connected with McNamara in one way or another all commenting on the man ... as well as hearing from McNamara himself. And, of course, I did none of that. I specifically chose to do none of that. I mean, there's a reason for it, but the minute you decide to do something that is different you put yourself in peril.

What do you mean by that — what kind of peril do you put yourself in?
It may be very difficult to put together.

Figure 3: Errol Morris, shooting the award-winning film The Fog of War.

Figure 4: Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. “There's a question of whether he's a good man or a bad man, which is a question that obsesses him,” says Morris. Photos courtesy of The McNamara Project Inc.

Why then do you choose such an unusual approach to your subject matter? I suppose breaking the rules of something — that interests me, just for its own sake, breaking certain kinds of narrative.

Beyond your choice of exclusively interviewing McNamara, what rules did you break in The Fog of War?
If I look at The Fog of War and things that I'm most proud about in the movie, I love the falling numbers over Japan, the whole sequence of the firebombing of Japan. And McNamara is telling you a very, very, very powerful story, a very important story. But I like to think that it's been communicated visually. The voice-over, the visuals combine in a way that a story is told. History can easily become overburdened by details. And so, in telling history, you have to chart a course through a morass of material. You have to tell a story, and you have to communi-cate the story powerfully.

Figure 5: In this creative graphic sequence from The Fog of War, numbers fall from the sky illustrating the firebombing of Japan. Photos courtesy of The McNamara Project Inc.

You've chosen an innovative style, but there's also a lot of new information about the war and McNamara's choices that come out during the film. What most surprised you during the making of it?
I know, myself, when I started work on The Fog of War, I was not aware of the extent of the devastation of Japan by Allied bombing — 67 cities. I'd heard of the firebombing of Tokyo, but did I know this continued week after week after week, and that Japan was virtually leveled even before we dropped the two atomic weapons? This was something that was new information, new history, and I wanted to find a way to powerfully present it in the movie, and I hope I succeeded.

Can you explain why Robert McNamara was so important to you? Why did he need to be the predominant character for you to tell that story?
He's important to an entire generation of people! In my generation, the generation that came of age during the Vietnam War, McNamara was a central figure; a reviled figure for many, many, many, many people. And when I started reading about him again, in the 1990s, he had just published his book In Retrospect in '95, and then two subsequent to that, it brought up all of these old memories, if you like, of the '60s. But it also made me realize that this man has been powerfully part of history. If you were trying to make a movie about the 20th century in some oddball fashion, but still nevertheless trying to grab a hold of the 20th century, you could do no better than to create a profile of this man.

When did you meet him?
The day we started filming. He came up for an interview, and I met him, and we started the interview. So it happened all at once — actually, before 9/11. It was in 2001 that I first met him.

Was he aware of the concept of how you planned to approach this? Was there persuasion involved?
Of course there was persuasion involved. It was not even clear that he would ever come back, or that he would — if he came back, as he did many times — whether he would continue to cooperate with the film, whether he was interested in the film.

His cooperation was a fortunate surprise for you.
Yes, I'm amazed he actually went through it, and I'm even more amazed that we're still on speaking terms.

Why do you think that is?
Because I believe the movie was fair to him. Maybe it didn't describe him, in every way, the way he wanted to be described. But the movie was not unfair, and he realizes that.

It may be a fair portrayal, but he is not always portrayed in a positive light. So even now, after he's seen the film, you maintain a positive relationship with him?
Well, I would not call Robert McNamara a pushover, by any stretch of the imagination. He has been a difficult customer all along the way. But we've always been on talking terms, on cordial terms. By the very nature that it does involve one man, I saw the movie as a collaboration. Not that I allowed him to completely push me around, but that somehow I was trying not to create a brief against him for some imagined war crimes tribunal, but I was trying to uncover how he saw the world. I was trying to uncover the complexities of his personality. I was trying to understand him. And I believe the movie does create a very complex portrait of a man, a very interesting one. And in that respect, I think it's a successful movie, and he himself knows that.

Can you explain the dynamics of that complexity? What interested you particularly about how he saw the world?
Well, there's a question of whether he's a good man or a bad man, which is a question that obsesses him. And probably obsesses most of the people who write about him, if they're not already convinced that he's bad. And seeing him as a human being, seeing him as a complex human being, to many people is very surprising.

A narrative free fall: Fast, Cheap & Out of Control

Was Fast, Cheap & Out of Control the first film on which you used the Interrotron?
Yes.

Are you trying to enhance the live experience of connecting with the person you're interviewing? Or is it more about the end result for the audience, connecting them to the subject that you're interviewing?
Clearly it's the latter, because you can be sitting in a room with me and look into my eyes, and vice versa, but the process of filming it is what makes it complicated. Are you off to the side observing a conversation, or is the camera part of the conversation? And with the Interrotron it actually becomes part of the conversation.

Why is eye contact so important to you?
When the person I'm talking to looks directly at me they are looking at each member of the audience watching the film.

Figure 6: Fast, Cheap & Out of Control interweaves conversations with a topiary gardener, a robot designer, a lion tamer, and an expert on naked mole rats in a funny and provocative meditation on creativity and obsession.
Photo courtesy of Fourth Floor Productions.

Why did you want to make Fast, Cheap & Out of Control?
Well, first of all I liked the idea that you could take four stories, seemingly unrelated stories, and weave them together into one narrative. And I liked the movie having a dreamlike quality. Most documentaries — not all of them, certainly, but most of them — are about some external reality. I suppose the very term documentary makes you think that is what documentary should be about, providing a description of an exterior world, a public world, a world that's available to all of us. But I don't think it has to be the case. Quite clearly, I don't think it has to be the case. But part of what documentary can be is subjective, an attempt to explore how people see the world, their own mental landscape, their own private way of seeing themselves and the world around them.

And conducting interviews with eccentric characters was the best way for you to explore their mental landscape?
I am a great believer that people, through how they speak, how they use language, reveal an enormous amount about who they are.

What was revealing about the characters in Fast, Cheap & Out of Control? How did you decide to cast that film? How did you meet them?
I called them on the phone. [Robot designer] Rodney Brooks lives right around the corner from me. I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts; he teaches at MIT. The gardener was just south of Boston, in Rhode Island. The lion tamer I had filmed years ago for the first time in connection with the film I wanted to make about Dr. James Grigson on violence. And I thought the lion tamer was an interesting way of looking at that phenomenon, the prediction of violence, or the control of violence. So I guess the last was the mole rat guy, Ray Mendez. I read about him in The New York Times. I first read about the mole rats and then I talked to a number of scientists, who didn't really inspire me very much one way or the other. And I finally stumbled on Ray Mendez, who at that time was living in New York City. And I went and met him, and I liked him. And so there you go!

What were the obvious connections, for you, between these characters? I can imagine another filmmaker saying, these are four fascinating characters and I'm going to make four separate, short films about them. But did you conceive of this as an integrated story from the beginning?
Yes. From the very, very beginning I was going to call it — because I liked the title of Rodney's paper Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. That was going to be the name of the film. And it was always imagined that it was going to involve these four stories woven together. In practice that proved extremely difficult to pull off.

In the editing?
Yes. Someone once asked me about the editorial strategy in that movie, and it took literally years to edit and, at one point I gave up on it, completely, because I just could not edit it!

After years of struggling with it, can you describe the final structuring principle that allowed you to finish the film?
The principal was that there's a preamble, where you're really told that the movie is going to be crazy, and that it's going to mix really diverse things, just so you know what you're getting into at the outset. And then the four characters were laid out so you know, at least, you have orientation. It's like a primer on the four characters. There's Character A, Character B, Character C, Character D. And then you bring the characters back, you shuffle the order, you keep shuffling the order, and then you start blending the stories. So that, for example, the narration of one character goes with the visuals of another. And then, two-thirds of the way through the movie, I like to think that you're in some kind of free fall; you're in some kind of strange land where it's a mixture of everything. So it's a narrative free fall for the viewers, hopefully.

You shot it and used material that was shot on many different formats?
There was video, there was Super 8, there was 16mm, there was Super 16mm, there was 35mm. It was reprocessed 35, as I described it, where we would film material off of television sets and then that was edited into the movie.

Can you describe how you went about blending the four characters' stories? Was there someone who was thematically categorizing these moments as you went along, putting these into bins? How was that managed, logistically?
It's a movie that could not have been made without an Avid, I can tell you that much. It was the first movie that I made with an Avid. There was media all over the place.

Given that you had media coming from so many diverse sources, the Avid nonlinear editing system made it possible to even to consider editing it. But there are a lot of elements in it: Karen Schmeer's editing, Bob Richardson's photography, Caleb Sampson's music. Were those collaborations taking place during the editing phase? In other words, were you making requests from the edit room? Were you asking, now we need this kind of shot?
No. You shoot a film and then you edit it. I mean, this thing was shot in the course of ten days, and then it was years and years and years putting it together.

Music is a powerful element in that film. Was the score something that you started working on during postproduction, or did you have a preconceived idea?
No, that started very late. I went through all kinds of attempts to make music work with it, and it was Caleb Sampson who really solved the problem. He created a really magnificent score for the movie.

Talk to me about the music in your films, more generally. How do you see music as a driving component of your rule-breaking narrative style?
It's essential. Properly considered, it's part of the narrative. It is an essential part of the narrative in every single film where I've used music extensively, which is every film after Gates of Heaven and Vernon, Florida. Music was totally essential in The Fog of War, essential in The Thin Blue Line — really essential in everything.

Why is music essential to your style?
Because it's yet another way of taking you outside of the real world and into some kind of dreamscape.

Innovative editing: An organic process

Do you get very involved in the editing process?
Of course I do! I believe, in general, that directors who don't edit really aren't directors at all.

Tell me about Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. I know that you wanted to draw connections between four different people with very unusual occupations: But the result was a juxtaposition of their perceptions and philosophies interwoven with musical portraits of their work. Perhaps you can tell me about how the editing process took place.
Well, Fast, Cheap & Out of Control was almost an editorial nightmare. I don't know if there's any movie quite like it. Although I know people have tried to imitate it subsequent to its release. But there are reasons why there are very few movies of that sort. They're impossible, impossible to edit. Juggling four stories at the same time and trying to make something that works for an audience.

You're considering the audience constantly while you're editing.
Yes. Because, of course, the presumption with every single film that I've made is that it's going to be in theaters. And, given that fact, it's essential that it works for people who are actually paying money to see it, actually going to see it in a theater. So it took me years to edit that film. And, as I said, I gave up on it at one point. I thought it was uneditable.

Why was that?
I think that the editorial process, at least in my films, becomes difficult, because I've been trying to reinvent at least some aspect of what I do in every film I've made. And so it's not really clear what kind of principal to use. Gates of Heaven was incredibly difficult to edit. And a whole number of very experienced editors looked at the footage and said, “I have no idea what to do with this. It's not clear to me that this is even editable.”

Can you explain why that was their reaction?
Because there is really nothing quite like it. There's no model to fall back on. There's no other film that I know of that looks like Gates of Heaven, or operates like Gates of Heaven.

Can you be more specific? An editor who has experience cutting documentaries, who has seen a whole variety of interviews and archival material, who has worked with a wide variety of directors, with different ideas and approaches, why did your material leave such editors so confused? What's so innovative about your material that they didn't know what to do with it?
You said it in your question. If the process is not straight ahead, if it's not easy to identify, if it's something you're actually uncovering in editing, if it's emergent — if you like — in the editing, then it's a much, much more difficult thing to grab a hold of. You're actually creating something new!

But you seem to prefer an organic process, rather than structuring your ideas ahead of time.
I'm very suspicious of documentaries that you can describe with a topic sentence. I think that almost everything that I've done has been avoidance of that sort of thing. There are not movies that are “about x.” Defined and circumscribed. And I think that in itself makes it very, very different.

Also, there are various techniques that people use to put together nonfiction. Whether it's narration of one form or another, and particularly voice-over narration, or various people commenting back and forth, a kind of attempted balance where people quite specifically give you two sides of the question, or provide perspective on an issue. These are all very, very familiar in documentary films. And to a very large extent I've avoided all of that in my films.

Why have you avoided traditional techniques?
Doesn't interest me. It's not so complicated. One of the things that's interesting about documentary is that you have an opportunity to create something, not just in terms of content but that's also stylistically, very different. And not just different from feature films, but different from other documentaries as well. It's the opportunity of doing something that is innovative. And I have played around in different ways with what it means to make documentaries.

Stylized commerical spots

In between your long-form documentary work, you've directed a lot of commercials. Commercials are very important to you.
I imagine I've directed well over a thousand commercials, but I have done a substantial number of commercials for Apple. I did their whole “Switch” campaign of real people. I did an enormous amount of work for CitiBank. I still do work for CitiBank. Oh, it's a long laundry list of various clients. Quaker Oats, United Airlines, Volkswagen, Cisco, IBM, American Express.

Can you tell me what commercials mean to you? Is it simply an employment exercise? Or do you see them as creative short films?
All of the above. I mean, they're not exactly what you would call “short films.” Because the standard length of a commercial is exactly 30 seconds. I mean, there are 15s, there are 20s, and there are 60s and 90s, but for all intents and purposes the art form, such as it is, is creating a story in 30 seconds. And it is enormously difficult. Anybody who's ever worked in this business knows it. And it is tricky, because obviously you have an impossibly short amount of time in which to express something, and to express it powerfully and express it, hopefully, well.

But part of the attraction is the income.
Yes, it's a way of earning a living. Absolutely. But I've never been able to look at it solely that way. Maybe that's an occupational hazard, or it's a hazard of being me, is that I eagerly get invested in what I'm doing, and I try to do a really good job. I try to take it seriously. I try to make them as good as I possibly can. And I do look at them — I should slap myself for even thinking this way, slap myself silly: I really try to make little films that work. And I'm very proud of my advertising. I put them on my web site, there are so many of them.

Do you approach a commercial as a 30-second documentary?
No. I believe there are elements in common, but commercial work is very different from anything else. It's very different from my documentaries, per se, and from feature filmmaking. I mean, one of the oddities about my career in advertising is that I work with actors all the time.

Is that difficult for you?
No, but you would think that because of my documentary work I would be dealing predominantly with real people. Well, for years and years and years I just worked with actors, and then it was discovered I actually could interview people [for commercials as well]. This was very recent, in fact. Something quite ironic.

Stylish “Switch” campaigns

Why did you start to work with real people in your commercial work?
Because I did this huge campaign for United Airlines following 9/11. We were at O'Hare preparing to shoot a very traditional commercial, and President Bush came on television and announced the invasion of Afghanistan.

They closed O'Hare, we lost all of our locations, we were going to be sent home, and I suggested, “Look, this is a historical moment. United Airlines is one of the two airlines directly connected with 9/11. It was several of their planes that were hijacked. People who work for the airlines are going to have very, very strong feelings about what happened. It's a moment that deserves to be preserved, to be recorded.” And I convinced them to go into a studio, and I interviewed captains and copilots, customer service representatives, flight attendants, rampers, you name it. I interviewed many, many, many employees of the airline. And it was very, very strong material.

How did you gain access to those people in a moment where everybody was obviously frozen?
I gained access because I was working essentially for the corporate client itself, and it became a priority to find people, to bring them in, and to put them on film. Our casting people handled it.

The filming happened that week?
It happened very, very quickly. We had already cast a lot of people, real people, but they were going to be reciting written copy. They were going to be given lines that they were going to speak, and that really got thrown out and we went to people just simply being interviewed, with the Interrotron, in a studio. And it was unusually powerful advertising, but it was real.

The United Airlines campaign led you to secure other commercial work?
Yes. The producer of the Academy Awards in 2002 was Laura Ziskin. And Laura Ziskin saw the United Airlines spots and hired me to do that movie that opens the Academy Awards. And that's also on my web site. It has, among other people, Gorbachev, Laura Bush, Iggy Pop, Walter Cronkite.

Steve Jobs, who was in the audience that year at the Academy Awards, saw my film. He liked the white background, he liked the style, and said, “Let's get that guy.” And that was why I was hired by Apple. It's as simple as that. And away we went, and filmed hundreds of people for Apple. Not all of them got on the air, but there were a lot of really, really great ones.

Do you have a favorite?
I probably do have a favorite, and it's probably the one I did with my son, Hamilton. And it's one that Steve Jobs really, really liked without even knowing that it was my son, and it ran nationally, and there were 10-foot-high moving pictures of my son in the front of various Apple stores.

What appeals to you about that one?
Well, because I did a good job, with someone who I love. And he really comes across well. He's funny, he's charming. And it's just a damn good commercial. I have to agree with Mr. Jobs here, it's a good commercial even independent of the fact that he's a close personal relative!

The United Airlines campaign led to the Academy Awards film which led to the Apple “Switch” commercials. Did those help to reestablish your commercial reputation as someone who directs real people as well as actors?
Now, I do all kinds of things, from real people, to actors looking like real people, to real people looking like actors — and every permutation and combination in between. Cross-pollination would be the best way to describe it. A lot of the techniques I've learned in commercials I've applied to my documentary filmmaking and vice versa.

Can you give me an example of that cross-pollination? How do your documentary methods inform your spot work, and vice versa?
Well, the Interrotron is the clearest example in commercials, because I now use it quite often. Whenever you're asking real people to express themselves and to speak at length—regardless of how much material you use in the end, you want a stream-of-consciousness narration — Interrotron is always the best device for that sort of thing. So I try to avoid doing too many spots, too many commercials, that depend on the Interrotron. I like to use it less, rather than more. But people are now aware of it in the commercial business so, yes, I'm called upon to use it. I used it most recently with B.B. King. He advertises a diabetes-measuring device. Of course, the most recent example of the Interrotron is this campaign that was done for the Democrats last summer. And there are about 50-plus spots that were shot for MoveOn.org.

It was the Democrats' own “Switch” campaign, of sorts.
Correct. People wrote, “Well, he's just imitating the Apple 'Switch' campaign.” And then someone wrote in and said, “Well, he did the Apple 'Switch' campaign.” And then someone else said, “And the Apple 'Switch' campaign was imitating the Academy Awards film, which he did previously,” which is, in fact, the case. By and large — not that there aren't lots of historical antecedents to what I do — but it's been a lot of imitating myself.

Do you have a standard process for approaching commercial work?
I'm not sure what you mean.

When you get a call like that, from Apple's agency, is it something where you start thinking, “OK, who have I met recently that would be right for this?” Or, “We should start casting sessions.” Do you storyboard your spots? Do you start scripting? What is your reaction to a new, interested prospective client?
To me, whether it's a feature-length film or it's a 30-second commercial, you are trying to create a kind of mental landscape, a fantasy world, a collection of ideas. And advertising in this respect is no different than much longer films. I try to think about it in terms of the brand, what people are trying to say, what needs to be communicated. I think about it conceptually. I like to think that one of the things I do well is, I find ways of visually presenting information that are striking. That I'm able to take a complex idea and express it in visual form in a way that is elegant, simple, and powerful. It's hard talking about yourself this way, but I do think it's one of the things I'm good at.