Another long-ass profile we read this weekend (around 17 pages online), was another warts-and-all GQ article on the great documentarian Errol Morris (the upcoming Abu-Ghraib-related “Standard Operating Procedure,” “The Fog of War”).
There’s tons of interesting tidbits in the piece, so we thought we’d extract the many and various highlights. Some might be old to hard-core Morris fans, but we suspect a lot of it is new. Morris has gotten many people to admit many a self-incriminating story on film and we loved that he calls his technique, the “shut-the-fuck-up school of interviewing.” It’s called listening and something more interviewers should try.
Morris Got Along With The “Avuncular” Serial Killer Ed Gein
Before his filmmaking career began, Morris was a Berkeley graduate student who became interested in “issues surrounding the insanity plea and criminal responsibility,” which lead him to various interviews with notorious serial killer Ed Gein (he’s the infamous wackjob who tore people’s skin off and made furniture and masks out of it; partly inspiring “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”). Morris ended up liking Gein’s uncle-like charms. “I like all these characters; that’s my problem.”
He Spent A Lot Of Personal Money Funding “Standard Operating Procedure”
He went, “very deep into my own pockets—foolishly deep… unrealistically, stupidly, insanely deep.”
Almost-Grave Robbing With Werner Herzog – The Friendship & Falling Out.
It’s part of the widely-known Errol Morris lore that Werner Herzog was so annoyed by Morris’ complaining about all of film’s drawbacks that the notoriously loony German director declared that he would eat his shoe if Morris actually ever got around to making a film. Back to that in one second. Morris first ingratiated himself to Herzog by selling him on his friendship to Ed Gein. He told the German new-wave director all about Gein’s Plainfield, Wisconsin hometown and a theory he had: Morris “mapped out the graves Gein had robbed, and discovered that they formed an approximate circle around Gein’s mother’s grave.” He and Herzog then made a pact to try and dig up the grave to see if her body was still there, but at the last minute Morris chickened out.
Herzog Betrays Morris
But Herzog was so enamored with Painfield, Wisconsin when he visited without Morris, he decided to make it the setting for his film, “Strosek..” Morris was horrified. “I was outraged,” He asked Herzog to reconsider and was rebuffed. “I thought it was a betrayal of our friendship. I was hurt and fucked-up about it, and angry.” He told Herzog: “ ‘For you to steal a landscape is the highest form of plagiarism.…’ He understood.”
Herzog Eats His Shoe Incident
See above for the backstory, however, the whole incident is something Morris doesn’t ever recall Herzog saying. So, when Morris finished his lauded pet cemetery documentary, “Gates of Heaven,” called to make good on his eating his shoe bet and Morris basically had no clue what he was talking about. He insists this “bet” was not the reason the film was actually made as many have suggested in his filmmaking lore. “Herzog did play a part, but it was the example he set by the movies he made, my actual love of his art, [not this ‘bet’].” Morris had mixed feelings when Herzog wanted to own up and the article suggest he regrets ever letting director Les Blank make the famous short documentary on the subject, “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.” Being it was written by Herzog (or as scripted as a doc can be) and shot by Blank (Herzog’s cinematographer), the move seemed like calculating grandstanding and Morris was so pisssed, he didn’t even attend the event when Herzog ate the boot. “I was just angry,” he says. “I think it was stupid. I should have done it.”
The ‘Gates Of Heaven’ Debut Was A Disaster: Wim Wenders & Roger Ebert To The Emotional Rescue
‘Gates’ had one of its major premieres at the Berlin Film Festival in the late ’70s and the screening was disastrous. Morris somehow had coaxed his idol and famous filmmaker Douglas Sirk to the screening, but he and most of the audience walked out mid-way. Morris was despondent, but German filmmaker Wim Wenders and critic Roger Ebert gave him some clutch encouragement. “It’s a work of genius,” Wenders told him at the time. “Standard Operating Procedure” won the Silver Bear at this year’s Berlin Film Festival and Morris made a point to thank him once again. “I have certainly never forgotten that,” he said. Ebert has been a life-long champion of ‘Gates’ and Morris’ films and his undaunted support of his inaugural doc is basically what helped the filmmaker start his career. “He’s been fabulous,” Morris said noting that Ebert still shows the film at various film festivals he has curated over the years. “It’s been like having a second mom.”
He Was A Private Detective
After his second movie, “Vernon, Florida,” while trying to make ends meet he became a private dick, or at least an assistant to one. “[My wife] and I had our honeymoon posing as diamond buyers at the [London] Savoy.”
Tom Waits Was His Wedding Photographer
Morris was married by a judge in a Brooklyn criminal court in-between prostitution cases. Waits’ wife, Kathleen, knew Morris from the P.I. world. Waits immediately lost the photos and then rang up years later to say he had found some of them on his garage floor).
“The Thin Blue Line” Legal Fallout
Morris amazing documentary was instrumental in freeing the wrongly accused murderer Randall Adams. How did Adams repay him? By looking for his share of the (nonexistent) “huge profits” from “The Thin Blue Line.” However, the story isn’t that simple (even though this is the one Morris admittedly propagated for years). Initially, the documentarian had paid Adams a simple $1 as a waiver for his co-operation, but later, he renegotiated and had Adams “sign a new document—partly, he says, out of guilt (this new document now specified fees of $40,000 and $60,000 if fictional TV or cinematic films were made of Adams’s story).” It seemed like a fair move to entitle Adams to his fair share of the profits if anything larger came of the documentary, but it was actually a ploy by Morris to own Adams’ exclusive life-rights to the story if something indeed bigger came a knockin’.
“[I did it] out of greed,” Morris’s admitted. “Let’s be clear, that I renegotiated it because I wanted to control the story.” As soon as Adams balked, Morris agree to let him out of the contract, but not before a lot of ugly and public legal dust-ups happened (Morris blames Adams’ equally greedy lawyer). “That was so fucking miserable I can’t begin to even tell you,” he said, but the filmmaker said he learned his lesson about getting in too deep. “You get so close to people in doing these things. And you get so connected to their stories. I think there is a danger that you forget that it’s not your story.”
Morris’ Career Stayed Afloat Due To His Work-For-Hire Commercial Directing
The documentarian is an unabashed champion of commercial work that has basically kept him afloat and funded his career as a documentary filmmaker all these years. A commercial for “7-Eleven” after “The Thin Blue Line,” started it all. “I love commercials, unreservedly. The haiku of the West. And I like to think of consumerism as the most effective preventative to genocide yet devised. If someone shows up at your door and asks you to hack your neighbor to death with a machete, you’re less likely to do it if you have prior plans, say, to go and buy a DVD player.”
Morris Pays His Subjects To Be Interviewed (Sometimes)
In what runs in heavy contradiction to most “documentarian morals,” Morris paid the “bad apple” subjects of “Standard Operating Procedure” to be interviewed about their involvement in the Abu-Ghraib scandal and he also paid Holocaust-denying subject of “Mr. Death,” Fred Leuchter. “I don’t know if it’s a great idea for me to talk about it. I’ve always felt that if someone specifically asked me, I wouldn’t lie about it, because I think that would be incredibly stupid,” Morris said of paying some of his subjects to talk. For “Standard Operating Procedure,” the first of the five “bad apples,” Javal Davis, asked for a fee and Morris agreed. “The rest just followed in due course” (he only pays though that make or break the film and only if they ask up front; Morris also does documentary “renactments” or “dramatizations” which doesn’t sit well with purists either).
“I don’t think it influenced in any way the quality or content of the material. Maybe it did—maybe I’m just kidding myself. But I don’t… The amounts of money were relatively small, and I just don’t see it being a consideration…”.
He recognizes that other documentarians take heavy issue with it though. “People can attack you for so many, many, many, many reasons. They take it as another sign of the erosion of documentary standards or of some kind of journalistic standards. But there’s always this dream that somehow you get material that is free from any kind of constraint. That is pure. And of course that notion in itself is illusory. People talk to you for various different reasons—pecuniary reasons can be among them.”
Morris Is Protective Of All His Fucked-Up Subjects Including The Abu Ghraib Bad Apples.
“I have this crazy hope that somehow these soldiers could be understood by more people—maybe it’s the hidden social worker in me trying to get out. I don’t want to absolve my bad apples of bad behavior, but I think it has to be put in some kind of context or perspective. They didn’t create this place.”
“Standard Operating Procedure” hits theaters on April 25. Here’s the trailer, if you haven’t already seen it.