NO-NONSENSE INTERROGATOR SOFTENS FOCUS IN LATEST FILM

Being assigned to interview Errol Morris is a rather tall order. The famed author, essayist, documentarian, recipient of both a MacArthur “Genius” fellowship and a Guggenheim, winner of an Emmy and an Academy Award, one-time pursuer of a PhD in philosophy, former private investigator and director of several of the most acclaimed documentary films of all time — including Gates of Heaven and The Thin Blue Line — has a strong claim on being the most qualified interviewer in the world. Who wants to pick up the phone and talk to a man who could unquestionably do your job a hundred times better than you? Who could feel at ease interrogating the world’s foremost interrogator? It helps a little that Morris’s latest picture, The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography, is by some measure his lightest, warmest, and most charming — a tender, affectionate profile of a longtime Morris family friend. Where the last 15 years of his career have found Morris staring down men and women of daunting infamy, here he’s happy to simply share Elsa Dorfman and her beloved Polaroid portraits with the world. to think of it in relation to the Polaroid technology. It’s almost like going back to the 19th century’s wet-plate collodion photography. Yes, it had to be developed like a normal photograph. But far fewer photographs could be taken. There was something precious and unique about each of the photographs, like a Polaroid. Q That uniqueness comes through in the film.

I hope the B-Side captures something about what is unique about that art, and about Elsa. You know, it’s probably obvious since I made the film, but I’d like more people to be aware of Elsa and what she did. I know that the movie has cheered her up enormously. So if I’ve only done that, I’ve done a good deed.

AQDo you agree with the assessment that this is a minor film?

Yeah I disagree with that. It’s not Wormwood, which is five hours long. But the themes are very powerful and deep and interesting. I don’t see it as slight in any way, so I would respectfully disagree. I think one person says it and then it just gets repeated endlessly. The film is about mortality. It’s about the perishability of our art. Changing technologies. These are important themes. It’s weird to ask me if I think my movie is profound. It’s so self-serving of me to say so. But yes! Yes! It is profound.

AAI don’t think it’s ever all that clear. I’ve been writing again lately for the Times. I mean, certainly in writing it’s a lot easier — and a lot less expensive — for example to record an interview on the phone than to bring someone to a studio with a film crew. With Elsa we started out not really knowing what it would be. Really we didn’t know. Would this be a piece for the Times? A fifteen minute short for Hot Docs? But when we started shooting it became clear immediately that it was something bigger.

QIs this often the way? Surely when you set out to make, say, The Unknown Known, you know you are poised to make a feature.

Yes, that I knew. Although, there are all kinds of difficulties in interviewing Donald Rumsfeld, to be sure. There’s something interesting about the nature of the enterprise. And now that we live in a kind of Netflix universe, the whole nature of what we consider to be the art form has changed. If you talked about doing a six-part series on one story five years ago, it was unheard of, it was out of the question. Now it’s becoming commonplace. The whole idea of what is possible has changed.

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