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.
Q Alex Ross wrote an article about Philip Glass for The New Yorker many years ago that concluded with a line I quote often: “These days he writes Philip Glass music in place of music that happens to be by Philip Glass.” Are you concerned about making “Errol Morris movies” rather than movies that happen to be made by Errol Morris?
A I am, actually. Although, if I may quote Philip Glass. He once told me, “They can always copy what you’ve done, but they can never copy what you’re going to do. I have tried — and I guess it’s for others to say whether I’ve been successful or not — to reinvent nonfiction, and what we mean by nonfiction, repeatedly. Yes, I’ve made all of these movies. But I think they’re diverse. I am not making Fast, Cheap and Out of Control 2, or The Thin Blue Line 2. Now, my most recent effort, a six-part series for Netflix called Wormwood — almost, but not quite done, though getting closer to being done — is yet another attempt to reinvent nonfiction.
Q You’ve abandoned your go-to interview camera, the Interrotron, for this one?
A I’ve used the Interrotron for so many movies, so many commercials, that when I started Wormwood I decided not to use it. And I decided not to use it in making The B-Side, too — in part out of a desire not to repeat myself, and in part out of a desire to do something completely different. I’ve been shooting using multiple cameras. In Wormwood I used as many as ten cameras on an interview. On The B-Side we used four or five. And I like it. Q The B- Side is about a portrait photographer, and it suggests an affinity between portraiture and documentary filmmaking.
A Well, of course I have Elsa in different locations. I have her in her garage, with her files, I have her in her studio, I have her at the facility where they scan her polaroids. There’s a desire to capture something about Elsa and her art. I’ve known Elsa for a long time. 25 years at least. It’s an opportunity to share her with a lot of other people. She is somebody that I’ve always admired, and she’s been a friend. For years. I’d like more people to know about Elsa. I love her and I’d like other people to love her too.
Q That’s not an ambition you’ve developed in your films previously. You’re not sharing Rumsfeld or McNamara with the world because you love them. It’s a confrontational relationship — more adversarial.
A I wouldn’t say that it’s adversarial! In fact a lot of people complain that the movies aren’t adversarial enough. I think one of the things that’s interesting about those movies — The Unknown Known and The Fog of War — is that they’re an attempt to capture something about Rumsfeld and McNamara. Now, McNamara turns out to be a far more likable person than Donald Rumsfeld. That’s not my fault, I don’t think. I recorded something that is really, really of interest. Confrontation has never been something that’s interesting to me. Maybe people imagine these movies to be confrontational, but I don’t see it that way. Q In the case of the B- Side the person you are interviewing is a friend. You have affection for her. You have a friendly relationship with her. Surely that changes the approach?
A I don’t know if it really does! Did I have an affection for Robert McNamara? I kind of did. Did I see him as a war criminal? Yes. But that didn’t mean that I couldn’t like him or try to capture something about him on film. Of course, it’s really, really complicated. It’s always really complicated. Because if you make good movies — and I hope that I at least aspire to making good movies — you’re trying to capture something real about your relationship to these people.
Q And yet you do actively confront them: you challenge them on things, present evidence, push points.
A Did I confront McNamara about things he did? I did. Did I confront Rumsfeld? I did. But it wasn’t about confrontation so much as trying to capture something about them. God knows there are so many confrontational movies that are made. But the nature of the enterprise is very, very different from what I do.
Q It’s not Frost/Nixon. A Yeah, it’s not gotcha journalism. What I find so fascinating about Frost/ Nixon — not just the original interviews, but the attempt to turn them into “drama” or history — is that often the reality of what occurred is just completely effaced. But this is a long discussion in and of itself. In the end, I am glad I made the opportunity to make The B-Side.
Q Why, specifically? A Because there are a lot of issues in it that are important to me. Yes, it’s a recording of Elsa, but I would call it — correct me if I’m wrong — an elegiac story about a dying art form, about Elsa’s struggles as an artist, about the evanescence of work in general, all our work. There’s something amazingly poetic about her and what she says. I’m really glad I made this movie. I’m relieved and glad.
Q I hope this doesn’t sound too academic, but the movie is about photographic technologies fading into obsolescence — the Polaroid going extinct, in particular. Was there a comparison on your mind between that obsolescence and your own transition as a filmmaker to digital from film?
A It had to be on my mind in some way. It’s impossible to be a filmmaker and to be unaware of all the extraordinary changes that have occurred in the last twenty or thirty years. We don’t edit the same way. Flatbeds and Steinbecks are gone. Now it’s Premiere or Final Cut Pro — and digital cameras. The technology has changed in so many, many, many ways. That’s not a good thing or a bad thing. But it is a thing. It’s interest- ing 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.
A 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.
Q Do you agree with the assessment that this is a minor film?
A 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. Q When do you know you have material for a documentary, versus a fiction feature, or even a five-part essay series in the Times?
A I 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.
Q Is this often the way? Surely when you set out to make, say, The Unknown Known, you know you are poised to make a feature.
A 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.
Ed. Note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.