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"FacebookPinterest\n\nIt was in April 2004 that news broke about a series of photographs taken over the final three months of the previous year at Abu Ghraib, a jail under the command of American forces in postinvasion Iraq. These were weird, shocking, shameful, unthinkable photographs: a naked prisoner on a dog leash, a prisoner with a cement bag on his head forced to stand on a box with electrical wires attached to either hand, a line of naked prisoners being forced to masturbate, a prisoner chained in a stress position with panties over his head, a female American soldier smiling and giving a thumbsup as she is photographed with a swollenfaced Iraqi corpse, seven prisoners compelled to form a naked human pyramid, and on and, degradingly, on. People articulated and channeled their disgust, wrote essays about what it all meant, argued over who was culpable, and for the most part, saw what they wanted to and what they needed to. Broadly speaking, for those on the right these were the actions of a few bad apples who had shamed America, and for those on the left it was evidence that revealed the true ugly face of the war and the secret policies of the BushCheneyRumsfeld triumvirate. Seven soldiers from the 372nd MP company involved in the acts shown, or in their documentation, were tried as a result; the longest sentence handed down was ten years.\n\nToward the end of 2005, Errol Morris decided to make a film about these Abu Ghraib photos. This seemed surprising. Though he has made movies about Stephen Hawking (A Brief History of Time) and Robert McNamara (the Oscarwinning Fog of War), over the past thirty years he has most often told tales about those far off the public radar: people, for instance, who run and who patronize pet cemeteries (Gates of Heaven); eccentric oldtimers (Vernon, Florida); a topiarist, lion tamer, robotmaker, and molerat expert (Fast, Cheap &amp;amp; Out of Control); and an ecutiontechnology specialist (Mr. Death). &amp;quot;I usually like stories that have no fingerprints on them,&amp;quot; he acknowledges, &amp;quot;and this story is covered in fingerprints. They&amp;#39;re some of the most widely seen photographs in history.&amp;quot;\n\nAnd yet, perhaps this subject wasn&amp;#39;t so different after all. &amp;quot;It&amp;#39;s always exciting,&amp;quot; Morris notes, &amp;quot;when you find a story that everybody knows about but nobody really has seen.&amp;quot; These soldiers\u2014whom he came to refer to, with a certain sense of irony, and hence affection, as &amp;quot;the bad apples&amp;quot;\u2014had been accused, interrogated, tried, imprisoned, vilified, analyzed, quizzed, blamed, picked over, and discarded. But amid all this action and attention, Morris noticed that there was one thing that no one had done. Something so simple and yet, as it would turn out, once the results could be seen, something that would prove remarkable, disturbing, and unexpected. What Errol Morris did\u2014the last thing anyone else had cared to do with these socalled bad apples\u2014was listen to what they had to say.\n\n[This February, in the week after Errol Morris&amp;#39;s sixtieth birthday, he and his new movie, Standard Operating Procedure, are invited to the Berlin International Film Festival, where the film, the first documentary invited into competition in the festival&amp;#39;s history, will win the grand jury&amp;#39;s Silver Bear award. While there, Morris is interviewed more times over a short period than ever before in his life. On the Tuesday morning, he gives twentyfour consecutive TV interviews, each of them between six and ten minutes long.]\n\nBerlin TV interview #3:\n\n&amp;quot;What would you say is the main message of your film&amp;quot;\n\n Morris sighs.\n\n &amp;quot;I don&amp;#39;t know. Pick a different place to live than planet Earth&amp;quot;\n\nThe first interviews Errol Morris ever did were with mass murderers. Morris wasn&amp;#39;t yet a filmmaker, just an unusual graduate student with peculiar interests. It was the &amp;#39;70s. He was at Berkeley, where he had ended up after his first academic career, studying the philosophy of science at Princeton, had been curtailed when the famous philosopher Thomas Kuhn (who originated the term, and concept of, &amp;quot;paradigm shifts&amp;quot;) responded to Morris&amp;#39;s impudent youthful theoretical challenges by throwing an ashtray at his head. (&amp;quot;I call it &amp;#39;the ashstray argument,&amp;#39; &amp;quot; says Morris.) At Berkeley he had become interested in the issues surrounding the insanity plea and criminal responsibility. This gave him a reason\u2014or perhaps, as time passed, an excuse\u2014to visit serial killers in prison. The first taped interview of Morris&amp;#39;s life was with Ed Gein, notorious for skinning his victims and other bodies he had dug from graves and using the harvested skin to make items of clothing and furniture. Morris, already beginning to develop what he now describes as his &amp;quot;shutthefuckup school of interviewing,&amp;quot; didn&amp;#39;t ask about any of Gein&amp;#39;s atrocities. &amp;quot;I always thought it&amp;#39;s untoward when you&amp;#39;re meeting someone to talk about the human taxidermy, the grave robbing, the cannibalism,&amp;quot; he rationalizes. &amp;quot;It seems a little forward.&amp;quot; Instead, he listened as Gein told him about Freud and Radio Moscow.\n\nMorris remembers liking Gein\u2014&amp;quot;he had a kind of avuncular calm&amp;quot;\u2014as he would find himself liking numerous interview subjects over the years that others might reflexively blanch at. As he puts it, &amp;quot;I like all these characters; that&amp;#39;s my problem.&amp;quot;\n\nBerlin TV interview #11:\n\n&amp;quot;I have this crazy theory that Bush won the election in 2004 because of Abu Ghraib. It&amp;#39;s a simple theory. The war was going badly, the insurgency was growing, the war is essentially out of hand, if it ever was in hand. Who to blame You don&amp;#39;t want to blame yourself. No one wants to do that. Blame these soldiers. Blame these soldiers for everything. Blame them for the failure of our war in Iraq\u2026 Let them carry the stain of war. And then you don&amp;#39;t have to blame yourself.&amp;quot;\n\nAs with many of his previous movies, Morris stumbled into Standard Operating Procedure. He was planning a movie about war photography with a much wider historical scope, and his initial fixation had been on a famous pair of photographs taken in 1855 during the Crimean War. But although Morris visited the Crimea in the fall of 2005 to investigate, he says that he began to think, &amp;quot;Well, I can&amp;#39;t just do the Crimean War photographs\u2014because, you know, who is going to go to the multiplex&amp;quot;\n\nNot long after the Crimean trip, Morris&amp;#39;s cameraman Bob Chappell saw an interview on CSPAN with Janis Karpinski, the brigadier general who was relieved of her command after the Abu Ghraib scandal, and suggested to Morris that this was someone he might like to interview. Morris flew Karpinski to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he has his office and home, and interviewed her oncamera\u2014for a total of sixteen or seventeen hours over two days. His focus began to shift, and soon his film was only about this one set of much more recent photographs. He reached out to the four &amp;quot;bad apples&amp;quot; who weren&amp;#39;t in jail. (Three\u2014Javal Davis, Jeremy Sivits, and Sabrina Harman\u2014had been released. The fourth, Megan Ambuhl, hadn&amp;#39;t received a custodial sentence.) &amp;quot;If there wasn&amp;#39;t a deep skepticism on all of their part, that would be in itself remarkable,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;They&amp;#39;ve been through a media circus, and they are justified in thinking that it&amp;#39;s the media, in part, that put them behind bars.&amp;quot; But one by one, he persuaded them, and others who had been involved at Abu Ghraib, to appear oncamera, and once they were in front of the lens, he let them talk. There is a school of journalism (and, of course, of warfare, too) that believes that people will only give up the most important truths under great pressure, but Morris is of the opposite school: that people will often easiest lead you to such truths when allowed to speak freely. And, crucially, that when they are allowed to find their own way they will also lead you to far stranger truths\u2014will give you answers the most hardassed interrogator could never get, because these will be answers to questions such an interrogator could never have thought to ask.\n\nAs well as doing interviews, Morris looked into the possibility of visiting Abu Ghraib itself, if only to film the perimeter (he was quoted a fee of $50,000 for safe passage to and from Baghdad), and he also considered shooting images in Amman, until he discovered that there were no buildings like Saddam Hussein&amp;#39;s showpiece jail in Jordan because, ironically, &amp;quot;Abu Ghraib was built on an American model.&amp;quot; Instead, he and his team recreated parts of Abu Ghraib in Hollywood, on the same soundstage where I Love Lucy was once filmed. (&amp;quot;You feel,&amp;quot; he says drily, &amp;quot;the presence of Ethel Mertz in every shot.&amp;quot;)\n\nTo begin with, Morris spent his own money on the project, going &amp;quot;very deep into my own pockets\u2014foolishly deep\u2026 unrealistically, stupidly, insanely deep.&amp;quot; Even when the movie was financed and well under way, he had a problem. He knew that two of the still incarcerated bad apples, Charles Graner and Ivan Frederick, were unlikely to be released in time and that there was no possibility of the military allowing access to them in jail, but he had hopes for the third. She was Lynndie England, the most infamous apple of all. As far as he was concerned, without her there wasn&amp;#39;t really a movie. So he did all he could. Before she got out, his team befriended her mother and her lawyer, and one of his researchers was there in San Diego to meet her, with her family and lawyer, on the day she was released. A month later, England flew to Cambridge with her baby boy, Carter, for two days of filming.\n\nMorris started nearly every interview by simply saying\u2014and you can see this as either a calculating tactic or a kind of generosity\u2014some version of &amp;quot;I don&amp;#39;t know where to start.&amp;quot; And although it&amp;#39;s not as if he never asks questions\u2014there are the moments that occur in most of his movies where suddenly his disembodied voice booms out with an inquiry and it&amp;#39;s quite obvious that he can be tough and pointed when he needs to be\u2014he&amp;#39;s not just concerned with getting his interviewees to fill in the gaps of a preconceived tale. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#39;t know what I&amp;#39;m looking for,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I think that one of the virtues of how I go about doing those things is that I don&amp;#39;t have this fid agenda going into it. It&amp;#39;s not as though I expect people to tell me what I want to hear. I don&amp;#39;t know what I want to hear.&amp;quot;\n\nBerlin press conference:\n\n&amp;quot;We don&amp;#39;t seem to learn much from history. I have my version of this very famous quote by Santayana: &amp;#39;Those who are unfamiliar with history are condemned to repeat it.&amp;#39; My version is: &amp;#39;Those who are unfamiliar with history are condemned to repeat it without a sense of ironic futility.&amp;#39; &amp;quot;\n\n&amp;quot;I guess it&amp;#39;s a way of introducing yourself to Werner Herzog,&amp;quot; says Morris. &amp;quot; &amp;#39;I know a mass murderer who you would be really interested in meeting.&amp;#39; &amp;quot; As he fell out of graduate school, Morris immersed himself deeper and deeper into the Berkeley film world; there he met many of the new wave of German directors, but it was Herzog with whom he formed, for a while, the strongest bond. He took Herzog on a prison visit with Ed Kemper, who had murdered his grandparents at 15, then, as an adult, borrowed his mother&amp;#39;s car to pick up female hitchhikers. &amp;quot;Killing them,&amp;quot; notes Morris, &amp;quot;and eating them.&amp;quot;\n\nExcited to be around Herzog (&amp;quot;I started to think of myself as a filmmaker,&amp;quot; Morris says), he shared with Herzog much of his serialkiller material. He told Herzog all about Ed Gein&amp;#39;s hometown, Plainfield, Wisconsin, where Morris had begun to conduct interviews about other murders that had taken place there in the decade after Gein&amp;#39;s arrest. In particular he told Herzog of a theory he had come up with. He had visited Plainfield cemetery with a psychiatrist friend, mapped out the graves Gein had robbed, and discovered that they formed an approximate circle around Gein&amp;#39;s mother&amp;#39;s grave. This suggested to Morris that Gein (who was the model for the motherobsessed killer in Psycho) may have exhumed his own mother. He and the psychiatrist had tried to detect any hollowness below by pounding the ground with a pole, their ears to the earth, but to no avail, and it bothered Morris, not knowing. &amp;quot;I dreamed,&amp;quot; he says frankly, &amp;quot;of being able to exhume Ed&amp;#39;s mother&amp;#39;s grave.&amp;quot;\n\nHerzog and Morris made a pact. They would meet in Plainfield\u2014Herzog was driving down from Alaska with his German producer\u2014and under cover of night they would together dig up Gein&amp;#39;s mother&amp;#39;s corpse, or unearth her empty grave. (&amp;quot;This seemed,&amp;quot; Morris comments a little wryly, &amp;quot;like, you know, a bonding experience between Germans and Jews.&amp;quot;) As Herzog has sometimes tauntingly advertised in the years since, it was Morris who chickened out. He never left Los Angeles, where he was at the time. Partly it was the cost of getting back to Wisconsin, but mostly it was fear. &amp;quot;I started to have these images of me and the Germans, the full moon, the shovels, the squad cars arriving unexpectedly. The looks of horror and disgust. I imagined my mother: &amp;#39;Errol! How could you What were you thinking&amp;#39; &amp;quot;\n\nHerzog went anyway. He did no digging, but he finally got to see Plainfield, which Morris had told him so much about, for himself. He fell in love with it. Morris was horrified to learn that Herzog planned to use it as the landscape and inspiration for his next movie, Stroszek. &amp;quot;I was outraged,&amp;quot; Morris recalls. He asked Herzog to pull back, and was rebuffed. &amp;quot;I thought it was a betrayal of our friendship,&amp;quot; Morris remembers. &amp;quot;I was hurt and fuckedup about it, and angry.&amp;quot; He told Herzog: &amp;quot; &amp;#39;For you to steal a landscape is the highest form of plagiarism.\u2026&amp;#39; He understood.&amp;quot;\n\nThere was one famous final act to the strange &amp;#39;70s MorrisHerzog relationship. (They are now, after many years, on good terms once more.) In 1980, Morris released his first documentary, Gates of Heaven, centered around the contrasting fortunes of two Californian pet cemeteries, triggered by a story he had read in the San Francisco Chronicle. Herzog maintains that, sometime before Morris started filming, frustrated by the way Morris seemed better at complaining about the impediments to making a film than getting on and making one, Herzog had declared that if Morris finished a film he would eat his own shoe.\n\nMorris has no recollection of any such conversation. He concedes it could have taken place\u2014&amp;quot;I don&amp;#39;t listen well&amp;quot;\u2014but he has always taken great exception to the idea that anything of this kind played a part in why Gates of Heaven came to exist: &amp;quot;Herzog did play a part, but it was the example he set by the movies he made, my actual love of his art.\u2026&amp;quot; Consequently, Morris had mid feelings when Herzog declared that he was going to make good on his supposed promise. The event, memorialized in the short and accurately titled film Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe, took place before a screening of Gates of Heaven in Berkeley. Morris was due to fly in from New York to attend and actually boarded the plane, but then he got off again. &amp;quot;I was just angry,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I think it was stupid. I should have done it.&amp;quot;\n\nBerlin TV interview #23\n\n[in which Morris gets a little exasperated with the Australian interviewer and by proxy everyone else who has ever asked why he didn&amp;#39;t get Robert McNamara in his last movie and these &amp;quot;bad apples&amp;quot; in this movie to say sorry]:\n\n&amp;quot;People imagine movies as some kind of strange church of possible redemption where you go into the theater and the person who&amp;#39;s been accused of the crime makes various representations to the audience of how they&amp;#39;ve received wisdom and recognized the errors of their ways and now would like to make a complete remission of sin through apology. That is not this movie.\u2026 If McNamara had suddenly started crying, saying, &amp;#39;You know those 2 12 million Vietnamese that died, I feel so really, really sorry, I&amp;#39;m a bad person, that was a bad thing to do, killing the 2 12 million people,&amp;#39; and he started crying.\u2026 I&amp;#39;m sorry, I (a) never want to see that; and (b) it doesn&amp;#39;t bring back those 2 12 million people. Saying sorry is almost like\u2026 I mean, I used to joke with my son: You know, you can do anything you want to another person as long as you apologize immediately. Cleave their head off with an ax, light them on fire, put them into some kind of absurd grinding machine that leaves them as a paste\u2014as long as you say &amp;#39;I&amp;#39;m sorry,&amp;#39; it becomes okay. I&amp;#39;m not interested in &amp;#39;I&amp;#39;m sorry.&amp;#39; &amp;quot;\n\n&amp;quot;Glad you&amp;#39;re not my dad,&amp;quot; the interviewer mutters in response.\n\nOnce the interviewer has left the room, Morris says to me, &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;m still thinking about &amp;#39;I&amp;#39;m sorry.&amp;#39; I guess the magic words are &amp;#39;please&amp;#39; and &amp;#39;I&amp;#39;m sorry.&amp;#39; It&amp;#39;s the elementaryschool view of the world.&amp;quot;\n\nMorris had been to the Berlin film festival before, when Gates of Heaven came out. It would turn out to be a doubly humiliating experience. One of the more esteemed guests at the festival that year was Douglas Sirk\u2014not only a legendary director but to Morris, who had programmed a series of his films in Berkeley, a hero. He met Sirk, introduced himself as an admirer and firsttime filmmaker, and somehow persuaded him to come and see Gates of Heaven. Sirk brought his wife. Halfway through, they got up to walk out. &amp;quot;I tried to plead with him to stay, which was completely humiliating,&amp;quot; Morris remembers. &amp;quot;He said to me, &amp;#39;It&amp;#39;s not a movie, it&amp;#39;s a slide show.&amp;#39; &amp;quot;\n\nEven worse was that evening&amp;#39;s public screening. The man who had been assigned to look after him, and introduce him at the movie&amp;#39;s end, asked Morris whether he wanted to watch his own movie, but Morris said that he was already depressed, so they went for a beer instead. According to Morris, when they returned fifteen minutes before the movie&amp;#39;s end, the theater, which had been twothirds full, was now entirely empty. &amp;quot;Literally empty,&amp;quot; he says.\n\nThankfully there were some who noticed, and appreciated, his achievement with Gates of Heaven. One of those who had seen a rough cut in San Francisco was Wim Wenders. Afterward, Morris asked Wenders what he had thought of it. &amp;quot;Oh, simple,&amp;quot; Wenders replied. &amp;quot;It&amp;#39;s a work of genius.&amp;quot; (In Berlin there is a dinner in honor of Standard Operating Procedure, and when Wenders arrives, Morris gets up to speak with him and makes a point to thank him once more for that initial kindness and encouragement. &amp;quot;I have certainly,&amp;quot; he tells me, &amp;quot;never forgotten that.&amp;quot;)\n\nLikewise, long after its unheralded release, Siskel and Ebert proclaimed Gates of Heaven one of their top ten movies of the year, and it is Roger Ebert who has become the film&amp;#39;s greatest and most enduring champion. When asked to show a favorite movie at events over the years, this is the movie he has often chosen, and has continued to proclaim its wonders.\n\n&amp;quot;He&amp;#39;s been fabulous,&amp;quot; Morris says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#39;s been like having a second mom.&amp;quot;\n\nOne evening in Cambridge, I go out to dinner at the All Star Sandwich Bar with Morris and his wife, Julia Sheehan, an art historian. The two of them met in Wisconsin in the &amp;#39;70s, after Julia had heard, through the local film community, of this interesting man who had been interviewing mass murderers. They have a 20yearold son who is studying psychiatry, and an 11yearold French bulldog called Jackpot.\n\nDuring the evening, they reminisce about Morris&amp;#39;s years as a private investigator. These came in the period after his second movie, Vernon, Florida, when various film projects had spluttered to a halt and he was desperate to earn some money. A friend recommended him to a top New York private detective whose field was investigating big corporate Wall Street cases. Morris worked for him on one of the first roguetrader scandals, gathering information to help one of the defendants caught in the scandal&amp;#39;s penumbra. &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;m not sure I ever understood it, to tell you the truth, but it involved trading in government securities.&amp;quot;\n\nFor another case, he was sent to London. His newlywed wife came, too, as part of his cover: &amp;quot;Julie and I had our honeymoon posing as diamond buyers at the Savoy.&amp;quot;\n\nAt a later date, Morris tells me about their wedding, itself not short of unconventional flourishes. A friend arranged for them to be married by a judge in a Brooklyn criminal court between prostitution cases. &amp;quot;Just utterly perverse,&amp;quot; says Morris. Their wedding photographs were taken by Tom Waits, whose wife, Kathleen, Morris knew from the privateinvestigation world. (Waits promptly lost the photos, phoning several years later to say that he had just found two on the floor of his garage.)\n\nAfter Julia has retired to bed, Morris details his current obsession\u2014maybe it&amp;#39;ll become another essay (after years of writer&amp;#39;s block, Morris has recently been responsible for a series of elegant, eclectic, lengthy, and intimidatingly erudite essays for the New York Times Web site), though right now he imagines it as his next nonfiction movie, the latest product of his interest in entering history through photography. &amp;quot;I took great pride in telling stories that no one else would be interested in,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;And I sort of would like to get back to that.&amp;quot; This new exploration follows the kind of trail only a man like Morris could find. &amp;quot;You start off with a randomly picked photo in 1892,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;and it takes you all the way through these truly insane series of stories, and it ends up in the White House with the first lady holding an albatross.&amp;quot; He laughs with delight. &amp;quot;Too good to be true. Murder! Bird poaching! Rabbit cannibalism! Laura Bush! Margaret Mitchell! And more!&amp;quot;\n\nBerlin TV interview #4:\n\n&amp;quot;Every war has its own character. Every war may be crazy, but I think every war is crazy in its own unique way. This war, which I think we only dimly understand, has its own craziness. I often think of it as a war of humiliation\u2026an attempt to humiliate Saddam, and to show Saddam that we are more powerful than you. So much of what happened at Abu Ghraib was planned and thought out in terms of humiliation\u2014stripping prisoners naked in front of, or sometimes having them stripped by, female military police. A way of humiliating them supposedly to get them to talk; an interrogation technique, but I often think it was humiliation in and of itself. We are left with this strange rondelet of humiliation and rehumiliation\u2014the leader of one country&amp;#39;s attempt to humiliate the leader of another, a prison in which inmates are routinely humiliated and degraded, photographs taken of this which show American soldiers humiliating Iraqis, the pictures come out and they humiliate the army and the U.S. government, and they in turn try to humiliate the soldiers that have humiliated them by showing pictures of people being humiliated. It&amp;#39;s insane, all of it.&amp;quot;\n\nIt was The Thin Blue Line that allowed Errol Morris a filmmaking career. Initially, he was given money to make a film about a Texas psychiatrist known for his consistently damning court testimony, but Morris&amp;#39;s attention soon diverted toward one particular case the psychiatrist had been involved in. On November 28, 1976, a police officer was shot dead on a Dallas roadside by a man in a car. Randall Adams was said to be that man, and was convicted largely on the testimony of a youth he had spent time with earlier in the day who claimed to have been crouching down in the car&amp;#39;s passenger seat at the time of the killing. Adams was sentenced to death and came days from the electric chair. Largely due to the evidence unearthed by Morris while making The Thin Blue Line, he would eventually be freed.\n\nMorris had conceived of the movie as &amp;quot;a nonfiction film noir,&amp;quot; and it has an ingenious structure in which, amid surreal reconstructions of different accounts of what happened and remarkable interviews with protagonists, supposed witnesses, and officials, the viewer slowly becomes aware that the other, younger man, David Harris, is the killer. When Morris first contacted Harris to persuade him to appear on film, he was yet to come to this conclusion. Harris agreed to meet with Morris to discuss his participation and suggested a bar near his hometown of Vidor, Texas: &amp;quot;in the middle of fucking nowhere,&amp;quot; Morris recalls, &amp;quot;this kind of brush swamp country.&amp;quot; Morris came alone, and the two of them sat at a table drinking beer. Harris asked whether Adams was still alive and was surprised to hear that he was. &amp;quot;I thought he would he dead by now,&amp;quot; Harris commented. The two of them, the filmmaker and the murderer, chatted away, and on one level, Morris remembers, &amp;quot;we&amp;#39;re getting along famously.\u2026 Harris, there&amp;#39;s this kind of a sweetkid aspect\u2014I, of course, ended up liking him.&amp;quot;\n\nBut, at the same time, Morris began to realize that he was sitting alone in the middle of nowhere with an unconvicted cop killer whose case he was digging into. Not long after sitting down, he was already fairly sure. Then there was a moment, discussing the night of the murder, when Harris said, &amp;quot;I&amp;#39;ll never forget the look in that cop&amp;#39;s eyes.&amp;quot; By the account that convicted Adams, Harris should never have been able to see the policeman&amp;#39;s eyes.\n\nIncreasingly uncomfortable, Morris blurted something incredibly stupid. &amp;quot;I said, &amp;#39;You know, Randall Adams has said a lot of stuff. And I think it&amp;#39;s a lie. He said that you&amp;#39;re responsible. And I&amp;#39;m really glad I had a chance to meet you because I can tell, having met you, that&amp;#39;s it&amp;#39;s not true.&amp;#39; &amp;quot; It was the opposite of what he was thinking, and he was pretty sure Harris knew that. Still, he saw the evening through. As they were leaving, Harris gave him a repeated lecture to be very, very careful driving.\n\nMaking his way through the dark country byways, cursing himself for not taking the longer way round on the freeway, with Harris&amp;#39;s thoughtful warning echoing in his ears, Morris convinced himself he was being followed. When he finally lost the headlights that he imagined were pursuing him, he stopped at a gas station and called his wife. &amp;quot;I said, &amp;#39;I just talked to David Harris\u2014I think he&amp;#39;s the killer and I think he&amp;#39;s following me.&amp;#39; And Julie started screaming at me on the phone: &amp;#39;You fucking idiot! What is wrong with you What the fuck are you doing You get out of there!&amp;#39; &amp;quot;\n\nIt would take two more years to get David Harris oncamera. In the meantime, Harris would call him at home in New York, and various appointments would be made and broken. One weekend when Harris didn&amp;#39;t show, it turned out that he had quite an excuse\u2014he was busy killing someone in Beaumont. This murder he was charged with. After long negotiations, Morris was given permission to interview him in custody. One of Harris&amp;#39;s requests for the interview, which was granted by the authorities, was that he be given some street clothes so that he didn&amp;#39;t look like a prisoner oncamera. It was a trick\u2014Harris was using Morris&amp;#39;s filming as a way of getting an outfit for an escape attempt, and now, suitably dressed, he disappeared. For two days, the authorities believed he was gone, but after escaping into the jail&amp;#39;s heating ducts he couldn&amp;#39;t find a way out, and eventually, hungry, gave himself up. But Morris&amp;#39;s interview, inevitably, was canceled.\n\nWithout speaking to Harris on film, Morris still had plenty of evidence that Adams was innocent, but arguably he didn&amp;#39;t have a movie. One final chance came when Harris, by now on death row for the Beaumont murder, was brought to Dallas for a hearing on the Adams case, and the Dallas authorities gave Morris permission to interview him. It was a Friday. Morris slowly built toward the central questions of what happened, and didn&amp;#39;t happen, on that night. Harris was charming and strangely honest. Maybe it was the fact that he was already on death row and had less to lose now, but you also got the sense that he was enjoying this, all of it\u2014the getting away with it but also the getting caught\u2014and that Morris was about to get the answers that he needed.\n\nAnd then, before Morris got to the point, the camera motor burned out. Morris arranged to return the next day, but it was impossible to find a replacement camera in time, so he had to turn up with just a tape recorder. In the finished film, this climactic sequence\u2014a closeup of a rolling cassette tape as you hear Morris&amp;#39;s and Harris&amp;#39;s voices dance toward the truth\u2014is so staggeringly dramatic that you can&amp;#39;t imagine how better the story could have been told, but on the day it occurred, Morris assumed that, whatever happened, without footage of this interview his film was ruined. They talked for less than an hour. &amp;quot;It&amp;#39;s probably the best interview I&amp;#39;ve ever done,&amp;quot; says Morris, &amp;quot;or will ever do.&amp;quot;\n\nWhat&amp;#39;s most remarkable about the conversation is its restraint. Where any TV interviewer would have been jabbing a finger in Harris&amp;#39;s face\u2014Did you do it Did you do it Did you do it (and then, no doubt, Are you sorry Are you sorry Are you sorry)\u2014Morris just edges him toward the information required, never forcing him, never spooking him. (Morris is sort of like a murderer whisperer.) &amp;quot;I asked him at one point, &amp;#39;Were you alone in the car when you were stopped by the Dallas police officer&amp;#39; and he just gave me this look. It&amp;#39;s not in audio. It&amp;#39;s just me and him. He gave me this look and smiled and nodded his head. In a way, it&amp;#39;s our private moment.&amp;quot; Morris never even asks Harris straight out if he did it. He doesn&amp;#39;t need to. Harris has said enough.\n\nAfterward, still in the jail, Morris remembers crying.\n\n&amp;quot;Thinking, This whole fuckedup thing, you know. That life is really really really fuckedup.&amp;quot;\n\nHe didn&amp;#39;t speak to Harris for years, but he got back in touch when he heard that Harris was soon to be ecuted. They exchanged emails and spoke on the phone. &amp;quot;I said that I had hoped to talk to him more over the years. I apologized. I said he was always on my mind in one way or another, which was true. And that I always liked him, which was also true. And that if I could help him in any way\u2026&amp;quot; At Harris&amp;#39;s request, Morris wrote a letter to the governor asking that his death sentence be commuted, and he also tried to interview Harris again. Harris was keen, and Morris says that he tried everything but the authorities wouldn&amp;#39;t allow it, and on June 30, 2004, Harris was killed by lethal injection.\n\nThere are people who would wonder how, I ask Morris, you could like someone who had killed at least two people\u2014and was prepared to let another die for a murder he committed\n\n&amp;quot;Yeah,&amp;quot; Morris acknowledges. &amp;quot;You know, I don&amp;#39;t know where &amp;#39;liking&amp;#39; and &amp;#39;fascinated by&amp;#39; begin and end. Hard to know. I mean, would I want him to come to dinner Not really, no. Was I scared of him Yes.&amp;quot;\n\nRandall Adams was the man Morris had helped set free, and Morris was there to meet him when he returned home to Columbus, Ohio, after his release from prison. &amp;quot;It was just amazing,&amp;quot; Morris says. &amp;#39;I thought, You actually did this.&amp;quot; Quickly, it turned sour. &amp;quot;The aftermath of the Adams thing,&amp;quot; says Morris, &amp;quot;was a horrendous thing.&amp;quot;\n\nFor years Morris has tended to encourage a simple version of the story, in which Adams comes off as a greedy ingrate looking for his share of the (nonexistent) huge profits from The Thin Blue Line. But the core disagreement was less simple. At issue was the contractual agreement between Adams and Morris. The initial release that Morris had Adams sign paid him a dollar for his cooperation. Later Morris had Adams sign a new document\u2014partly, 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&amp;#39;s story) but partly, he now concedes, &amp;quot;out of greed,&amp;quot; because in the second contract Morris&amp;#39;s rights over Adams&amp;#39;s story became exclusive. &amp;quot;Let&amp;#39;s be clear,&amp;quot; he admits, &amp;quot;that I renegotiated it because I wanted to control the story.&amp;quot; Morris says that as soon as the liberated Adams took issue with this, he offered to release him from the contract. That is what eventually happened but only after some very unpleasant public legal moves, for which Morris primarily blames Adams&amp;#39;s lawyer. &amp;quot;That was so fucking miserable I can&amp;#39;t begin to even tell you,&amp;quot; he says. He and Adams haven&amp;#39;t spoken since, though Morris says that he would now like to do so.\n\nPerhaps he got a little carried away, albeit in the way someone absolutely needs to if they&amp;#39;re to make Errol Morris movies. &amp;quot;You get so close to people in doing these things. And you get so connected to their stories. I think there is a danger,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;that you forget that it&amp;#39;s not your story.&amp;quot;\n\nThe Thin Blue Line was released by Harvey Weinstein&amp;#39;s Miramax pictures. Weinstein listened in to one of Morris&amp;#39;s early interviews to promote the film, then wrote Morris a letter. It began:\n\nDear Errol:\n\nHeard your NPR interview and you were boring. You couldn&amp;#39;t have dragged me to see THE THIN BLUE LINE if my life depended on it.\n\nIt&amp;#39;s time you start being a performer and understand the media.\n\nLet&amp;#39;s rehearse:\n\nQ: What is this movie about\n\nA: It&amp;#39;s a mystery that traces an injustice. It&amp;#39;s scarier than NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. It&amp;#39;s like a trip to the Twilight Zone. People have compared it to IN COLD BLOOD with humor.\n\n\u2026If you continue to be boring, I will hire an actor in New York to pretend that he&amp;#39;s Errol Morris. If you have any casting suggestions, I&amp;#39;d appreciate that.\n\nWhen Randall Adams appeared to be after a share of The Thin Blue Line&amp;#39;s supposedly abundant profits, what Morris would tell people was, &amp;quot;Well, clearly Randall has never had to deal with Harvey Weinstein.&amp;quot;\n\nBerlin press roundtable\n\n[when asked whether he has any &amp;quot;dark hobbies\u2014like computer games&amp;quot;]:\n\n &amp;quot;No computer games. My darkest hobby of all is how I earn a living\u2014I make TV commercials. That&amp;#39;s the darkest, darkest hobby of all.&amp;quot;\n\nUntil he was approached after The Thin Blue Line to make a series of commercials for 7Eleven, Morris says that he had never thought of this line of work. &amp;quot;If I&amp;#39;d known about this ten or fifteen years earlier,&amp;quot; he reflects, &amp;quot;the amount of suffering I could have alleviated in my own life\u2026&amp;quot; As far as he could tell, he was approached for the 7Eleven spots\u2014known as the &amp;quot;mobile judge&amp;quot; ads, in which a courtroom on the back of a trailer was taken from town to town so that the mobile judge could give his legally astute but predictably 7Elevenfriendly opinion of local convenience stores\u2014for the absurd reason that, following The Thin Blue Line, he was the director with a passion for justice. No matter. One swift eyeopener was that, while The Thin Blue Line had cost $1.3 million over the three years it took to make, the budget for these &amp;quot;mobile judge&amp;quot; ads and their twoweek shoot was $1.7 million.\n\nIt is work for which Morris has shown a great aptitude. His commercial work, and his reputation within that field, built up over time, and recently he has been shooting as many as a hundred commercials a year. The best known are perhaps his long series of Miller High Life commercials and his &amp;quot;switch&amp;quot; commercials for Apple. And on the dark day that David Harris was ecuted, for instance, he was trying to prep a commercial for ATT having just wrapped a Tylenol shoot. He is not one of those directors who feel sullied by such work. &amp;quot;Or if I am sullied,&amp;quot; he says, &amp;quot;it&amp;#39;s happily so.&amp;quot; (I spend a day watching Morris do his day job, filming commercials for the Full Tilt Poker Internet site. Onset, his demeanor veers between that of the supremely assured and selfconfident director and that of an eccentric and rather forlorn academic who has wandered into the wrong building and is desperately hoping that someone will set him straight. Both personae, I suspect, are effective at achieving his ends.)\n\nReading about Morris before I met him, I had seen him justify his love of commercials in two memorable and ingenious ways. The first was with his theory that while movies always try to sell us the lie that people can be heroes, commercials put forward the far more achievable and believable premise that products are heroes. The second was his notion that consumerism in general, and hence commercials in particular, divert us from our worst instincts as a race. This is how he once argued it: &amp;quot;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&amp;#39;re less likely to do it if you have prior plans, say, to go and buy a DVD player.&amp;quot;\n\nBerlin TV interview #3:\n\n&amp;quot;The soldiers got blamed because they took pictures of things that embarrassed the U.S. Army and the administration. They were punished for being photographers. The crime is photography. I don&amp;#39;t see it as a crime. Under another set of circumstances, Sabrina Harman would have gotten the Pulitzer Prize. What did she give us She gave us evidence of a murder that we would not have otherwise.&amp;quot;\n\nIn the early &amp;#39;90s, Morris invented the device known as the Interrotron. It always annoyed Morris that interviewees would never quite be looking into the camera when you spoke to them, but rather just to one side, where the interviewer was sitting. It amazed him that more people weren&amp;#39;t bothered by this, and he resolved to do something about it. He realized that you could project the image of an interviewer on a teleprompter screen in front of the lens; his screenwriter friend Judith Rascoe pointed out that for the system to truly work, you would need two cameras with two teleprompters, each showing the image from the other camera, so that both the interviewer and the subject could look directly into a camera and have a conversation with the face they saw there. Its name\u2014the Interrotron\u2014came from Morris&amp;#39;s wife, who liked its amalgamation of &amp;quot;interview&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;terror.&amp;quot; (There is no actual distinct separate device that is an Interrotron. It can be created from any two cameras and teleprompters, connected correctly.)\n\nThe Interrotron has turned out to be the perfect complement to his interviewing style: both the intimacy and eye contact and yet the sense of distance (the interviewer can&amp;#39;t be seen directly and so is just a floating head), seem to encourage revelation. (Morris has noted in the past that when people sit in front of the Interrotron they are watching television, which everybody loves.)\n\nHe&amp;#39;s still annoyed that he never patented the device. By the time he took the notion seriously\u2014&amp;quot;it&amp;#39;s my usual style to have absolute contempt for most of what I do and think&amp;quot;\u2014it was too late. Much as he is surprised that more people don&amp;#39;t use the Interrotron, his nightmare is a world in which everyone is using his invention while he languishes abandoned and unrewarded: &amp;quot;My recurring fantasy is that I am in a substandard nursing home, tied to some horribly fitted mattress in a pool of my own urine, and all around me there are other patients watching Interrotrons.&amp;quot;\n\nMorris is fascinated by why nearly every interview in Berlin began with a variation of the same question: How did you get them to talk to you\n\n&amp;quot;Why is that such an interesting question&amp;quot; he wonders.\n\nI tell him that I am more fascinated by the question that they didn&amp;#39;t ask. For all their curiosity in this area, not one single journalist asked, &amp;quot;Did you pay them&amp;quot;\n\n&amp;quot;It is interesting,&amp;quot; he agrees. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#39;t know if it&amp;#39;s a great idea for me to talk about it. I&amp;#39;ve always felt that if someone specifically asked me, I wouldn&amp;#39;t lie about it, because I think that would be incredibly stupid.&amp;quot;\n\nIt is not the first time he has paid a subject of his films. When he returned to find Fred Leuchter, the subject of Mr. Death who fecklessly becomes a hero in Holocaustdenial circles, several years after first interviewing him, he paid him to continue the project\u2014payments he rationalized in an interview at the time on the basis that he paid actors to act out scenes for his documentaries and he was asking Leuchter to recreate certain images from his life as an actor.\n\nFor Standard Operating Procedure, the first of the five &amp;quot;bad apples&amp;quot; Morris interviewed, Javal Davis, asked for a fee and Morris agreed. &amp;quot;The rest just followed in due course.&amp;quot; (Only the bad apples. If other subjects refused to be interviewed without payment, Morris didn&amp;#39;t pay them.) &amp;quot;In this instance, I justified it\u2014I think that&amp;#39;s how the contracts were written\u2014that I was paying them as consultants or advisers to the project. Yes and no. I was essentially, for all intents and purposes, paying them to be interviewed.&amp;quot;\n\nHe has this further to say on the subject:\n\n&amp;quot;I don&amp;#39;t think it influenced in any way the quality or content of the material. Maybe it did\u2014maybe I&amp;#39;m just kidding myself. But I don&amp;#39;t\u2026 The amounts of money were relatively small, and I just don&amp;#39;t see it being a consideration\u2026&amp;quot;.\n\nMy hunch is that you&amp;#39;re right, but my hunch is also that there are people who\u2026\n\n&amp;quot;Oh yes, they would take exception to it, or they would take it as another sign of the erosion of documentary standards or of some kind of journalistic standards. But there&amp;#39;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\u2014pecuniary reasons can be among them.&amp;quot;\n\nI guess some people will simply attack you on the grounds that they think these are bad people and you gave them money.\n\n&amp;quot;People can attack you for so many, many, many, many reasons,&amp;quot; he says. The truth is that he feels protective of his subjects, and he finds himself instinctively stepping to their defense: &amp;quot;I have this crazy hope that somehow these soldiers could be understood by more people\u2014maybe it&amp;#39;s the hidden social worker in me trying to get out.&amp;quot; He believes, and the complex story his film tells echoes this, that much of the blame has been misplaced: &amp;quot;I don&amp;#39;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&amp;#39;t create this place.&amp;quot;\n\nVerlin press roundtable:\n\n&amp;quot;Sometimes I can&amp;#39;t believe what people say to me oncamera. I just simply can&amp;#39;t believe it.&amp;quot;\n\n&amp;quot;You know,&amp;quot; Errol Morris says to me one day, apropos of nothing (or at least nothing that could easily account for what he says next), &amp;quot;anytime anybody thinks that I&amp;#39;m halfway intelligent, just remember that I stole my dog&amp;#39;s medication and took it. And actually almost drove myself crazy in the process.&amp;quot;\n\nI&amp;#39;m a little taken aback, and I wonder whether I have somehow misheard, or misunderstood, him.\n\nThis isn&amp;#39;t, I check, a metaphor\n\n&amp;quot;No.&amp;quot;\n\n(I wait, expectantly.)\n\n&amp;quot;I was going to write in to the New York Times ethicist, Randy Cohen, and ask him, &amp;#39;Under what circumstances is it okay to steal your dog&amp;#39;s medication&amp;#39; And I was going to give him the alternatives: &amp;#39;You steal your dog&amp;#39;s medication without telling him but you replace it\u2026. Is it okay, sir&amp;#39; &amp;quot;\n\nWhen did you do this\n\n&amp;quot;Not so long ago.&amp;quot;\n\nWhat was the medication\n\n&amp;quot;You want me to go into the details&amp;quot;\n\nI think so. Yes.\n\n&amp;quot;Selegiline. Supposedly, it increases the life expectancy of rats by 20 percent. Dogs take it to prevent the onset of Alzheimer&amp;#39;s. Senile dementia. It&amp;#39;s a cognitive enhancer.\u2026&amp;quot;\n\nIs it licensed for human use\n\n&amp;quot;Recently.&amp;quot;\n\nSo you sort of knew what you were doing\n\n&amp;quot;I don&amp;#39;t think I did, actually, because the effect of it was quite terrible.&amp;quot;\n\nThere would be an argument that you could have just gone to your doctor and said, I think I should try this.\n\n&amp;quot;That&amp;#39;s timeconsuming, as we all know.&amp;quot;\n\nYou started taking it regularly\n\n&amp;quot;Yes.&amp;quot;\n\nFor how long\n\n&amp;quot;Not long, because it was doing bad things. It drove me crazy. I stopped sleeping altogether. And you know, it&amp;#39;s been a wonder drug for Jackpot\u2014Jackpot functions now so much better.&amp;quot; He stops, and sighs. &amp;quot;I think I&amp;#39;m obeying my own rule that if you talk to someone long enough, they will show you how crazy they really are.\u2026&amp;quot;\n\nBut you took it for several days\n\n&amp;quot;Yeah. For a week.&amp;quot;\n\nHad you told your wife beforehand you were going to do this\n\n&amp;quot;I did, actually. She was really disapproving. She kept telling me to stop. I was afraid to go cold turkey.&amp;quot;\n\nAnd how was that\n\n&amp;quot;Not good. I don&amp;#39;t recommend it.&amp;quot;\n\nHave you done many things like this over the course of your life\n\n&amp;quot;Probably. Think of it as just desperation\u2026 I think it is probably good to feel desperate. It encourages thinking.&amp;quot;\n\n _Berlin press roundtable:\n\n&amp;quot;Sometimes, when people ask me about regime change in Washington, I say we need a species change. The species might be no damn good.&amp;quot;_\n\nWe meet for breakfast two mornings in a row at a Los Angeles hotel. Morris is the kind of man who, even before the first glug of unsweetened black coffee hits the back of his throat and the small hand reaches nine, is prone to start talking about epistemology and ontology and cloacal orthology, or contemplating how it would change the myth of Sisyphus if you told people he was paid for his pointless efforts, or relating how a famous concert pianist called Sviatoslav Richter became unable to perform in public unless accompanied by a plastic lobster, or worrying about how he might track down the audio of the announcement of Hitler&amp;#39;s death on German radio (the hardtofind full version, preceded by three thunderclaps), or musing about how a member of the Pythagorean school, Hippasus, was said to have been thrown off a boat by his fellow mathematicians and drowned for the crime of proving that the square root of two was an irrational number, or mischievously wondering if he can in any way compare himself to the niceguy Nazi masterinterrogator Hanns Scharff, who was so liked by some of his subjects that they kept in touch after the war and who went on to make mosaics for Disney World.\n\n&amp;quot;You know,&amp;quot; he tells me, &amp;quot;the best answer that I&amp;#39;ve ever had to the question &amp;#39;What is real&amp;#39; was provided at the Wisconsin state crime laboratory by a man who was in charge of maintaining the Gein archive. He provided a very powerful and thoughtful suggestion. We walked into the room, and there was this chair where the cane had been taken out of the seat and a woman&amp;#39;s buttocks sewn in. He looked at me nervously and, without any trace of irony, said to me, &amp;#39;You can tell it&amp;#39;s real because you can see the asshole.&amp;#39; With due respect to some of the great philosophers who have wrestled with this question over the years, this man was onto something.&amp;quot;\n\nChris Heath is a GQ correspondent."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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