Platform

"Standard Operating Procedure:" Questions and answers with Errol Morris

By Susan Gerhard

Transcription by Eve O’Neill.

Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris reaches into the murkiest of waters and somehow manages to extract clarity. His fishing expeditions have taken him from the lonely highways of Texas to the torture chambers of Iraq. What he pulls up is never the expected answer; often enough, it’s a revelation. With Standard Operating Procedure, which opened in the Bay Area last Friday, Morris forces audiences into a new understanding of the infamous torture photos that emerged from Abu Ghraib, and our complicity in their making. His investigative zeal traces back to the Bay Area, he said in a recent onstage conversation during the San Francisco International Film Festival. What follows is the transcript of the interview with B. Ruby Rich during his SFIFF Persistence of Vision award screening at the Sundance Kabuki April 29.

Graham Leggat: Please welcome with me, the director of Vernon, Florida, among others, The Thin Blue Line, A Brief History of Time, Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, the award-winning The Fog of War, of course, as well as tonight’s tour de force Standard Operating Procedure, Errol Morris.

(Applause.)

Leggat: On behalf of the San Francisco Film Society, I would like to award you, Errol Morris, with the 2008 Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award.

(Applause.)

Errol Morris: Very nice to be back here. I owe a lot to the San Francisco… The Thin Blue Line played at this festival, at this very theater. It really was the start of my career as an employed filmmaker. I’d made films before then, but they really had not led to any kind of employment as such, except that I had worked for a private investigator for years as an out-of-work filmmaker. So this festival has made all the difference to me. It’s great to be back here. I can’t believe it’s been 20 years since the The Thin Blue Line, but thank you all for being here tonight, it’s terrific. And thank you very, very much for this award. This is my home town in many ways. I made my first film in the Bay Area. I first became really truly interested in film by going constantly to screenings at the Pacific Film Archive, which in those days was run by Tom Luddy….And of course thank you to the faculty of the philosophy department at the University of California at Berkeley for throwing me out of the department, as someone really unworthy. Thanks to their kindness and largess I am here today. (Laughter.)

(Applause.)

Leggat: Just for those of you who are unfamiliar… the Persistence of Vision award is given to a filmmaker working outside the mainstream of fiction, fiction narrative films—

Morris: It’s a dangerous award!

Leggat: It is a dangerous award, it’s true. But I’m sure you’d be into that. We’re very very lucky tonight to have talking with Errol one of the Bay Area’s foremost public intellectuals, a wonderful writer, thinker and teacher. She’s currently the professor of community studies and Graduate Director of the social documentation program at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Please welcome B. Ruby Rich. (Applause.)

B. Ruby Rich: Hello everyone, we can’t see you but you can see us.

Errol, you’re back here where it all began, and I thought since you already told the story about getting kicked out of the philosophy department, since they’ve already heard the story about Werner cooking his shoe, I thought I’d ask you about something that’s very prominently displayed on your website, which is your San Francisco Art Institute student ID. It says 1973, and I didn’t know that you had gone to the Art Institute.

Morris: Well, I went to the Art Institute because they had cameras that you could borrow. So I enrolled. And I had a hard time getting a camera out of ‘em. You had to take all these courses. Which I wasn’t really interested in. But I did get the camera finally and I started shooting a film. And, I often look back on it and think I should’ve finished it. Maybe it would’ve been a lot better than everything that followed. But I abandoned it.

Rich: What was it about? Who were you looking at?

Morris: I had all these characters. I had filmed a character who I called ‘the paralyzed man.’ And he was completely wrapped in bandages. And I had lines for each of these characters, ‘I may be completely paralyzed but I can see the stars,’ and so on and so forth.

Rich: So this is where the fiction comes that’s been haunting your documentaries ever since, is that what you’re saying?

Morris: That might be the case.

Rich: Let me ask you about the first film of yours that we know, which is Gates of Heaven….Back then when you were examining these different characters and different communities. Do you remember still now what was driving your curiosity then?….

Morris: I like to think of it as desperation rather than curiosity. (Laughter.) … I was a troubled graduate student and at one point I wanted to write my dissertation on the insanity plea, maybe because I myself was going crazy. And I started interviewing mass murderers. It was the heyday of mass murderers in the Bay Area. It was the mid ’70s. (Laughter.)

*Rich: It really was, this part isn’t a joke. *

Morris: And I started going to trials. Trial of mass murderer David Carpenter [Trailside Killer of San Francisco]… Trial of mass murderer Herbie Mullin. And a lot of the ideas that I still have come from that period. I also started interviewing people for the first time; this is the beginning of my interviewing habit. By the way, if any one knows of a 12- step program for withdrawing from interviewing, I’d be delighted to hear about it. I started interviewing murderers and their families. And I started hearing all of these crazy things that were unendingly interesting. Murder trials are endlessly fascinating. Listening to psychiatric testimony, people wrestling with various attempts to explain bizarre, violent behavior. Usually being quite unsuccessful in the process. Leaving more questions than answers. I often would say I have a favorite line from each murder case that I become involved with. Ruby and I worked in Santa Cruz—a lot of these murders occurred in the Santa Cruz area, actually.

Rich: They tried to reassure me when I went: ‘Don’t worry, none of them occurred on campus.’

Morris: I had become interested in this mass murderer Herbie Mullin. And I went to see his father. This was the day after he had been convicted of ten counts of first degree murder.

I went to see his father up in the mountains in Felton, and this is really what got me hooked on all of it. His father was very, very angry. And he asked me, he said, ‘Are you planning to see Herbie?’ I said, ‘I’m going to try to visit him in prison.’ ‘Well, if you see Herbie, I want you to tell him one thing. He better watch out or he’s gonna be in biiiig trouble.’ (Laughter.) So I knew that this was the kind of work I was cut out for. And everything else followed in due course.

Rich: You know, when you started making these documentaries it was still a time when people believed a lot in ‘documentary truth’—when people really believed the claims of cinema verite, or the American version, direct cinema, and there was a lot of rhetoric around the reliability of documentary. And you really grew up with that. How much of your early filmmaking was consciously in reaction to that?

Morris: A lot of it was in reaction to that. At the Pacific Film Archive I got to see all of these very odd films—Tom Luddy had brought the New German Cinema. In this case he brought Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog to Berkeley. There’s a line I read recently about Marquez, he was talking about the experience of reading a copy of Metamorphosis for the first time and he said to himself, ‘I didn’t know you were allowed to do that.’ I think it’s a very, very important line, it’s telling you that you have license to do things you never imagined. I remember seeing Werner’s Fata Morgana, the dwarves film Even Dwarves Started Small, Land of Silence and Darkness, and thinking, well this is really something quite different. Maybe I could do something quite different. I don’t even know if it’s this conscious formula, but it’s a very, very big thing. Looking at all of these films, seeing Wim Wenders’ early films at the PFA. And then just sheer perversity. Just wanting to do something different just because you’re told you’re supposed to do things in a certain way. The question is always, ‘Why? To what end? What for?’ The idea that you should make documentaries with available light, hand-held camera, you should be as unobtrusive as possible, hiding, perhaps even lurking in the shadows. (Laughter.) I started thinking about the possibility of doing everything as the exact opposite as what you were supposed to do. So I would say, instead of using handheld cameras, let’s get the heaviest equipment we can buy or rent. Instead of using available light, let’s light everything. Instead of hiding or lurking in the shadows, let’s be as obtrusive as possible. Let’s rearrange everything. And the result was Gates of Heaven. And it shows me, it shows me that all of these rules can be changed. Wim Wenders is one of the very, very first people to see a rough cut, at the PFA, the first time I ever put it in the theater. And I had no idea if I could ever make this work as a movie, if it made any sense at all, and I asked Wim what he thought of it, and he said ‘Oh, it’s obvious it a masterpiece.’ Which was very, very, very, very kind.

Rich: You know, you had this statement that you made; it was an interview in Cineaste the year after The Thin Blue Line came out, talking about this whole question of what documentary should look like and you made this statement, I’m quoting you now, ‘Truth isn’t guaranteed by style or expression. It isn’t guaranteed by anything.’ And Linda Williams, who I know is in the audience tonight and teaches at Berkeley, used that in a great piece about The Thin Blue Line, "Mirrors without Memory," talking about how documentary language was changing and how wrong it was to have this belief that there was this one truth that you could find, this one kind of image. I wonder what you were thinking about before and after The Thin Blue Line because—(cell phone ring). Sorry, if everyone would just shut their cell phones that would help a lot.

Morris: I don’t want to get into a fight with Ruby, but I try to encourage cell phones. (Laughter.)

Rich: That’s because you’ve seen that cell phone cameras can be so very important to history. No, just kidding.

Morris: No, it’s true, though, absolutely true. Some of the most arresting images from Abu Ghraib were made using cell phone cameras.

Rich: As you’ll see: You’ll be on YouTube by midnight.

Morris: The movie is produced by Sony Classics and I always feel I should thank Sony for making the movie possible because almost all of the photographs taken at Abu Ghraib were taken with Sony cameras.

Rich: As you’ll see in a little while, they’re specifically identified by camera brand. Sony is predominant.

Morris: But those were the actual cameras used.

Rich: So, this is what I wonder, were we sold a bill of goods in terms of those early days of documentary? I think it’s so wonderful and ironic that The Thin Blue Line, the documentary that gets attacked for fictional style is the one documentary that got a man out of prison.

Morris: Ironic, isn’t it?

Rich: Logical, perhaps. But where does that leave us now? Do you think people are still sort of looking for these markers of truth in documentaries? Do people still come up to you with this? Where is there left to go with this now, for you, having broken this sort of sound barrier already. What’s left on the other side?

Morris: Well, someone asked me today how I would define documentary, and I said I think it’s very, very simple. You’re making a movie about the world, you’re making a movie about things that have really happened and it’s the pursuit of truth. It’s that underlying intention to investigate, to find things out, to find out what is true and what is false which—it dignifies the entire enterprise. And is essential. It’s not as though you pursue truth with a list of rules. You pursue truth with whatever is available, whatever is at hand. It’s thinking things through. It’s looking for new evidence. I responded to a number of questions that had been given to me by W.J.T. Mitchell, who had written an article about the film for Harper’s, and he asked me about solving mysteries. And I said there is no mystery to solving mysteries, there is just investigating, looking at evidence. This idea that style guarantees truth is my enemy. Style doesn’t guarantee truth. I sometimes compare it to the idea that writing a sentence in one font rather than another makes it more true. I just don’t believe that’s the case. Although [someone] who came to one of these Q&As …. said he had heard me say something like this, [and] sent me an article about a kid who had analyzed all the term papers that he had written and all the grades that he had gotten and found out he did a lot better in certain fonts. (Laughter.)

Rich: So there.

Morris: I think everyone should find out that personal font that works best for them.

Rich: Errol, you talked about having worked as a detective, usually you talk about it to reference time when you could not be a fully employed filmmaker. But, what I wonder is—

Morris: No, no, no, not fully employed. Employed in any way. (Laughter.)

Rich: What I wonder is this, how much of an affect do you think the detective work has had on your filmmaking every since then? How much do you think it influenced the way that you look at argument, the way that you look at character, the way you listen to people?

Morris: I think I was detective long before I became a detective. I was a detective from the very beginning. In fact, I was very surprised when I got this work, how similar it was to doing what I had already been doing. It was kind of embarrassing. I found that it was easier to get people to talk to you if you said that you were a filmmaker. Particularly if you didn’t have a camera present. What’s the harm in talking to him? He’s a filmmaker without a camera! You can say anything! (Laughter.) But I have found that investigating with a camera, you would think, this can’t possibly work. You can’t bring someone into a room with 10, 20, 30 crew people, lights, etc, etc, and expect to hear something new. And I found again and again and again over the years that you actually can investigate with a camera, very powerfully. The Thin Blue Line, and, I believe, this current film, Standard Operating Procedure, is proof of that.

Rich: I think that there’s a way in which people address the camera throughout in your films that they don’t in other films. I don’t know how much these days it has to do with the Interrotron, or whether it has to do with the expectation of your process, I have no idea, but it seems to be me you get a quality of concentration that has to do perhaps with duration, perhaps the number of hours that you talk to someone, and also perhaps with the kind of intimacy that only distance allows, the fact that you’re not even in the room with them—

Morris: Oh, I am, everyone thinks I’m not in the room with the Interrotron—

Rich: Everything I read says you’re not in the room.

Morris: Wow.

Rich: Don’t believe that, no matter what font it’s written in.

Morris: No, I am. I am.

Rich: You’re just, they’re not looking at you. They’re looking into the camera. But they give a different kind of attention to that.

Morris: I like to attribute everything to the Interrotron, ‘cause it really is a nifty device.

Rich: Do people all know by now what that is?

Audience: Yeah. No.

Morris: Yeah. Um. I’ve been using it for, 15 years? And I neglected to patent it. Let this be a lesson to all of you. You have a year following the first public announcement of your invention to patent it, or else forget it. I was living in this really rotten apartment in midtown Manhattan and it was filled, it had, including myself, it was filled with failed show-business types. It was filled with [inaudible’s] sister, the guy who had written Yellow Rose of Texas and neglected to copyright it. A whole set of extremely sad stories. And I was convinced when I couldn’t patent this thing that I was going to end up in some—not that this has changed much over the years—I was going to end up in some sub standard nursing home, with Interrotrons everywhere. Interrotrons in front of every bed.

Rich: Do you want to explain to these people what his is? You want me to have a bad try at—

Morris: No, I’ll do it. I’ll do it. Thanks. It’s interesting. I explain it all the time and no one ever gets it. Because—oh, I think I did a really great job of explaining the Interrotron that time, and they’ll come into the studio and see this thing and say, ‘Oh. This is not what I expected.’ But here goes, bear with me and if anyone has to take a cell phone call I understand. Do you know what teleprompters are?

Audience: Yes.

Morris: Yes?

Rich: I think they do.

Morris: They do. They were honest about not knowing what the Interrotron was. I think we should give them the benefit of the doubt.

Rich: Errol Morris, Friend of the Audience.

Morris: Teleprompters were invented – why were they invented? They were invented so a news anchor or a politician could read text and at the same time make eye contact with their audience. Simple as that. So, what they did is they put a half silvered mirror at 45 degrees with a monitor, the text backwards on it. And you can see the text reflected on that mirror, that half silvered mirror and at the same time you’re looking right into the lens. I’ve been obsessed with eye contact from the very beginning. I don’t know, maybe I just can’t relate to people, and I thought, if at least I make eye contact with them things will be better. In Gates of Heaven I put my head right against the side of the camera and if you know where to look you can see the side of my head. My cameraman would grab my hair occasionally and pull me back out of frame. Of course, even if your head is right against the lens, people are looking at you—they’re not looking into the lens. It’s not the same thing. I now describe it as the difference between the first person and the third person. Are you observing two people talking? Are you one and the same with the camera? So I get on this idea, why put text on a prompter? Says who? Why not put anything you want on a prompter? Why not have two cameras and two prompters? Imagine a camera trained on Ruby, a camera trained on me. Two prompters, I’ll call her camera the A camera. Because I want to be nice. And, the camera on me is the B camera. Both of them have prompters on them. I take the video feed of the camera on me and I put it on her prompter. I take the video feed from the camera on her and put it on my prompter. We’re both looking directly down the lens and at the same time making eye contact. It’s very, very, very powerful. So when you look at the film, I don’t want you to pay any attention whatsoever to the film itself, now you are entirely focused on eye line. (Laughter.) Forget about everything else, please. And yes, during the movie, leave your cell phones on.

Rich: You are so being set up for this film because they’re all kind of relaxed now, laughing…. You know what, you just raised something that’s seriously interesting, which is this whole question of identification that audiences go through with documentaries in particular, with all film. And I wonder how much of that was driving you, not just wanting yourself during the time of production to be communication with the person you were interviewing in your documentary about, but also the fact that this was going to change how the audience in the movie theatre was going to see that person, how they were going to experience that person. It wasn’t just you, it wasn’t just you they were looking at, they were then going to be there on the screen looking in this, just, unprecedentedly direct way at the audience. How that was going to affect peoples’ experience years from now?

Morris: I didn’t think how truly arresting it could be until I started looking at material shot with Robert McNamara. McNamara is talking about Armageddon and he’s staring right into the lens of the camera. It’s very, very, very dramatic. And very interesting. I think this is near, are we near the end of our rope, here?

Rich: We’re nearing the point where we’re supposed to be allowing them to speak. In fact, I’ve been looking for my cue. We have a little time here for you to speak and to ask any questions you’d like about Errol’s films up until now. We’re going to wait for any questions about *Standard Operating Procedure until after you see it, I think it’ll make more sense, though I know you all have been reading about it, and reading a lot of controversies, but I think we’ll deal with that after the film, so anything else is fair game.*

Audience member: Thanks so much for being here and being such an interest with your answers and your time, Mr. Morris. I just wanted to ask a question about a project I know very little about and some of it is rumor, and I’m just wondering what, if it did exist and what’s going on with it. There’s the juxtaposition of famous people, powerful people perhaps, talking about their experiences with film. For instance Donald Trump talking about Citizen Kane, I heard something like Gorbachev talking about Tarkovsky, is that something that you’re still working on? A project you’re going to continue with?

Morris: He is talking about a film that I made (he waves to audience member )—I just saw someone I know!—A film I made for the Oscars. Every time Laura Ziskin is hired to produce the Oscars, she hires me to do a film for the very beginning of the Oscars. The first time I did this film where I ask people about their favorite movies. It’s actually one of my ultimate green room experiences, I was in a studio in New York and I had in the studio at the same time I had Iggy Pop, Donald Trump, Walter Kronkite and Mikhail Gorbachev. Oh, and then Al Sharpton came in. (Laughter.)

Now all I really needed was these sound bites—3, 5, 10, 11,12 seconds, whatever. But of course I got a lot more material and I just have it stored away. Material on each one of these people that I brought in. I talked to Donald Trump about Citizen Kane and edited that material into a little movie that I put on my website. Which I rather like. Self-serving of me to say so, but yes, I think it’s really strange and really funny. And I was going to do a whole series of them, I just have never gotten around to it. I asked Gorbachev if he’d ever seen Dr. Strangelove. (Laughter.) Because it sort of occurred to me over the years that I used to think Dr. Strangelove was a documentary. And of course now we know absolutely that that’s true. (Laughter.) But I’m gonna finish it, I promise! And yes, ok I’ll say it here now—Gorbachev’s favorite film: Tarkovsky’s ‘The Mirrior?’ An interesting choice.

Rich: It explains a lot.

Audience member: I really love The Fog of War and when I was first watching it in the theater, about half way through the film, I had this epiphany that I felt like suddenly I was not just getting a view into the mind of McNamara but that I was getting a view into the mind of Donald Rumsfeld. The difference of course is that Rumsfeld will never grow a conscience after the fact. How much of this was part of your awareness when making this movie? Had that occurred to you at the time as well?

Morris: It was certainly part of my awareness of the movie that the issues McNamara was talking about became more and more and more relevant every day. That was one of the very odd things about making Fog of War. It was not obvious at the start, but it was certainly more than obvious by the time the movie was finished. I never liked these comparisons, I have to confess, between Rumsfeld and McNamara. When Rumsfeld left office, perhaps not soon enough, I would get all of these phone calls, various newspapers, to comment on the similarity between these two Secretaries of Defense, 40 years apart. McNamara took office in ’61, Rumsfeld in 2001. And I reminded the people who were interviewing me the oddity of these 40 years, the difference. When McNamara became the Secretary of Defense there was the bellicose Joint Chiefs of Staff who wanted pre-emptive war against the Soviet Union. Kennedy and McNamara’s job was to keep the lid on. They were the doves. The Joint Chiefs were the hawks. Forty years later it was the exact opposite, and that is really truly interesting in and of itself. There’s a story to be told about Rumsfeld as well. I would love to interview him at some point if he’s willing, but I think we’re talking about two very different men and two different, very different moments in history.

Audience: The first time that I saw The Thin Blue Line, the thing that really impressed me was the balance between investigation and interviewing….How much do you need to know before interviewing somebody and is there a point where you think you know too much and you’re not going to ask? Because you really know a lot about somebody before you go in front of the camera and start talking to them—

Morris: Sometimes, not always.

Audience member: So when you decide to say, I know enough or I don’t know enough, I need to do some more groundwork, do you go back then? Back then with follow up questions?

Morris: For the most part I never interview people twice. I certainly have done that, in McNamara’s case I brought him back 3 times. It changes with every single interview but one thing I firmly believe, if you know everything that you’re going to hear in advance of the interview, why bother? What’s the point? I never go in with a list of questions. I prepare. I remember preparing for my first meeting with McNamara. I felt like I was cramming for a test, which in many ways in fact I was. I read his books very, very carefully, I thought about them. But I didn’t come in with a list of prepared questions. Because anything can happen in an interview, you don’t have any idea what someone is going to say. When I started working with Philip Gourevitch on the book, Standard Operating Procedure, I gave Philip the interviews and he said, ‘My god, are you aware that there’s close to 2 millions words of transcript?’ I thought he was complaining that there might not be enough material. (Laughter.)

He said to me, ‘Are you aware that you always say the same thing at the beginning of every interview?’ And actually I was blissfully unaware of this. I always say, ‘I don’t know where to start.’

With McNamara, I think this is a very good example. With McNamara he came in on a Tuesday, the Sunday before the NY Times had run an article about Bob Kerry, Congressional Medal of Honor winner, Vietnam hero, US senator, etc., etc., etc., accused of war crime. And McNamara and I started to talk about the Kerry article and he was annoyed. He said Kerry is not to blame for anything. War crimes do not concern ordinary soldiers, they concern people who make policy. This is the kind of thing you’re supposed to hear at the end of hours and hours and hours of interviews, you’re not supposed to hear them at the very, very beginning of an interview. And he started to talk about something I knew nothing about, as it turns out no one knew anything about it, he’s never really talked about it publicly. His role working for the army air force during the bombing of Japan in 1945, his role in the fire bombing of Tokyo. Just amazing stuff. I don’t know how else to describe it. McNamara speaking openly and frankly about the possibility of his being a war criminal. Now, he’s saying it with respect to WWII, but the inference of course is absolutely clear.

Rich: You know, I’m just gonna jump in here with one thought, because before you said that Errol, I was thinking about this kind of ongoing tension in your work, between the detective and the philosopher, between these two parts of your approach to the subject and now I wonder, to what extent do they come into your presence and your camera as if they’re coming to a confessional? Do they come there, all ready to reveal what they’re hiding? Or is it your interviewing, your technology then that makes them reflect out loud?

Morris: I think it’s simple. I think I’m empathetic and I want to listen. I’m not there, actually, to get any kind of confession. I’ve heard people endlessly say to me, ‘Why can you make them confess?’ and my answer is, ‘I’m a Jewish boy from Long Island, I’m not a Catholic priest.’ (Laughter.)

Rich: On that note, we’re ending the Q and I think you’re about to see the latest work from a Jewish boy from Long Island.

Morris: Thank you all very much and I will be here with Ruby to answer questions after the film, and I am quite interested, I’m very tempted to just go into some long rambling monologue about how you should look at this movie, but I know that’s a very bad idea. So I won’t. But we’ll be here after the screening to answer questions after the movie and I would love, love, love, love to answer some questions and get some kind of response. So thank you for being here tonight. (Applause.)

[After film.]

Rich: I think I’m going to start this while you all take a minute to recover and ask you one question first, Errol. You made *The Thin Blue Line and an innocent man who had been imprisoned, Randall Adams, got out as a result. The man who played the scapegoat and served the time for somebody else’s crime got out. And you just said to me earlier that after making this film, you feel that Sabrina Harman is the Randall Adams of Abu Ghraib. Could you talk a little bit about that? *

Morris: I should take just one slight step backward. I have shown the film to a number of different audiences and I am always surprised by the reaction. I’m also surprised by people telling me when they’ve seen the film the second or third time it radically changes for them. And essentially, it’s a question for this audience, because I’m curious. The bad apples are considered to be truly, truly beyond the pale. Villains in the true sense of the word. Are you still left with that impression after seeing this movie?

Audience: Bad apples? Who?

Morris: The bad apples who were referred to by various members of the administration as the source of the entire problem and they involve five of the people who I interviewed, Sabrina Harman, Megan Ambuhl, Lynndie England, to be sure, Javal Davis and Jeremy Sivits. I was unable to interview both Ivan Frederick and Charles Graner. But those are the seven. The people really beyond the pale. Has that changed for you as a result of seeing this movie?

Audience: Yes.

Morris: Any Nos out there? Why no?

(Inaudible from the audience.)

Rich: Did you hear the answer up there? The answer was —

Morris: He didn’t really think of them as beyond the pale to begin with, this really must be San Francisco. (Laughter.) It’s my version of GPS.

Audience member: I thought of the women as below-average intelligence. And the men as sadistic psychopaths. Not necessarily the ones you filmed—

Morris: You’re talking about us right? (Motions to Ruby and himself.)

Audience member: But I think the sadistic psychopaths are probably the ones you didn’t film. But the women really seemed below average intelligence to me and I think that’s why they were so easily manipulated by the men.

(Nos from audience)

Morris: You know, I’ve seen a lot of women of below-average intelligence and they don’t really include the women in this movie. I’m terribly sorry.

(Light applause from audience.)

Morris: Is this applause from women of sub-average intelligence? (Laughter.)

_Audience member: To go back to your question: I never really bought the whole bad apples theory in the first place. I think that there’s a culture that the military creates that leads people to do things that they wouldn’t ordinarily do. It’s like the test with the prisoners and the guards. Any one of us could conceivable be put into a situation like that and react in a way totally unexpected and totally opposite to what we think our behavior would be in that situation.

I think your film, if anything, really shows that to be true. I love the fact that what you uncover, as with many of your movies, is there’s a lot of ambiguity in situations involving human beings. And it’s not black-and-white, and this whole situation is presented as being black-and-white, and the media needs conflict and needs heroes and villains and these people were cast as the villains. And the truth is much, much more complicated and I really appreciate that your film brought that to light. _

Morris: Well, thank you very, very much. (Applause.)

Rich: I think that something really interesting happens with this film. A lot of things are very interesting, but it seems to me that we go into the film expecting that we’re going to get the truth about the photographs, that we’re going to get an investigation into the photographs or who these people were and what happened, and instead what we come out with is the realization that the photographs are the mere sliver of evidence of what went on, and that there was this huge unseen machine going on there, still going on, that hasn’t been interrupted at all. And I think it’s remarkable the way in which you’re able to do that through the way in which you interview people and the kinds of symbolic stages that you’ve done throughout to try to fill in for us those gaps between what we’re hearing and what we’re seeing and everything else that surrounds it. That wasn’t a question. (Laughter.)

Morris: But thank you. Of course this movie was inspired by photography and by these photographs in particular. How photographs can reveal and conceal. Let me just say a few words about what’s still bothers me about all of this. Maybe it’s that residual feeling that I haven’t really done all that I could do, or all that I’ve uncovered isn’t really represented in the movie. I’ve written a piece for the New York Times on Sabrina Harman and her smile. It continues to bother me. There’s something very disturbing about that whole story. I think it’s the best example I can give about how photographs can act as a cover up and as an expose. Again, it’s a question for this audience. Is it clear that Sabrina Harmann had nothing whatsoever to do with the death of al-Jamadi?

Audience: Yes.

Morris: Good. What is so peculiar about this story for me, is how I myself looked at that photograph when I first saw it, the photograph of the smile, the thumbs up, the corpse. I thought, ‘What a monster.’ Later on I realized that Sabrina was in no way involved with this man’s death. I realized he had been killed by the CIA and that the top brass of the prison were involved in an elaborate cover up. A cover up of a murder. Al-Jamadi’s body was removed on a gurney, an IV placed in his arm, etc., etc., etc.

Now, was the CIA interrogator who was alone in that room with al-Jamadi, was he ever charged with a crime? No. Do we know his name? Yes. Was anybody involved in the cover-up ever censured in any way for their participation in covering up a crime? No. Sabrina Harman, on the other hand, spent a year in prison. There was a laundry list of the crimes that she had committed. At first it included a lot of the stuff involving al-Jamadi, the dead Iraqi. A lot of it was dropped, Sabrina feels, because they didn’t really want it to be further examined in a court martial. I would repeatedly ask myself, it was a question I kept coming back to again and again and again, ‘What exactly is it that they did?’

We’re all horrified by it, we’re horrified by the picture. Of course, oddly enough we see the smile but we don’t see the crime. The crime is invisible. The example that I use in my essay is the Cheshire cat, everything disappears, everything vanishes save for the smile. What exactly is it that Lynndie England did? She was asked to pose in a number of pictures by her them boyfriend Chuck Graner. I know the use of that tie down strap was authorized by the medical authorities at Abu Ghraib, what exactly is the crime that she committed? On the other hand, I also know that part of the policies in place at the time involved American women humiliating Iraqi men. Tim Dugan comes to Abu Ghraib, his first interrogation, there are two female American interrogators interrogating a prisoner, an Iraqi prisoner who has been stripped nude. Tim Dugan asks himself, ‘What is going on here? What is this really about?’

Sabrina Harman and Javal Davis walk onto the tier, they walk onto Tier 1A, this is mid-October 2003, they see naked Iraqi prisoners with women’s panties on their heads in pretzel positions. Stuff, I might remind everyone here, they did not create. It was there, in place, when they arrived. A war of sexual humiliation. A war to show them who is boss. Shock and awe. Why no plan for after the war? Because that wasn’t the point, the point was to show who was the bigger man here, find Saddam, kill him, turn American foreign policy into a charade. Devote the entire resources of a country of 300 million people to trying to kill one man. Where is the crime here? I have a very simple thesis. When Chuck Graner took that picture of Lynndie England and the prisoner known as Gus on the leash, Chuck Graner was doing something on the one hand very simple and on the other hand something very complex. He was taking a picture of American foreign policy.

(Applause.)

Morris: What I find outrageous is that people are not outraged by what is going on in our name.

(Applause.)

Audience: What makes you think we’re not outraged? We’re outraged!

Morris: It doesn’t matter, this is San Francisco!

Audience member: Thank you very much. As with all of your films, I always find myself very moved when I leave, and um, one think that I’ve been thinking about as I’ve been watching this unfolding criticism of this film and the controversy that has come about. And it strikes me after seeing this film that it’s just one more distraction and distortion to try and outweigh the 99 percent of the other information that you’re showing, so that then things have to be talked about, this has to be talked about as some sort of equivocation, like you have done something wrong so therefore everything else is wrong that is being represented. And I’d like to hear you talk about that because I can’t help but feel very sorry for my country, very sorry for our soldiers who are fighting in our name and very sorry for these young people who were the butt of all of this.

Rich: Can I add something on to that?

Morris: Of course.

Rich: I wanna just add something onto that before Errol answers it, and I really appreciate that question. In terms of the recent direction that this controversy has taken with the piece that was in the New York Times on Saturday about whether you had paid people for interviews and whether that then invalidates the entire film. It occurred to me that in the same way that we’re hearing the Presidential campaign has turned into a game of ‘gotcha’ I feel that this has also turned into a game of ‘gotcha,’ where they think that they can invalidate what you have to say by focusing on that. You know, remembering what happened after The Thin Blue Line, when Randall Adams got out of prison and sued you for not paying him. For as much as he wanted to be paid or imagined he should be paid. I though, OK, so that happened and now you’re you’re being attacked, this time around, by somebody else for paying people.

So either you pay too much or not enough. And I wonder even how much relevance that has to the realities of documentary filmmaking today? To the realities of what constitutes exploitation of subjects? To how people work in documentary when it’s no longer completely tied to journalism, completely tied to old-fashioned print journalism procedures. It’s a cluster of questions I just wanted to add on to yours in terms of how you shot through some of what’s coming at you now and how you think about your own practice in view of that.

Morris: There’s so many things coming at me. It’s really hard to know where to start. I thought that I had put this whole question of reenacted events, images, to rest years and years and years ago. I’ve used them in every single film that I have made. In Mr. Death, in A Brief History of Time, in The Thin Blue Line, and now in Standard Operating Procedure. It may be my fault ultimately, the use of reenactments. The word itself, is probably a mistake. I’m not reenacting scenes. It’s not Archimedes in the tub with his V-8 moment, ‘Eureka!’ These are ideas that are being illustrated, lines from interviews, thoughts that I’ve had about the meaning of what I hear and what I see.

If I were to pick my favorite re-enactment, my favorite illustration from Standard Operating Procedure, I would say it’s the drop of blood that falls on Tony Diaz’s uniform. He’s called into the shower room by the CIA interrogator. Who asks him to ‘Hang him a little higher.’ He’s in a Palestinian hanging, a kind of low-budget crucifixion. The MPs try to hang him a little higher. The hood is taken off, they realize he is dead. A drop of blood falls on Diaz’s uniform. And at that moment, the moment that Diaz is describing this scene and he’s going back three years into the past… by the way, an interview where someone describes a past event is a reenactment in words of what had happened before…He’s wrestling with it.

I felt him wrestling with it. You know, I’m not involved in this, but I am involved in this, but I’m not involved in this, but I am involved in this, and I’m not involved but why is there a drop of blood on my uniform? What is that about? And I remember my feelings at that point in the interview, I felt he was talking about all of us, he was talking about me. The same kind of logic that I go through. I didn’t vote for him in 2000, I didn’t vote for him in 2004, I’m really not involved in any of this, it has nothing whatsoever to do with me, I’m not complicit. But them again I am involved. And the drop of blood, I’m not reenacting some scene, I’m trying to make myself and the audience for my movie think about the questions embodied in that drop of blood and what Diaz is saying.

If doing this invalidates two-plus years of digging, interviewing and research I’m the crazy one. Now the newest wrinkle, it turns out that I have been paying some of these people. I paid the bad apples in this movie. Something that I didn’t particularly want to advertise, but on the other hand I have no desire to hide. They would not have appeared in the movie had they not been paid. It just would never have happened. Except one of them didn’t want to be paid, but since I paid the other four I felt it was indecent not to pay him as well, and so I insisted on it. There’s a very good argument that can be made that not paying, take Lynndie England for example. A person who is seen by many people as the central villain of the story. Her mother thrown out of the trailer park where she was living with her grandson, Carter, Lynndie’s son. Poverty on a level that I don’t believe anybody in this audience can even imagine. I know I can’t imagine it. This is not a newspaper interview. This is something that requires people to travel. In the case of Lynndie England, I brought Lynndie, her lawyer, her lawyer’s wife, I brought Carter, all to Boston. I paid to put them in hotels. I paid them per diems, as anyone would be paid in the motion picture business. I also paid her money for the interview itself. I don’t regret it. When I was speaking after the screening of the film at the Tribeca Film Festival there was a long discussion between myself and Anthony Swofford, an actually moving discussion, when I tried to talk about my feelings on soldiers and how poorly the military has been used by this administration, that this was not an anti-military film.

The end of all of this, the Times reporter comes forward and shoves a tape recorder in my face and says, ‘You knew it was wrong to pay them, could you comment on that?’ I asked him, ‘Did you see the movie? Or read the book?’ ‘I don’t have time to do that.’ I would like anyone who believes that these five interviews are hopelessly tainted by money that they were given to tell me what inaccuracies they have found, of what was destroyed by the fact that money, a small about of money, changed hands in this instance. To not have paid many of these people would have been exploitation of the worst sort. You’re absolutely right, I got sued by Randall Adams after I got him out of jail. He thought I was making a lot of money. One thing to me is absolutely clear—the movie, by the way, was distributed by Miramax—one thing to me was absolutely clear. Randall Adams had never, ever met Harvey Weinstein. (Laughter.)

I can tell you how much money I’ve made from these movies. It’s very, very, very close to nothing. I make my living by doing commercials, directing commercials. I make my living through advertising. I lose money making these films, I’ve lost money on every single documentary film that I’ve made—

(Applause from audience.)

Morris: Don’t applaud that! (Laughter.) All it means is I am a male of substandard intelligence. (Laughter.)

Audience member: I’d like to return to the question that you asked about the bad apples and I think it’s very clear that your film has done a fabulous job of exonerating the people that you interview and certainly suggesting the responsibility of those higher up in the system in general. However, I really felt that even at that level there was a very dangerous and frightening, in respect to our culture as a whole, and the people that you interviewed, abdication of responsibility, even on their parts. And it reminds me of the infamous 1950s Milgram experiment and I wonder what our society has learned since then. One of the things that actually troubled me a little bit about the film was the use of the term ‘weird’ and ‘weirdness.’ It’s your first question that we can actually hear in the film and it’s the term that ends the film, with the final line that is stated.

Morris: I never noticed it before, and thank you.

Audience member: I wonder if weirdness, unfortunately is something that has become emblematic of the state of our moral outrage, that that is the only way that we can talk about these things, is to say their weird, rather than to move into a different level of self criticism as a culture in general. But my question for you is also, since you spoke about the importance of how you see the film affecting us as United States citizens, I’m also wondering what type of impact you see it having on the world and in particular in the Muslim world.

Morris: There’s a lot to reply to.

Rich: You have a minute and a half.

Morris: I’ll make it fast. (Pause.) (Laughter.) Maybe I won’t. Weird. Oh, the question about the Middle East, it hasn’t been shown in the Middle East yet. I don’t know what effect it will have. It was shown of course at the Berlin Film Festival and there was an international audience there and most of the reporters, if not all of the reporters that I spoke to from Arab countries loved the film. I don’t know if that’s really the kind of question you’re asking. I don’t know what effect this is going to have. I don’t know what effect, perhaps none, that it will have in this country.

Rich: What effect would you hope it to have?

Morris: The same thing that I hope for in every film I have ever made, that it will make people think. I don’t pretend to have all the answers. Many people will end it with this. Many people have expressed annoyance that these people do not express remorse, contrition. I somehow find the question in appropriate, oddly enough, and I’ll explain to you why. Imagine that you were Sabrina Harman, imagine that you took these pictures to expose the military as nothing but lies. Imagine you watched as a DIA interrogator skates away without censure. Imagine you see the higher ups all around you who knew about the photographs, knew about these policies, and were responsible for implementing them. Imagine that you spent a year in prison and these people remain untouched. Would you be in an incredibly apologetic mode? Thank you all very, very much for coming tonight.

topics: bay area, critics, directors, documentary, san francisco international film festival

05.12.2008