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MillimeterDirector: Errol Morris
Oct 1, 1998 12:00 PM, D.W. Leitner
"Over the years I keep thinking: The whole idea of cinema verite did tremendous damage to filmmaking in general, and to documentary filmmaking in particular," ventures director Errol Morris, sounding a bit like the philosophy grad student he once was. "Because it carried this bogus metaphysical claim-nonsensical, if you stop and think about it-that style guarantees truth, that somehow if you juggle a camera around in your hands, sneak around in the corners of rooms and hide behind pillars, the Cartesian riddle will be solved as a result. That somehow epistemology will no longer play a role in what you do. That this is truth cinema, truth incarnate as revealed by a camera!"
Morris is anticipating his critics, of course. Like his acclaimed but controversial The Thin Blue Line (1988), his new documentary, Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control, released by Sony Pictures Classics, again transgresses the canons of documentary dogma.
In Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control, the anything-goes cinematography of Robert (Natural Born Killers) Richardson ignores preconceptions of what documentary camerawork should and shouldn't be, instead reaching out in its rakish angles, white-hot overexposed highlights and overcranked frame rates for poetic transcendence and spiritual grace.
This is helpful because, as in the case of Morris's first documentary, Gates of Heaven, a skewed meditation on the deeper meaning of pet cemeteries, Morris has again assembled a genuinely disturbing menagerie of obsessives and their pets. This time the owners include a mammal scientist, a robot creator, a topiary gardener and a circus lion tamer-and while some of the pets are, strictly speaking, lifeless, they are far from expired.
Consider: hairless "naked" mole rats reveling in their own delectable feces; "fast, cheap, and out of control" mini-robots mindlessly swarming with insect-like fervor; whip-tamed feral lions smelling around for an opportune moment to viciously retaliate against their trainer; towering graven images of cuddly animals scissored from bushes and hedges, threatening to sprout back like giant Chia Pets.
This is not your mother's documentary. "There's a moment in the filming of Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control in the garden," muses Morris. "It's 2 a.m., and we're shooting 120 frames a second, so it's necessary to light this place up like a Christmas tree. We have huge HMIs, three Condors, rain towers, fog machines, a crew of 40 people, and the gardener walking in the rain, and this friend of mine leans over and says, 'Well, you may be a fly on the wall, but it's a 500-ton fly on the wall.'"
"Part of the style was shooting in every way imaginable on everything imaginable: every kind of emulsion in black & white and color, including infrared black & white. I certainly would have shot in infrared color if I could get the stock."
Then there's "degraded imagery," as Morris puts it. "I call it 'Bob TV.' Richardsonwould shoot these pristine 35mm dailies, beautifully shot, beautifully lit, and take video transfers of the dailies, put them on some crummy television set, then film off of the TV set, not controlling roll bars or anything. And in the process produce some of the most beautiful images that I've ever seen, images that are in some very real sense reprocessed, a kind of visual equivalent of Velveeta Cheese. But somehow, unlike Velveeta Cheese, simply great."
And if the public doesn't warm to the notion of paying $8.75 to watch fetid naked mole rats shimmying across the silver screen? Perhaps there's "Errol TV" in our future: Interrotron Stories, named for Morris' famed interview contraption, a sort of TelePrompTer with Morris' face hovering Oz-like where the text would be, assuring direct audience eye-contact with talking-head subjects.
In the meantime, Morris fine-cuts his next opus, Dr. Death. "Bob shot a lot of this material at the same time we were shooting Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control. We went down to Nashville and shot in the death house, the prison just outside of Nashville where Fred, the electric chair repairman, had just installed a new system. One of the strongest images that I think I've ever produced is Fred strapping himself into his own electric chair."
