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The Morris Microscope

Jan 1, 2008 12:01 PM, By Michael Goldman

Errol Morris mixes media in a documentary examining the Abu Ghraib photos.

Morris on process

millimeter: Did you use your famous Interrotron technique to interview the subjects in this film? How have your interview techniques evolved with technology over the years? (“Interrotron” refers to an interviewing process Morris invented based on the teleprompter concept, in which Morris and the person he is interviewing each sit in front of a camera viewing the other’s face displayed on a video monitor while they converse.)

Morris: Interviewing has changed, certainly. The whole nature of how I interview people has changed. But the interviews I do with the Interrotron — I’ve been doing that since 1992, for about 15 years, since I first used it for my interview with Fred Leuchter in [2000’s Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. That film came out after Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control, but the Leuchter interview was conducted before that film was made]. And of course, it was at the heart of Fog of War. The Interrotron [concept] remains the same. It’s based on two teleprompters, two video images. We cross-connect cameras and video taps so myself [and the interview subject] are looking at each other live — into the lens of the camera.

But that said, now we are able to shoot the interviews themselves in HD. In the pre-digital days, interviews were put together in hunks of 11 minutes because that was the length of a film magazine. Every few minutes, we had to stop and change mags and re-slate. That is how all my films were done until recently. Then, all of a sudden, you have high-end digital cameras — the Sony [HDW-F950] in this case — and I could start shooting interviews in high def. There was no need to stop after 11 minutes, or even 110 minutes. The cassettes are larger, and you can just pop another one in a matter of seconds without re-slating. So you never have to stop. These interviews are real long. The interview I did with Janet Karpinksy was shot over two days and was approximately a little over 17 hours. I had never done that kind of thing before. If I were shooting 35mm film, it would be hard to justify that.

How has the way you cut your films evolved in recent years?

I did a little film for the opening of the Academy Awards [telecast] this year, and one of the people I interviewed was [director] Alfonso Cuarón, and I asked him, “How come you gave yourself an editing credit?” His answer was completely appropriate: because he did a lot of the editing. I’m also in the editing room all the time, and it is perfectly legitimate for a director to give himself an editing credit for doing that, but I just don’t do that. I do sit in front of the Avid all the time, though — that digital salt mine where you work away interminably.

For this project, it was voluminous. That was something I had to come to terms with. It made the editorial process something that was very drawn out. My movies are made — not entirely, but to a large degree — in postproduction and editing. It’s just not something you can slap together as a script [and then follow that script]. You are actually writing the script while editing. The movie becomes emergent from all that. The one thing I have learned is that much [of the material] has to be discarded. What remains is the small residue of what you started with.

The whole editing thing has really changed. I think as much about this as anyone. It’s the theory of interviews on film — or better, digital media — meaning the question of eye contact, the idea of first person versus third person, and the whole idea of interviewing people at length. When you have lengthy interviews like these and have no idea what might come out of an interview, unendingly interesting kinds of things occur, and then you have to [fit it all together].

For this particular movie, I’ve had a fairly good cut of it for probably five months now, but I continued to work on it, and it always gets better. There is the question of when do you stop. There are lots of ways to know that, I suppose: when they tell you they won’t distribute your movie unless you stop, for instance. If you don’t stop, you’ll lose all your money. Those ways always work, but there is a certain point where you can’t make the movie better — you can only make it worse. The last few months [at press time], the movie got consistently better. Fog of War, though, was never finished. I didn’t even have a film print when we got it to Cannes. We had to digitally project it. Interestingly, it looked gorgeous, and that experience made me realize something that is increasingly obvious to people working in this business: Digital projection is the way to go. It is not a compromise. It is the preferred alternative. I can’t imagine film prints being around that much longer. They get damaged and dirty and cumbersome and heavy.

How would you prefer this film be projected and seen by the masses?

I wish I didn’t have to make a film print, to tell you the truth, because this is my first film in cinemascope with an aspect ratio of 2.40:1, and then I have to go and make an anamorphic print for [film] projection. I’d rather see it projected digitally. The amazing thing about a [cinemascope] frame is that you do not have to fill it in. You can direct attention to different areas of the frame. It is extraordinarily beautiful for interviews and, I think, very powerful.

What is your view on shooting entirely with digital technology? Is that something we’ll see in your future?

I never really seriously entertained [shooting all of S.O.P. in HD] as an option. I suppose I should qualify that in some way. Bob Richardson uses the full latitude of the [film] emulsion, and he’s very fond of creating, on one hand, rich, dense blacks and then blowing out or highlighting other parts of the image. The question is, is it even possible to achieve that kind of look without film?

But one of the cameras I used on this shoot was the Phantom v9 [high-speed digital camera from Vision Research]. That is a camera I first used on commercials. I did a whole campaign for Full Tilt Poker, which was shot on 35mm and using the Phantom, and I fell in love with the camera. It’s a really interesting device, because you can shoot really high speed and look at it practically in realtime — not quite in realtime, but very soon after it is shot. And you can get 2K resolution at speeds of about 1000fps. But very early on, Richardson said he refused to light for video when we used it. And that was the proper way to look at it — let video follow me, rather than the other way around.

Still, my reasons for not wanting to shoot [entirely] in video might change now that the [Red Digital Cinema] Red One camera is coming out. I’m very excited about Red. I’m a person who thinks that film works as much from what it hides as what it shows. I like limited depth of field and the idea of planes of focus. Even in interviews, there is something exciting about an interview shot where the entire face is not focused — maybe not the ears or eyes — giving you a sense of shape because of the limited depth of field. Until very recently, all of the digital cameras — even the high-end digital cameras — had chips that were more the size of Super 8 or 16mm than that of 35mm. Red is going to change that. I’ve always said that the minute you have digital cameras with a chip the size of a 35mm or Super 35 frame and you can slap 35mm lenses onto the camera — the lenses that I use all the time, whether it is Panavision or Cooke lenses or Zeiss high-speed lenses or whatever — the minute you can start doing that and create planes of focus the same way that you do in 35mm, then it will become less of an issue — film versus digital media. It’s all going to change — we all know it. It is changing, and I’d like to think I’m part of it.

What else is different about how you made this movie, from a technical point of view, compared to your past work?

I used material from cell phones. [The soldiers at Abu Ghraib] didn’t only take digital snapshots. They also took motion-picture images using their cell phones and, in some cases, their still cameras. I used some of these little digital movies in Standard Operating Procedure. What’s particularly interesting about that is what is the aspect ratio of video shot with a cell phone? They are ridiculous. Instead of 4x3, they are 3x4. Little more than tiny vertical strips that have a tiny image in them surrounded by a huge black frame. If this makes any sense at all, what we did was — if you have a little cell phone and you are panning left and right with it — we panned the image in black left-right also, so you get the feeling you are looking in a little slot that gives you a view of a little piece of the world. You have to see it to really understand. It’s all about finding new ways to use imagery, to incorporate that imagery into a film.

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