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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.

Sidebars
Shooting S.O.P.
Conforming S.O.P.

In 1997, millimeter Senior Contributing Editor D. W. Leitner respectfully accused director Errol Morris of “transgressing the canons of documentary dogma” while writing about Morris’ then-new documentary Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control. Ten years later, the Oscar-winning filmmaker (for 2003’s The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara) is at it again, toying with the whole concept of what exactly a documentary is or isn’t as part of his newest work: Standard Operating Procedure (S.O.P.) from Sony Pictures Classics.

The film — like Morris’ famous The Thin Blue Line (1988) — features what may loosely be called re-enactments of events surrounding the infamous Abu Ghraib prison scandal that the main players in the drama describe, but as with The Thin Blue Line, those re-enactments do not necessarily reflect the exact specifics of the situation — nor are they intended to. Robert Richardson, ASC — the co-cinematographer on the film, along with Robert Chappell — says the re-enactments should be more properly defied as “creative translations.” The film also features visual effects and other dramatic touches, such as ghostly images of characters who have come and gone from the story and much more that might lead viewers to conclude the movie is hardly a standard documentary.

“There is obviously a very strong documentary element in this movie. When you see [former Abu Ghraib warden] Janet Karpinsky or [private] Lindy England [a key player in the scandal] talking, they are not actors playing these roles — they are real people,” Morris says. “The interviews are not scripted or rehearsed. They are investigative in nature. I’m talking to these people to find out something about them.

“But I am playing with the idea that this is clearly more than a documentary. To me, the whole idea of drama versus documentary — considering that every documentary has elements that are controlled and every dramatic film has elements that are uncontrolled — is [hard to delineate]. The central intuition about documentaries is that there is something spontaneous, unrehearsed, unscripted about it. That’s the essence of the cinéma vérité idea — things unfold before the camera; [they are] not orchestrated for the camera. Drama is the other way around — the whole auteur theory is that the director controls everything. But when you think about it, both documentaries and dramas have pieces of both genres involved. You can’t say nothing is scripted or controlled through editing and framing and 1,000 other devices in a documentary, just as you can’t say everything is controlled in drama. These are the things that give film its power.”

However one describes the film, Morris’ primary goal throughout was to examine not so much the Abu Ghraib scandal itself but rather the famous photographs taken by some of the soldiers involved — photos that brought the infamous event to the world’s attention.

The concept hit Morris while working on a series of lengthy essays for his The New York Times blog (morris.blogs.nytimes.com) in which he analyzed the context and meaning of some vintage photographs from the Crimean War taken by famed British war photographer Roger Fenton. His general conclusions in those essays were the notion that photographs are rarely fully understood by those showing or viewing them and that the meaning of such imagery is — by definition — altered, limited, or changed by the use of captions and other text to describe them as well as by placement and other factors.

Therefore, Morris says he began to wonder about the specifics behind the Abu Ghraib photographs during the exact moments when the camera shutter closed and each of those photos were launched into the world. The movie thus features interviews with the people who took the photos, many of the people pictured in the photos, the people whose lives were changed by the photos, and even the technical specifications of the photos — what cameras were used, what time they were taken, what angle they were photographed from, and what other photos of the same events existed that were taken with other cameras.

“The movie came out of an odd set of concerns. I had been thinking about photographs [since writing the essays for the The New York Times],” Morris says. “I got to thinking about the infamous [Abu Ghraib] photographs from the fall of 2003. I’m really interested in the whole question of what a photograph means — how the context in which a photo appears can ... determine how we see the photograph. It occurred to me — and this is the intuition behind the movie — that no one had bothered to contextualize these photos. Everyone had opinions and strong feelings about them, and they quickly became politicized in the U.S. and in the Arab world. But the question came up, how much do we know about the circumstances in which they were taken? So what I produced, essentially, is a movie about photographs and the people who took those photos. The great mystery we try to get to is what goes on inside of people’s heads. That is the mystery of any of these photographs when you stop and realize that someone, presumably like ourselves, was looking through the viewfinder taking the picture. I would say the mystery of what, exactly, was going through their minds remains at the end of this movie, but I also think that it is important to examine them. I believe they will be the iconic photos of the Iraq War.”

It’s all heady stuff, and from a technical point of view, that mission made the project an incredibly complicated affair. Morris estimates that his team sorted through more than 150 hours of interviews and millions of words worth of transcripts. The team also found ways to incorporate imagery from dozens of different formats — ranging from 16mm, 35mm, HD material, standard-def video, and even cell phone-originated photographs and video.

Morris readily credits his veteran team with figuring out ways for him to sort through it all — from his longtime producer Julie Ahlberg to Richardson and Chappell to editor Andy Grieve to veteran visual effects supervisor Robert Legato. Legato, along with producer Ron Ames, created a workflow infrastructure for the project to allow Legato and his team to conform the picture before it went to Company 3, Santa Monica, Calif., for colorist Stefan Sonnenfeld to do the final DI color correction work.

During his chat with millimeter, Morris had much to say about the technical challenges behind S.O.P., the art of documentary filmmaking, and the impact digital technology is having on how he makes movies. Following are further highlights from that conversation.

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.