Errol Mark Morris (born February 5, 1948) is an American film director known for documentaries that interrogate the epistemology of their subjects, and the invention of the Interrotron. In 2003, his The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.[1] His film The Thin Blue Line placed fifth on a Sight & Sound poll of the greatest documentaries ever made.[2] Morris is known for making films about unusual subjects; Fast, Cheap & Out of Control interweaves the stories of an animal trainer, a topiary gardener, a robot scientist, and a naked mole-rat specialist.[3]
Early life and education
Morris was born on February 5, 1948,[4] into a Jewish family in Hewlett, New York.[5] His father died when he was two and he was raised by his mother, a piano teacher.[5] He had one older brother, Noel, who was a computer programmer.[6] After being treated for strabismus in childhood, Morris refused to wear an eye patch. As a consequence, he has limited sight in one eye and lacks normal stereoscopic vision.[7]
In the 10th grade, Morris attended The Putney School, a boarding school in Vermont. He began playing the cello, spending a summer in France studying music under the acclaimed Nadia Boulanger, who also taught Morris's future collaborator Philip Glass. Describing Morris as a teenager, Mark Singer wrote that he "read with a passion the 14-odd Oz books, watched a lot of television, and on a regular basis went with a doting but not quite right maiden aunt ('I guess you'd have to say that Aunt Roz was somewhat demented') to Saturday matinées, where he saw such films as This Island Earth and Creature from the Black Lagoon—horror movies that, viewed again 30 years later, still seem scary to him."[8]
College
Morris attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison, graduating in 1969 with a Bachelor of Arts in history. For a brief time, Morris held small jobs, first as a cable-television salesman, and then as a term-paper writer. His unorthodox approach to applying for graduate school included "trying to get accepted at different graduate schools just by showing up on their doorstep."[8] Having unsuccessfully approached both the University of Oxford and Harvard University, Morris was able to talk his way into Princeton University, where he began studying the history of science, a topic in which he had "absolutely no background." His concentration was in the history of physics, and he was bored and unsuccessful in the prerequisite physics classes he had to take. This, together with his antagonistic relationship with his advisor Thomas Kuhn ('You won't even look through my telescope.' And his response was 'Errol, it's not a telescope, it's a kaleidoscope.')[8] ensured that his stay at Princeton would be short.
Morris left Princeton in 1972, enrolling at Berkeley as a doctoral student in philosophy. At Berkeley, he once again found that he was not well-suited to his subject. "Berkeley was just a world of pedants. It was truly shocking. I spent two or three years in the philosophy program. I have very bad feelings about it", he later said.[8]
Career
After leaving UC Berkeley, he became a regular at the Pacific Film Archive. As Tom Luddy, the director of the archive at the time, later remembered: "He was a film noir nut. He claimed we weren't showing the real film noir. So I challenged him to write the program notes. Then, there was his habit of sneaking into the films and denying that he was sneaking in. I told him if he was sneaking in he should at least admit he was doing it."[8]
Unfinished project on Ed Gein
Inspired by Hitchcock's Psycho, Morris visited Plainfield, Wisconsin in 1975, where he conducted multiple interviews with Ed Gein, the infamous body snatcher who resided at Mendota State Hospital in Madison. He later made plans with German film director Werner Herzog, whom Tom Luddy had introduced to Morris, to return in the summer of 1975 to secretly open the grave of Gein's mother to test their theory that Gein himself had already dug her up. Herzog arrived on schedule, but Morris had second thoughts and was not there. Herzog did not open the grave. Morris later returned to Plainfield, this time staying for almost a year, conducting hundreds of hours of interviews. Despite this, his plans to either write a book or make a film (which he would call Digging up the Past) were left unfinished at the time. In an October 2023 interview with Letterboxd
Style and legacy
To conduct interviews, Morris invented a machine, called the Interrotron, which allows the interviewer and his subject to make eye-contact with each other while both staring through the camera lens itself. He explains the device as follows:
"Teleprompters are used to project an image on a two-way mirror. Politicians and newscasters use them so that they can read text and look into the lens of the camera at the same time. What interests me is that nobody thought of using them for anything other than to display text: read a speech or read the news and look into the lens of the camera. I changed that. I put my face on the Teleprompter or, strictly speaking, my live video image. For the first time, I could be talking to someone, and they could be talking to me and at the same time looking directly into the lens of the camera. Now, there was no looking off slightly to the side. No more faux first person. This was the true first person.[35]"
Author Marsha McCreadie, in her book Documentary Superstars: How Today's Filmmakers Are Reinventing the Form, had paired Morris with Werner Herzog as practitioners and visionaries in their approach in documentary filmmaking.[36]
Morris uses narrative elements within his films. These include but are not limited to: stylized lighting, musical score, and re-enactment. The use of these elements is rejected by many documentary filmmakers who followed the cinema vérité style of the previous generations. Cinema vérité is characterized by its rejection of artistic additions to documentary film. While Morris faced backlash from many of the older-era filmmakers, his style has been embraced by the younger generations of filmmakers, as the use of re-enactment is present in many contemporary documentary films.
Filmography
Feature films
- Gates of Heaven (1978)
- Vernon, Florida (1981)
- The Thin Blue Line (1988)
- The Dark Wind (1991), fiction movie
- A Brief History of Time (1991)
- Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997) [40]
- Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (1999)
- The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003)
- Standard Operating Procedure (2008)
- Tabloid (2010)
Accolades
- Gates of Heaven (1978) was long featured on Roger Ebert's list of the ten greatest films ever made.[45]
- Golden Horse for Best Foreign Film at the Taiwan International Film Festival for The Thin Blue Line (1988)
- New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics Best Documentary for The Thin Blue Line (1988)
- Washington Post Best Film of the Year for The Thin Blue Line (1988)
- Edgar Award for Best Motion Picture, from the Mystery Writers of America, for The Thin Blue Line (1989)
- Guggenheim Fellowship (1989)
- MacArthur Fellowship (1989)
- Emmy for Best Commercial for PBS commercial "Photobooth" (2001)
- In December 2001, the United States' National Film Preservation Foundation announced that Morris's The Thin Blue Line would be one of the 25 films selected that year for preservation in the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress, bringing the total at the time to 325.
Bibliography
Books
- A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald (Penguin Press, 4 September 2012)
- The Ashtray (Or the Man Who Denied Reality) (University of Chicago Press, 2018)
Articles
External links
- Errol Morris discusses his career on the 7th Avenue Project radio show
- Errol Morris (Jonathan Crow, Allmovie)
- Errol Morris (Nina Rehfeld, GreenCine)
- Voices on Antisemitism Interview with Errol Morris from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
- Werner Herzog in conversation with Errol Morris (The Believer)
- The Unknown Known: Errol Morris's New Doc Tackles Unrepentant Iraq War Architect Donald Rumsfeld
References
- Elaine Dutka. 'Fog of War' lifts Morris to his first Oscar victory Los Angeles Times, 2004-03-01, retrieved 2022-12-20^
- Nick James. The Greatest Documentaries of All Time Sight & Sound, British Film Institute, September 2014, retrieved 2022-12-20^
- Roger Ebert. Way out and in control