NEW YORK (AP) â Errol Morris has just sat down with a reporter when his wife calls.
âIâm being deposed,â Morris says, smiling, into his phone. âI hope that itâs going to turn into a criminal investigation, but I believe itâs just an interview.â
Morris, the veteran documentarian of and knows a thing or two about interviews. He famously invented a contraption called to capture face-to-face eye contact on camera.
In his latest film, Morris sits down with the celebrated spy novelist John le CarrĂ©, the enigmatic author of âThe Spy Who Came in From the Coldâ and âTinker Tailor Soldier Spy.â The interviews were conducted shortly before
Their exchange probes the life and work of le Carré, whose real name was David Cornwell, and who as a former British intelligent agent was, himself, expert in conducting interrogations. The film, which opens Friday in select theaters and on Apple TV+, is based on It's also an investigation into the murky depths of human nature and of history, where fact and fiction often blur.
The conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
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AP: Some of the first interviews you ever conducted were with the serial killer Ed Gein, whose murders inspired Robert Blochâs novel âPsychoâ and Alfred Hitchcockâs film. I donât know if you consider that the beginningâŠ
Morris: Itâs certainly one of the starting points.
AP: Why do you think that was, that your life as an interviewer began in such a dark place?
Morris: I really donât know if it has a simple answer. Maybe I felt comfortable talking to people. It was one of the ways I investigated murder, certainly Ed Geinâs murders in Waushara County, Wisconsin. It wasnât just interviews. I mean, itâs a pattern in a lot of the films that I made, certainly the early films. âThe Thin Blue Lineâ was a lot of interviews, but it was a lot of just research. I worked as a private detective, and what did I do as a private detective? The same damn thing. Talking to people. Research. I had a friend who once told me that you couldnât trust people who didnât talk a lot because how else would you know what theyâre thinking? And I think there is some truth to this. When people talk, they have a way of revealing things about themselves. Didnât Freud have that idea?
AP: Was that your approach to interviewing le Carré?
Morris: What really puzzles me about some of the press in connection with âThe Pigeon Tunnelâ is they talk about it as a contest between me and David Cornwell. Maybe he saw it that way, but I never saw it that way. Iâve never seen any interview that way. I often like to say that I belong to the shut-the-f----up school of interviewing. If you just let people talk, within a very short period of time they will reveal how crazy they are. That certainly motivated âGates of Heaven.â âGates of Heavenâ is a series of interviews but theyâre monologues. Then I had this idea, what if I made a movie â this was around the time I did Robert McNamara for âThe Fog of Warâ â what if I break some kind of standard rule? I love, by the way, breaking rules.
AP: Reenactments, most notably in âThe Thin Blue Line,â were breaking a rule, werenât they?
Morris: They were. It doesnât matter if itâs documentary or drama, itâs all fake. Itâs all reenacted. Itâs all recreated. The oddity of all this was that there was this idea that documentary by just the very fact that it was made was truthful. Call it a naĂŻve idea â I would call it a naĂŻve idea. Truth isnât something thatâs handed through some kind of style or process of filmmaking. âThe Thin Blue Line,â I thought, was endlessly misunderstood.
AP: It did lead to justice, vindicating an innocent man. As much as , that was a film that arrived at some truth.
Morris: Eh. Thereâs a line that I just adore in âThe Pigeon Tunnel.â Thereâs an illustration from âThe Looking Glass Warâ about how people see the world differently â inarguable. But the fact that people see the world differently does not mean the truth is subjective. Itâs an important distinction and a confusion thatâs made endlessly.
AP: Especially nowadays.
Morris: Especially nowadays, where the whole idea of truth is challenged. I have a friend who was probably the greatest living philosopher â he died recently â . And we were talking about âRashomon.â His explanation for âRashomon,â he said: âOh, itâs obvious. Theyâre all lying.â People donât have to be lying. They can be self-deceived. They can be confused. We see the world differently. And then David talks about objective truth, that he believes in objective truth â as do I.
AP: Le Carré and you would seem to share some of the same obsessions. Did you feel sympatico with him?
Morris: Well, I really like him. And yes. I mean, Iâve never made a film where I havenât thought after the fact that I could have done a better job, and this film is no exception. I didnât know that he would die so soon after that interview. People say I must have known or he must have known that it was to be his last interview. But I donât think so. Just look at him on screen. Heâs all there. This is not a man who is failing. Itâs a man whoâs at the top of his form. Extraordinarily fast, articulate, knowledgeable, funny, perverse. Yeah, thatâs where I identify with him most of all â his funny, perverse sense of humor.
AP: The central, mysterious metaphor of le CarrĂ©'s, âThe Pigeon Tunnel" â a tunnel that funnels pigeons to shotgun-wielding men â looms throughout the film.
Morris: Iâve often compared the writing to a Kafka parable, except John le CarrĂ© wrote it. What does it mean? To take one of the most famous Kafka parables, âBefore the Lawâ: âThis door was meant for you and you alone and now Iâm going to shut it.â Now what does this mean? The pigeons, are they us? Who are the shooters? Is it the kind of parable that you need to think of in that way? Itâs Sisyphean. People just endlessly doing things without even knowing why.
AP: That sounds like the view of history in âThe Fog of Warâ â everyone just bumbling through.
Morris: Because we live in an era where people are just saturated with conspiracy theories of one form or the other. Conspiracies sort of simplify the world. They make the world intelligible to people. They do turn the world into string pullers and dupes. When I did the (Steve) Bannon movie ( ), Bannon was completely obsessed with cyclical history, and I would say fascists love cyclical history. Because: âMan isnât the author of anything. All there is is dharma, destiny.â I believe something much closer to what you just said â that history is a muddle. People are at cross-purposes with each other. They are really too confused to ever effectively conspire to do anything. I say to (le CarrĂ©) at some point: âHistory is chaos.â And he agrees, âHistory is chaos.â
Jake Coyle, The Associated Press
