FILM: Beyond the Camera: Interview with Errol Morris

Errol Morris Interview

Errol Morris was born in Hewlett, Long Island, New York in 1948. Thus far, his filmmaking career includes the direction of five feature-length documentary films: Gates of Heaven (1978); Vernon, Florida (1981); The Thin Blue Line (1988); A Brief History of Time (1992); and Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997).

The following interview between William Phillips and Errol Morris was conducted on March 20, 1998 over the telephone.

William Phillips I've read that you did your undergraduate work at the University of Wisconsin and majored in history, and I'm intrigued that you worked for a while as a detective. I've been wondering if your experience as a detective was helpful to you as you worked on The Thin Blue Line, or on A Brief History of Time, or on any of your other films?

Photo of Errol Morris

Errol Morris The answer is that it was helpful. I worked as a detective before I became a filmmaker very, very briefly. But I spent close to two years working as a detective between making Vernon, Florida and making The Thin Blue Line. I was completely out of work as a filmmaker and could not get money to make another film, and I fortunately had the opportunity through a mutual friend to work for one of the best private detectives in America. This was not the low end of the detective business, it was the high end. So instead of doing matrimonial cases or skip tracing, I was working on Wall Street, watching trading, mergers and acquisitions, and huge corporate cases. And at this time I could open The New York Times to the front page of the financial section and usually find one or two, maybe even three, cases that I was involved with. It was a high-profile detective job. It was a really terrific time, and I think I was good at it, if only because when you strip away everything, people have these images of what being a detective is like. But when you strip all of that away, it really comes down to your ability to talk to people, and, even more significantly, to have people talk to you. And that's really what I do in my filmmaking as well. So, you might say that there was a detective element in my filmmaking well before this time, and a filmmaking element in my detective work. It's talking to people, getting them to talk to you, and listening.

WP: It seems to me that in especially The Thin Blue Line you're playing the detective in the whole process of making that film. And it's interesting that you were working as a detective before you made The Thin Blue Line. That was your major work right before working on The Thin Blue Line?

EM: Yes, and then I got the money to make a movie again. Thank God I don't have to be a detective anymore. Of course that proved to be completely untrue.

WP: I was at a party in Ann Arbor many years ago talking to a man who ran a detective agency in the area, and he told me that he preferred to hire philosophy students as detectives. I noticed that you have a background in philosophy. Is that helpful, too?

EM: Yeah, I think it's an odd job, and I think what really helps is some innate curiosity about the world and about people. But the world is properly considered something of a mystery, and it's our job, if not to solve that mystery, then at least to attempt to explore it. And I think The Thin Blue Line takes its unusual character from this odd position I found myself in in Texas. I jokingly referred to myself at the time as a new kind of hyphenate. You know, not a writer-director or writer-producer, but a director-detective. Because I wasn't playing a detective in Texas, I really in fact was a detective. After the movie was completed, I toyed with the idea of writing a book, because the movie is only the tip of the iceberg. You see the results of my detective work in the movie, but you don't really find out about how that detective work was done the details of how I tracked David Harris, the man who I believed was the killer, for two and a half years, until I finally got him to confess. Or how I uncovered material from the records of the Dallas District Attorney's office and the Dallas Police Department about the investigation prior to Randall Adams's arrest and conviction for the murder of a Dallas police officer. And it's an amazing story, a story that really still hasn't been told, and maybe someday I will tell it.

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