Errol Morris Interview WP: When you were editing Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, did you try at any time to use scene cards and arrange them in four columns so you could see-- EM: Yes. I mean, we tried everything. WP: Did that help? EM: Well, everything helped ultimately. Oddly enough, I think I lost faith in my craft. But it came together, when it came together, relatively quickly. It came together when I started to pay attention to what people were saying. I believe every film I've made has this obsession with language, about how people reveal themselves through how they talk. I lost sight of that in the early attempts to put Fast, Cheap together. The cutting was too rapid, it was too disorganized, it was too disjoint, but worst of all, it did not allow people to talk at length. The minute I started putting the movie together in a different way so that the people were talking at greater length, revealing themselves through talk, the movie very quickly started to become a movie. It became about people again. It developed some kind of emotional resonance, some kind of emotional depth. I even think I should have gone even further in that direction of preserving the individual characters. It's a tricky deal, that movie, because the way we sort of thought about it, was that the beginning should have some kind of prologue that gives you a taste of how crazy it's going to be--how it's going to be this odd mixmaster of four stories--and then immediately following that there should be this clear statement that these are the four characters--this is who they are, this is what their interests are--so that you were not confused about who the subjects, what the subjects, of the movie were going to be. And then as the movie evolves, these four characters start to get shuffled and combined, until two-thirds of the way through it you feel you're almost in freefall between them. And then in the end they sort of break apart, and the hope is that there are four discrete stories again at the end. Four discrete stories that are nonetheless tied together. WP: On the making of Fast, Cheap & Out of Control again, how much did you actually shoot and how much of it was found footage or previously shot footage? EM: Well, you know, I've never really kind of assessed it in some pure quantitative terms, but I would say that no more than 15% of that movie is found footage. WP: Of all the footage that you shot, how much of it did you actually use in your film? EM: You know, I don't even know if I could answer that, but I tried to use a lot of [cinematographer Robert] Richardson's imagery, because it was fabulous. I mean, he created so many amazing images, and I tried to pack in as many as I could. WP: So, more than half, would you say, of what you shot or had shot, actually ended up in the finished film? EM: Well, it's hard to know because you shoot a shot, and you use one-third or one-quarter of it, and it's like, how many shots did I use in the total length of the film? The goal is that you shoot as much as you need to in order to make the movie. In Gates of Heaven I shot relatively little material because I had no money. It wasn't by choice, and I was fortunate that I was able to get as much good material as I got with very limited resources. My principle has always been: want not, waste not. And the goal is to shoot as much as you can, not as little as you can, because having more to work with in an editing room is not a bad thing; it's a good thing. The "more is more" principle. 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7    N E X T : Adding Music

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