Errol Morris Interview WP: What is the latest on Randall Adams and David Harris? EM: Harris is still on Death Row, and I'm not sure when his next execution date is. Inevitably he will be given a lethal injection by the state of Texas. Exactly when that will happen is still unclear. WP: But not for the murder of the Dallas police officers, but for the other-- EM: Five months after I first met him he committed a murder of Mark Walter Mays in Belmont, Texas. Randall Adams is still out and out of trouble. It's an amusing sort of detail about the Texas Dr. Death, Dr. Grigson, who testified at Adams's trial and examined both Adams and Harris. It's one of those few instances where he was doubly wrong. Usually you only get to be wrong once at something, but he managed to be wrong twice in one case. He said David Harris had not killed and would never kill again. A good example of a false negative, because David Harris had killed and went on to commit additional felonies, including capital murder, and Randall Adams, who he said would continue to kill and kill again, has been out of prison now for ten years without any kind of record whatsoever, and had no record really before going into prison, either. . . . When I stumbled upon him by accident, this was a case that no one cared about. No one cared enough about it to not care about it. It was just the classic story of a person forgotten about, like the Edmond Dantas in The Count of Monte Cristo. It was a person who was a non-entity, who was lost in prison and who would've remained in prison for the rest of his life. I'm very proud of what I did in that case, regardless of whether he appreciated it or not. WP: You're proud of what you did for him and for exposing an injustice? EM: Yes. I was trying to right something which was a really terrible wrong. WP: Well I think indirectly, too, you've made a powerful argument against capital punishment, which I know you oppose. EM: Yes. WP: How would you define documentary or nonfiction film? EM: Well, people have said to me that my films are really not nonfiction because, after all, I have actors and reenactments and so on and so forth. My answer has always been that of course they're documentary, of course they're nonfiction, because these are real people. The drama in the film derives ultimately from the fact that there are real people expressing themselves on camera using their own words, speaking extemporaneously. When you watch The Thin Blue Line this is not an actor portraying Randall Adams. This is Randall Adams. This is not actors portraying the Dallas police. This is the Dallas police. And the drama, in good measure, derives from examining these people and trying to figure out why they're saying what they're saying. Are they telling the truth? What do they really mean by what they're saying? And that's something really quite different from watching a film with actors. In my films, the key difference--well, what makes them documentary films--is this out-of-control element of putting people in front of a camera and allowing them to express themselves without a script. That, I would say, is the documentary essence of my work and what sets it apart from what we would take to be scripted feature filmmaking. WP: And of course your method ends up allowing people to eventually contradict themselves and show what they thought was so certain is not so certain after all. EM: Absolutely. WP: Like so many film teachers, I'm trying to get people to appreciate and to enjoy a variety of films for different reasons. I'm wondering what you would say to viewers to persuade them to give documentary or nonfiction films a chance? EM: It is really exciting to see the unexpected, and so much of Hollywood filmmaking has been boilerplate filmmaking, cookie-cutter filmmaking, films which basically look very much alike and work in very similar ways. I'm not sure that this is an argument for everybody, but I think that's what's exciting about any art form is seeing people that are really exploring the boundaries, the limits of the medium, rather than doing the same thing as everybody else. Certainly it's what excites me. And I would certainly love to see an audience for that kind of filmmaking as well. Because it's different doesn't mean it can't be dramatic, interesting, exciting. In fact, it could be even more so. 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7

© Copyright 1999, Bedford/St. Martin's