By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Errol Morris on interview technique
I’ve had the privilege of hearing a few versions of how Errol Morris conducts his interviews, but this is more terse than usual. From an interview at Spiegel Online about the upcoming Standard Operating Procedure: How long are the interviews? Long. Ten hours, 12 hours, 14 hours, two days. Long. Can you tell us something about your interview technique? It’s the “shut the fuck up” school of interviewing. You shut up, you let them talk. And you try to ask stuff which is remotely interesting to them, and to yourself.
I try never to have a list of questions. Philip [Gourevitch], who has been going through these transcripts, told me something I had never realized. He said: “You know, you say the same thing at the beginning of every single interview. You always say, ‘I don’t know where to start.'” It’s true, I never know where to start. And then they usually say something, thank God. You had the photographs and the videos they shot, and you decided to add another level by recreating images. Why did you decide to do that? This is now the third film where I have used reenactments. I remember someone asked me during the making of “The Thin Blue Line” — I had terrible trouble getting the money to shoot the reenactments — if I really needed the reenactments. The answer is yes, I really need them. I’m very protective of my reenactments. There’s this mistaken idea about reenactments in general that you’re showing somebody what really happened. I’ve never used reenactments that way, nor do I ever imagine myself using reenactments that way. What you’re doing is you’re creating a little world where people can think about a problem or a set of questions. I’m trying to get the audience to think about certain questions about who was where, when, and what did they see. It forces you into a position where you are asked to think about something or to think about something the way I am thinking about it. In “Standard Operating Procedure,” if the idea is entering history through a photograph, if you’re somehow going through the surface of that photograph and going beyond, the reenactments help you to do that. They slow everything down, almost, but not quite, to that instant of photography and ask you to reflect, to listen to what people are saying about that moment when the photograph was taken and the circumstances under which it was taken. It’s creating a kind of strange abstract world around a photograph… With “Standard Operating Procedure,” I’ve collected an enormous amount of evidence in this story. This is one of the best investigations I’ve ever done. I’m really proud of it. Also in this case I kept saying I want to make a non-fiction horror movie. I wanted to make something that looked like a horror movie. [Photo from Morris’ website.]
