AVC: There seem to be a lot of ideologues in documentary filmmaking who are sensitive to tone and style. Some even say that you should never hear a filmmaker's voice in a film, while your voice is in almost every one of your films.
EM: I didn't allow my voice in Gates Of Heaven or Vernon, Florida, but I was forced to put my voice into The Thin Blue Line, because my camera broke on the last day of production, when I was filming my interview with David Harris. That was on a Friday, and I had no camera available. So I went back on Saturday with a tape recorder and taped that final interview. At the time, I thought it was a disaster, but actually, in retrospect, it was a very, very powerful conclusion to the movie.
So my voice went in. And then I started experimenting with it in Fast, Cheap & Out Of Control, and Mr. Death, and of course in The Fog Of War. I'm surprised when people ask me if I did the interviews in The Fog Of War. Like, what, there's this midget that follows me around? [Laughs.] He's hardly noticeable, so it works out well for both of us.
AVC: There are a number of aesthetic positions you can take as a documentarian. You can be Frederick Wiseman and stay completely out of the way, watching without comment. Or you can be Ross McElwee, and make personal essays, or Michael Moore, and be a personality in the film in a different kind of way. And there's a lot of debate over which method is more honest: the pretense of objectivity or the utter abandonment of it.
EM: On my website [errolmorris.com], I have the text of a lecture I gave at Harvard, where I address a lot of these issues. One of the central documentary issues, I suppose, is "truth." Because you are making claims about the real world. You're not creating an imaginary world or a fictitious world. You're commenting in some very direct way on the real world. You can ask yourself, if a film makes a claim, is the claim true or false? Having said that, a style of presenting material doesn't guarantee truth. There's this crazy idea that somehow you pick a style, and by virtue of picking the style, you've provided something that is more truthful. It's as if you imagine that changing the font on a sentence you write makes it more truthful. If I use Times-Roman, is it more truthful than if I use Helvetica? [Laughs.]
Truth exists independent of style. It involves all kinds of issues. Properly considered, it's a quest, a pursuit. To say that vérité is more truthful than something that is narrated is just misplaced. Completely wrong. And the fact that people still talk about it as though they're really talking about something... it puzzles me greatly. A moment of reflection about it tells you that it makes no sense! If someone tells you that George Bush is not the 43rd president of the United States, they might be engaged in wishful thinking, or denial, but if they make that claim, it's either true or false! And you can assess that, regardless of whether there's an omniscient narrator, or an unreliable narrator, or it's shot in vérité, or it's manipulated, it's agitprop, whatever! It makes no difference! It's a style!
Different issues are being addressed than the issues people think are being addressed. This is a long-winded discussion, and yes, I am writing a book on this.
AVC: Coming out when?
EM: [Sighs.] You know, I'm trying to do too much. I'm trying to do drama now. I have a whole number of projects. And I keep up this steady diet of commercials. I'm shooting them constantly. I do my ninth campaign of this year next week. And nine campaigns means that I've probably done over 50 commercials this year alone.
AVC: Do you put the money you make on commercials toward your other projects?
EM: I've never made any money off of any of my films. Statement of fact. So without commercial work, I would be in big trouble. I would be one of those people selling grapefruit by the side of I-10 in Santa Monica. I'd like to think I'd at least move to a warmer climate. [Laughs.] Because of commercials, I can afford to live in the Northeast during the winter.
- Comments