Though Oscar-winning The Fog Of War director Errol Morris is arguably the premier documentary filmmaker of this age, he originally turned to the form out of intellectual curiosity. Morris was a philosophy student and an artistic dilettante in the mid-'70s when he met German director Werner Herzog, who encouraged Morris to pursue his interest in human oddity by making movies. Morris had planned to start either with a film about serial killer Ed Gein or a film about people who butchered themselves for insurance money, but he got sidetracked by a news item about a mass exhumation at a California pet cemetery. He talked to the owners of the cemetery shipping out the dead pets and the owners of the cemetery receiving them, and he cut the footage together into a laconic, ironic study of the ladder of success. The resulting film, 1980's Gates Of Heaven, was little-seen on its original release, but early champion Roger Ebert named it one of his 10 favorite movies of all time, and gradually the documentary's reputation grew, along with Morris'.
Gates Of Heaven has been newly released on DVD, along with Morris' second feature, Vernon, Florida (which is what became of his planned film about insurance fraud), his third feature, The Thin Blue Line (an expressionistic murder mystery, and one of the films that helped begin popularizing documentaries in the late '80s), and the complete run of his TV series First Person (which presents brief, illustrated interviews with unusual people). Morris recently spoke with The A.V. Club about the differences between his early career and now, and about his bill-paying forays into the world of advertising—including his set of 2004 pitches for Senator John Kerry.
The A.V. Club: When you made Gates Of Heaven, what were the prospects for a documentary?
Errol Morris: Very, very, very bad. Prognosis: poor. The patient will not live. And to compound the problem, the year that the film was finished, when it was shown at the New York Film Festival, there was a newspaper strike in New York. So the movie wasn't even reviewed by the major or even the minor New York papers.
But we had a rough-cut screening at the Pacific Film Archive, and Wim Wenders was there, and when I asked him what he thought, he said, "Well, it's really quite simple. It's a masterpiece." And that came as a complete shock. I mean, I liked the movie, but it hadn't been clear how to put it together. We were editing in Emeryville, which is just south of Berkeley, in this one building where there were a lot of editors. It was next to a rendering factory. [Laughs.]
There was an editor who worked downstairs, doing mostly pornography. His name was David Webb Peoples. He's subsequently become a famous scriptwriter. And Dave Peoples came up and looked at it. I had tremendous difficulty editing the movie, because there was no principle for editing that kind of thing. I don't think that it's even clear now how radically different that movie is from other movies. It involved these very strange dioramas, edited against each other. You can say it's talking heads, but it's not talking heads in a context where they've been stitched together by voiceover and various kinds of visual detritus. There was something extreme and radical about this material, and it wasn't clear whether it was editable. And Dave Peoples said, "You know, I think it's really terrific, but I don't know how to edit it. I have no advice." And he loved the movie, understand. Dave Peoples is a really good guy.
And then I tried to hire various quote-unquote "professional editors," and none of them had any idea. We were editing in a room that was probably, I don't know, 60 square feet. I had an editor, an assistant editor, and an apprentice editor. The editor [George Berndt] had worked on Apocalypse Now, and he was so rigidly hierarchical and bureaucratic. The apprentice couldn't speak directly to me. He had to speak to the assistant, and then the assistant would relay to me what the apprentice had said. This is in 60 square feet, by the way—a trick if you can pull it off. [Laughs.] Within a couple of weeks, it was clear that the editor and the assistant editor could do nothing. And so the apprentice took it over, with a friend of mine from graduate school. Charlie Silver and Brad Fuller and me, we just hunkered down and edited that movie. To a certain extent, I've felt at sea in every single movie that I've edited, but I felt really at sea on that movie. We didn't know what the fuck we were doing.
AVC: Did you have any sense of what you were going for?
EM: I knew that I wanted it to move from Los Altos and the unsuccessful pet cemetery to the extraordinarily successful one in Napa. So the movie follows, in some rough order, that progression. It's an excursion into some very odd dreamscapes, connected with some weird version of reality. From the beginning, I would always object when people would say, "It's the pet-cemetery movie." No, no, no, no! It's not about pet cemeteries. And the next question is always, "If it's not about pet cemeteries, what is it about?" Well, that's tricky! In essence, it embodies many of the ideas that are in every single film I've made. The obsession with language. Eye contact. An interest in accounts of subjective experience rather than objective reporting. The fundamental belief that if you scratch the surface of any person, you will find a world of the insane, very close to that surface.
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