ErrolMorris Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Errol Morris is probably the highest-profile working documentarian after Michael Moore -- and since Moore is more of a video essayist than a documentarian, Morris is, in truth, number one. He's also one of the rare documentary filmmakers who embraces the genre as cinema rather than mere journalism. His movies are always visually interesting, and never straightforward.

That bodes well for Morris's upcoming maiden voyage into narrative cinema: a yet-untitled dark comedy about the good old days when people thought that cryonics was our best bet to cheat death. The movie, focusing on 1960s efforts to freeze people for later reanimation by future scientists armed with incredible technology, will be written by Zach Helm, who wrote Stranger than Fiction and wrote and directed the lovely Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium.

Documentary filmmakers transitioning to narrative features isn't anything new of course. This weekend's State of Play, for example, was very competently directed by Kevin MacDonald, who not only began his career making documentaries, but actually made one about Errol Morris. And of course we all remember Michael Moore's Canadian Bacon.

While MacDonald seems to be focusing on fiction these days, I can't imagine Morris will ever abandon documentaries altogether. But if his narrative effort is half as formally original and visually exciting as most of his docs, I won't complain if he does.

[UPDATE! Our old friend Christopher Campbell reminds me in the comments that Morris has already made one narrative feature, that I forgot about and now need to run out and see. So this will be his second.]

[Variety]

In describing today's best directors, three terms are generally used (and overused): Maverick, Genius and Auteur. A "maverick" is now used to describe virtually anyone who makes a movie without using Hollywood money. An "auteur" is used to describe anyone who writes as well as directs. And "genius" is used to describe anyone who makes a halfway decent film. I'm taking these words back. In reality, a "maverick" should be a button-pusher. It's a filmmaker who is so radical and daring that even high-minded, forward-thinking critics sneer at their work, people like Vincent Gallo or Catherine Breillat. These people are so dangerous that they have trouble making and distributing films. Harmony Korine, director of Mister Lonely (5 screens) is very much a maverick. Korine has pushed many buttons and many envelopes over the years and though I love his work, he's someone I wouldn't want to invite to my house. (He scares me.)

Werner Herzog, director of Encounters at the End of the World (1 screen), is also a maverick (and, incidentally, a buddy of Korine's). His physically dangerous films have probably had insurance companies slamming the door in his face, and his co-workers have included people who might not be fit for polite society. (At the very least, most of them would turn heads.) Some of his actors have reportedly threatened to kill him. It cracks me up that, because Herzog's documentary Grizzly Man was such a hit, Herzog was allowed to make his new film for the Discovery Channel. I'd really love to have been in on that board meeting. Did they really know who they were dealing with? At the same time, Herzog is also an auteur: all of his films have the same roaming curiosity, fearlessly exploring man's tenuous connection to nature, from Aguirre navigating the Amazon looking for El Dorado, to Timothy Treadwell seeking to befriend the bears.

With the rise of cheap digital video, some might claim that we're in a Golden Age of documentaries, except for the fact that most documentary filmmakers aren't really filmmakers. They copy a basic template over and over again, assembling footage rather than making a movie. Of course, some of this may qualify as great journalism: the 2003 film Blind Spot: Hitler's Secretary, for example, or last year's No End in Sight. But very few understand how to combine filmmaking and reporting, how to make the story speak on a personal level. For my money, then, Errol Morris is the greatest living documentary filmmaker. As his reputation has risen -- he went from a guy who couldn't get arrested at the Oscars to a guy who actually won one -- his films have become more like events, like a story you can't possibly miss from a reporter you know and trust. (He has become like a Walter Cronkite or an Edward R. Murrow of the documentary set.)

Morris' Standard Operating Procedure screened this week at the 51st San Francisco International Film Festival, where Morris received the festival's Persistence of Vision award. The new film can be seen as the third in a trilogy of Morris' war films, with Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (1999) taking on World War II and The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003) examining Vietnam. This one stumbles right into the current war in Iraq, and stares right into the face of the Abu Ghraib prison controversy. Of course, this story was extensively covered on the TV news and people have already seen the gruesome photographs, but Morris slows down the story a bit, taking a more careful look after the fact (many of his interview subjects have finished serving their jail time).

Manda Bala (Send a Bullet), directed and produced by Jason Kohn, is a richly painted, riveting documentary weaving together threads of political corruption and disparity of wealth distribution in Brazil, frog farms, kidnappings in Sao Paulo, reconstructive ear surgery, and the growth of the personal security business in Brazil. If all this sounds like a lot to meld together into one coherent tale, it is, but Kohn proves himself more than up to the task. Cinematical spoke to Kohn by phone recently about Manda Bala, which has received numerous awards on the fest circuit over the past year, and recently won three awards at the inaugural Cinema Eye Awards.

Cinematical: I read that at the Cinema Eye Awards, in your acceptance speech you talked about this film being made out of anger; can you talk a bit more about that?

Jason Kohn: Really that came out of my sense of frustration at the state of contemporary documentary films, at least at the time when I started making the film. There was a lot of talk going on about the democratization of docs, how it's cheaper to make them with new technologies, and I thought that was mostly bullshit. This idea that people on the marginalized fringes of society now have access to these technologies – it's just not true.

Errol Morris has certainly been busy lately, between starting up blogs at The New York Times, reuniting with Werner Herzog, and chillin' at Apple stores in LA, San Francisco, and New York. Now he's getting funny. The Hollywood Reporter posts that he's got a non-documentary feature on the way that is "based on a true story that will contain comedic elements." The film will be called The End of Everything, and he's going to write the "exotic plot" which is "said to entail a range of subjects including a wingless bird, author Margaret Mitchell, a volcano, and Laura Bush."

Gah. He's got me hook, line, and sinker, tapping into my inner Tom Robbins fandom. After the 2003 war film The Fog of War, Morris wanted to lighten up and is quoted as saying: "I'm a funny guy, and I'd like to make something funny now. I can't see myself making one political film after another. I'm glad I made these two movies, but I'd like to do something different."

The 2008 Berlin International Film Festival awards have been announced, and while I've only seen one of the films that picked up prizes, I'm very excited about the results. The top honor, the Golden Bear, went to Tropa de Elite (The Elite Squad), which is the first fiction film directed by Brazilian filmmaker José Padilha, who last gave us the brilliant documentary Bus 174. It was also scripted by Oscar-nominated writer Bráulio Mantovani (City of God) and tells the story of a captain in Rio's Special Police Operations Battalion and the corruption within the city's military police force, particularly its brutality in the handling of Rio's favelas. The film was hugely popular in Brazil when it was released there last fall, though mostly it was viewed illegally via the internet. Originally due out in the U.S. last month from The Weinstein Co., Moviefone now shows the film as being a Summer 2008 release, hopefully with a lot of support now thanks to the big win in Berlin.

Another Latin American cinema winner was Mexico's Lake Tahoe, the latest from Fernando Eimbcke (Duck Season), which picked up the Alfred Bauer Prize for innovative filmmaking and a FIPRESCI critics prize. Other winners include Errol Morris' eagerly anticipated documentary on Abu Graib, Standard Operating Procedure, which won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize (aka second prize) and Paul Thomas Anderson, who won the Silver Bear award for best director, for There Will Be Blood. Anderson's film also received a Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution (Music) for Jonny Greenwood and its score. The Silver Bear award for best screenplay went to Xiaoshaui Wang for In Love We Trust, while the Silver Bears for acting went to Sally Hawkins, for her peformance in Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky, and Reza Najie for his performance in Majid Majidi's The Song of Sparrows. Kumasaka Izuru won a best first film award for Asyl -- Park and Love Hotel. For the rest of the Berlin winners head over to the festival's website.

Alice Kelikian, a professor at Brandeis and Chair of their Film Studies Program just pulled off one heck of a feat: she's convinced Werner Herzog and Errol Morris to reunite for the first time in almost 30 years, according to And the Winner Is. The talented filmmakers will come together on October 22 at the Edie and Lew Wasserman Cinematheque on the Brandeis campus in Massachusetts. Unfortunately, we won't all get to see the event -- it's open to some students and invited guests. Hopefully they'll record it, because this is a pretty big deal.

The dispute between the filmmakers dates back three decades. Morris had told Herzog that he was going to make a documentary about pet cemeteries. Werner didn't think he could do it, and told Morris that if he pulled it off, he would eat his own shoe. True to both their words, Errol made 1980's Gates of Heaven, and Herzog was left with a big meal of tasty shoe. To make good on his promise, Herzog did it at the premiere of the doc, boiling and eating his shoe, which later became Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. That, apparently, angered Morris and the two have been at odds since. Will they talk about the feud? Will they remain civil? Or, will this become a live action celebrity death match?

It is no surprise that someone is planning a documentary about the Abu Ghraib scandal; there will probably be a few. Already there is Robert Greenwald's latest, Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers, which deals with one aspect of the prisoner abuse, and the PBS series Frontline has included the incident in its recent episode titled "The Lost Year in Iraq". However, there's a good chance that no others are or will be as good as the one Errol Morris is set to make. The project was announced Sunday by Diane Weyermann of Participant Productions (An Inconvenient Truth) during the American Film Market.

Morris has a habit of making docs that stand out even in the non-fiction genre, which despite having a seemingly general form is still comprised of distinct and divergent subgenres and styles. It is also important to point out that there is no way of knowing how this film will look or sound, considering none of Morris' films are anything alike. It is interesting, though, that he is going for another politically-tinged subject after making The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, for which he finally won his first Oscar (his most worthy, The Thin Blue Line, was ineligible for unfair reasons). As much as I will look forward to his take on Abu Ghraib, I kind of hope that he'll follow it with something less topical. There's enough political docs out there already, and Morris doesn't, or shouldn't, require such marketable subject matter.

Sony Classics, which also released The Fog of War, is already on board to distribute the film when ready.

In the late 1970s, Errol Morris heard a bizarre story about a community in Florida that was home to so many people who had mutilated themselves for insurance money that it was known as "Nub City." Being Errol Morris, he eventually went to the town with his camera, prepared to make a movie about the community and the people there. Things didn't work out quite as he planned, however, because the people didn't take kindly to being film. According to Morris, his life was threated convincingly enough that he was forced to flee. That movie never happened, but things worked out alright for the director, because it was after being expelled from Nub City that he stumbled upon a little town called Vernon, Florida.

Now, though, Morris will have his revenge (sort of). According to a blurb in the Boston Globe, he's finally making Nub City - but through a fictional lens. The new version of the story will be a horror film, "based on the bizarre true story of several Floridians who turned up missing arms and legs after taking out insurance policies on themselves." Hopefully the people he pissed off 30 years ago are either dead, or won't mind being depicted fictionally. But hey, the dude's an Oscar winner - he's a lot harder to quietly whack now than when he was just a punk with a camera.

[via Movie City Indie]