More from Peter Keough's interview with Errol Morris
After 11 days on the road promoting Standard Operating Procedure, his film about the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal, Errol Morris is back in his Cambridge office. His interrogators from the media have hit him with the same difficult questions over and over. They haven’t broken him yet, but he admits he’s getting a little “punchy.” Now he sits at his desk, on which rests a laptop and a mummified chimpanzee head. A mounted horse’s head hangs on the wall behind him, and in the corner stands a stuffed stork. It’s surprisingly tall.Morris has made films about loaded subjects before: the death penalty (Mr. Death: the Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.), Vietnam (The Fog of War), the mysteries of the universe (A Brief History of Time). But never as loaded as the shock and awe spread by the 2004 release of photos of sexually humiliated and physically tortured naked Iraqi prisoners taken by the MPs guarding them. The woman with the leash; the human pyramid; the smile and the thumbs-up next to a ravaged, dead face. Images we’d like to forget — and, apparently, have. None of the presidential candidates has had much to say about the subject, and none of the major media outlets paid much attention when our president acknowledged that, yes, he authorized such behavior. So probably the toughest question of all is — who’s going to care?
Frank Rich wrote in his column that Iraq movies are like garlic to vampires. Do you think this one is going to suffer the fate of all the others?
I like Frank Rich a lot. I know him. I like the whole editorial. I am not eager to have an obituary written for my film before the film appears in theaters. Can I say in good conscience it’s not an Iraq movie? I cannot. But I think it is a different kind of an Iraq movie. I wanted to avoid doing the same thing that other people were doing. I did it because I was genuinely interested in the photographs and the guys who took the photographs. It’s a different movie from what you expect. I think people all expect the other type of movie, and this is a movie that I think will be around long after the Iraq War. It’s telling a much bigger story, and it’s a story that does involve photography and people. I’ve heard from a number of people who watched the movie twice, even three times, that it changes for them. Each time, they see it differently.
That’s what I experienced.
Well . . . what happened in your case?
I had some frustrations the first time, and some of them were resolved the second time I saw it, but they were replaced with new frustrations . . . .
Well, this is something I’d love to hear about. Can I ask some questions? Can I flip this around? What were your frustrations the first time?
Maybe I should put them into the form of questions to you. You’ve said that in this film you wanted to do something opposite to the Fog of War, where you interviewed the man at the top [Robert McNamara], and instead talk to the people at the bottom. Wouldn’t it be more useful, because the people at the top are still at the top, to pursue those people instead of the scapegoats? This question has been raised repeatedly, “why not the higher-ups?”
And by higher-ups you could mean the command structure in the Department of Defense all the way up to Rumsfeld and the White House, a huge complex story in its own right. I disagree that that is the only important story here. It’s not as though there had been a paucity of work on the higher-ups — in fact, there is an enormous amount known. What is so surprising is not that we don’t know that stuff. What’s surprising is the fact that no one acts on it. How many torture memos do you need to see before you get the idea that the government is advocating torture?
But here’s a story that no one knows anything about. To me, these aren’t political questions, these are investigative questions. I saw the story that no one had bothered to investigate. No one asks the simple question “What do these photographs mean? What were they taking pictures of? Why were they taking these pictures? What was actually going on?” The photographs made us think, “I know the story, the story is in the photographs.” If you’re on the right, you say, “Okay, these are bad apples,” and on the left, you agree fundamentally, but you say they were turned into rogue soldiers by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld. I like the idea of pulling them back from the world of scapegoats into the world of people and trying to figure out the mechanism through which they became scapegoats. To me, that is actually the deepest and most important question about the Iraq War and about our response to the war. And I’ll stick to my story.
MORE: For an extended transcript of this interview, as well as video clips from the conversation, visit Peter Keough's blog: www.thephoenix.com/outsidetheframe
