The Guru Interview: Errol Morris

Errol Morris is our preeminent investigative documentarian. His Thin Blue Line helped reverse a murder conviction. In The Fog of War he got Robert McNamara to break down and admit that the Vietnam War was a mistake. Standard Operating Procedure, his latest investigation, focuses on the nefarious goings on in the Abu Ghraib prison camp, heinous events that were brought to the world's attention when incriminating photos of the torture, humiliation and even murder that took place there under the auspices of the U.S. Military command in Iraq. Though Americans have for the most part turned away from depictions of the ugly war, I think this is the movie that will make a difference. Because it was not only made by a diligent investigator, but by a brilliant filmmaker as well. It has none of the shenanigans of a Michael Moore movie. Morris is barely in evidence. He lets the people speak and the viewers draw their own conclusion. He is not making propaganda; he makes art.

Errol Morris was drawn to making Standard Operating Procedure through his love of photography, particularly war photography. After seeing the notorious photos from the Abu Ghraib prison camp, the ones that showed U.S. soldiers taunting, humiliating and torturing Iraqi prisoners, including the now infamous man in a hood, standing in water, electrodes attached to his body, Morris wanted to know more. Those photos represent the psychological low point of the Iraqi war debacle. It's as if the mask of a benevolent democracy was removed to reveal the American monster that lurked beneath the fake façade. America's status in the world became irreparably diminished and it could no longer claim moral superiority. Morris wanted to learn more about the circumstances surrounding the taking of those photographs. And he found out.

David Hershkovits: And what was it about the photos that made you want to find out more.

Errol Morris: I had been interested in photography, interested in war photography in particular for many, many years. I had been toying with the idea of making a movie about war photography.

DH: So when you saw these photos, did it spark something connected with war photography?

EM: They intrigued me for many, many, many reasons. Very early on, I had read Susan Sontag's book The Pain of Others. I had also read her piece that appeared in The New York Times Magazine called "Regarding the Torture of Others," specifically about the Abu Ghraib photographs. She railed against posed war photographs and how posing ruins the authenticity of a photograph. And I found it all really, really, really interesting. Because she herself acknowledged that these were posed photographs. And the photograph that I'm really speaking of in particular is the photograph we've seen with MPs smiling, looking at the camera. And part of what makes those photographs so peculiar is the fact that they were taken by the soldiers themselves and you can see that the soldiers are clearly posing in them, posing for the camera. And the question in my mind was, were all of these scenes or some of these scenes posed? And if they were posed, in what sense were they posed?

DH: It suggests to me this one photo that I keep thinking about in the film, where it appears as though they're punching one of the prisoners. In viewing the picture, you assume that what followed was worse, but really that's all that really happened.

EM: No, that's not true. It's even odder. There was a picture taken of [Corporal Charles] Grainer with his fist cocked as though he were about to punch a detainee. He didn't punch him. Well, he punched him later. It's an example of some of the things that interested me -- really, the relationship between a photograph and reality. The photograph and what is photographed. This is the simple explanation, I guess the one line explanation: It occurred to me no one had ever really attempted to contextualize these photographs. No one had talked to the people about taking the photographs, why they were taken. Everybody would conjecture. There were thousands of conjectures about why these photographs were taken. And, maybe this is the perverse part of me, it probably is, it just occurred to me I knew nothing. I knew nothing about these photographs. I had read a lot about them, but I knew nothing. And it would be really an interesting enterprise to try to find out something.

DH: Part of the shock in my watching this is that you were able to get all this material and were able to speak to these people who were involved in that. How does that happen -- to get access to all those thousands of photos.

EM: It doesn't just happen. I wanted to do something like The Thin Blue Line, at least in the sense of investigating something. And I perhaps had forgotten how really difficult it is, particularly when you're asking people to appear in front of the camera. There's the process of trying to convince people who really have no reason to do it at all, trying to convince people that they should.

DH: In this case they did have a reason: Ultimately, they felt they were being singled out for the crimes whereas there were other people who were more guilty or higher up were not. Wasn't that their motivation to get their story out?

EM: Yes. But you can also imagine even how they have been portrayed for the most part in public, their skepticism that anyone would want to do anything other than portray them as evil.

DH: So how do you even begin? Find one person who you can speak to who leads you the others?

EM: That's exactly it.

DH: Who was that first one?

EM: Well the first interview was with [Brigadier General] Janis Karpinski, who really was not directly connected with the photographs, but I knew that she would be willing to be interviewed. She had been interviewed by many other people. My cameraman had seen an interview with her on CSPAN and said, ‘you should have a look at the interview, I think this is someone that you would be interested in talking to.' So I interviewed Janis, now over two years ago, and I realized that I had this extraordinary interview but I didn't really have the story that I was looking for. So I kept being drawn back to the photograph. I interviewed a lot of people. I interviewed probably twice as many people as are in the movie, and decided not to use these interviews because I wanted to confine myself.

DH: To the discussions of the photos.

EM: To the discussions of the photos. And it seemed to me that that was the first thing to accomplish. And, of course, I didn't even know whether I could do it. There are a lot of people that I wanted to talk to, I just couldn't talk to. I mean chief among them is Chuck Grainer, who is a military prisoner and completely inaccessible. It was not even an issue. I couldn't even visit him, let alone…

DH: Doesn't he have lawyers?

EM: He does have lawyers. The military has no interest in making him available to the press. So it was out of the question. We tried. Both [Staff Sergeant] Frederick and Grainer. And at a certain point I felt that I had a movie. I suppose I'm crazy enough to want to interview everybody and wait for it.

DH: You couldn't wait forever. You didn't know if you would ever get it.

EM: Correct. I mean, it's interesting. In The Thin Blue Line I had this horrendous waiting game. It took me two years to get David Harris, the killer, to be interviewed. Without any expectation that that interview would ever happen. And the knowledge that I didn't have a film if it didn't happen! At least it would have been a radically different film.

DH: And the videos taken by the soldiers that you show. I had never seen them before.

EM: I think a lot of the stuff hasn't been shown. And I am embarrassed to say that I sort of lost track after a while. Because my goal was to just get as much material as I could, and I didn't necessarily go back and ask myself, has this been seen? Has that been seen? I believe there is at least some reasonable fraction of material there that has not been seen, and it certainly hasn't been contextualized.

DH: I would think there's way more that that, because most people have just seen a handful of those photos, the ones in the news.

EM: There were some 13 separate investigations done of Abu Ghraib. There's even a report summarizing the reports. You read them and it's like you're looking at some kind of geological record. They're depersonalized; they're a parade of unrelated facts. It's interesting that the military investigator took these files, he synchronized the pictures using prison logs and the internal clocks of the cameras. And what emerges is this timeline that for the very first times gives you a picture of, maybe not cause and effect, but of what happened when. It gives you a chronology. Oddly enough, the emotional reality of what you're looking at isn't captured. When you look at the picture of the inmate on the box, the wired, hooded man… I mean, I have to tell you, this is a surprise, this one of the reasons I like doing this. It's when the military investigator tells me this is standard operating procedure I say to myself, huh? No one could do this. You're looking at the iconic photograph of abuse, the central photograph of torture and abuse of the Iraq war. And you're told this is standard operating procedure?

I think what standard operating procedure is very blurry. And I think when push comes to shove, and you really try to pin people down about what it is, no one knows. There are so many issues that I can go on and on and on about. I'm fascinated by the story, I'm fascinated by the role the photographs played in it.

DH: Did you want to make a movie that was an indictment about the war itself? Or the condition of war?

EM: I think it's all of the above. Other people have certainly written extensively about the torture memos, the role that this administration plays in dilapidating the definition of torture and excluding the detainees from protection from the Geneva convention and on and on and on. There's an enormous amount that was known. I just was not investigating that. It's not that I don't have strong feelings about it or I'm unaware of it or I just forgot to put it in the movie.

DH: Well, it's there. In some ways it's more powerful to let the viewers draw those conclusions.

EM: I'll give you another example from the movie that deeply saddens me. There's a picture of Sabrina Harman smiling with her thumb up and in the background you see the corpse of al-Jamadi. Now, people look at the photograph and they think, she's a monster! She's just a monster! No ifs ands or buts. If you look at the photograph, that's what you would think. There's a corpse, this young girl smiling broadly with her thumb up, and yet, here's one of the mysteries of this war: She had nothing whatsoever to do with this man's death. And if anything she was responsible for us knowing about it. If these photographs had not been taken, we might not ever be aware of the fact that this man was killed -- not just killed, I might add, but this man was murdered. Murdered by the CIA. So, I mean it's a strange time we all live in. I think there's such frustration, such despair about the course of the country that people don't know what to think or what to do. And of course there's an enormous amount of anger. And I'm wading into all of this.

DH: Have you prepared for any kind of reaction? Do you expect that the film will lead to anything concrete as has happened in the past with your work?

EM: Yeah, I think I could be attacked. I think also that the people who are responsible for these policies could be attacked. I don't really know.

DH: Do you think people will be shocked?

EM: I don't know what shocks people anymore. I can tell you that I am shocked. You know, regardless, I'm not trying to tell you right here -- and I just want to make that clear -- I'm not trying to tell you that these "bad apples," these so called "bad apples" are lily white. I am most certainly not trying to say that. But I am trying to say that they were scapegoats. We the public have participated in that in some odd way. George Bush could well have been re-elected in 2004, not solely because of the "bad apples" but the "bad apples" helped. And they helped because they gave him someone to blame. You want to know why the war is a failure, why the war's going south? You want to know why the Arab world hates us? Look at these guys and look at these photographs. So there's this odd transference that occurred -- it doesn't matter if you're on the left or the right, and if you're on the left you say, OK, these are "bad apples" these are rotten people, but they were turned rotten by administration policies. The right will say, nonsense, they were rotten. Well of course they were rotten, but they were rotten on their own, they were rotten under their own initiative. The thing that remains constant through it is that we never see them. They become these strange journalistic artifacts that emerge from these pictures. And I'd like to give them back their humanity, so that we have some understanding of what we're looking at.

Standard Operating Procedure opens in theaters Friday, Apr. 25.