Antarctica and Abu Ghraib.

Werner Herzog is taking his new film, Encounters at the End of the World, on a victory lap around the festival circuit, and Errol Morris is about to finish his latest, S.O.P.: Standard Operating Procedure, which examines the photographs taken by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison, mostly through interviews with the people who took them.

Both directors were once outsider mavericks - as much by their exclusion from the movie marketplace as by their own artistic decisions. Yet each has found his way inside, toward the mainstream, if not quite there. Herzog's Encounters will play on the Discovery Channel, which produced the picaresque film about Antarctica. Morris's film was produced by Participant and by Sony Pictures Classics, which should help get it beyond the art-house circuit. And beyond the art-house circuit is exactly where a film about Abu Ghraib should be. Let's hope it's out there in time for the electorate to take into consideration. This comes at a time when an Abu Ghraib t-shirt, with a pile of nude bodies drawn on it, is being hawked on the Internet as "the most comfortable t-shirt ever!" No news on whether there's a money-back guarantee on that claim. There sure wasn't on the promise by the Bush team that the slam-dunk Iraq war would be financed by oil revenues.

S.O.P. will also be published as a book, co-authored by Philip Gourevitch, which will include fuller accounts of the marathon interviews that Morris conducted with the amateur photographers and with others up the chain of command. As with most things that make sense, you wonder why filmmakers hadn't done this before.

I reviewed the Herzog adventure in Antarctica for Screen at the Toronto International Film Festival, and on October 23, I was fortunate to hear Herzog and Morris talk about documentaries and a range of other things at Brandeis University, where Alice Kelikian, director of Film Studies, promises that there will be more such conversations to come. Let's hope so.

You can listen to Herzog and Morris on the Brandeis site, beginning with Herzog's provocative assertion that verite documentaries are dead - this, in the city where Fred Wiseman still lives and works. This is not just wish fulfillment. Encounters is evidence, once again, of the impact a narrative voice can have.

The Herzog-Morris conversation then moves on to war stories about the two of them keeping vigils in the chilly Wisconsin town where the serial killer Ed Guine lived and "worked," and about visiting another vicious killer in a California penitentiary. Morris and Herzog address the problematic notion of "truth-telling" in non-fiction films - a panel subject if there ever were one - which seems to be taking up where discussions of "objectivity" left off. Part of that conversation involves the strategy of "withholding," not giving the audience all that it wants. (For Herzog, that involved not playing the audio of a man being eaten by a grizzly bear in Grizzly Man. He also resists the temptation to track a penguin in Antarctica that inexplicably walks into the interior of the continent, to certain death.)

After the event, Errol Morris shared a few thoughts and opinions:

On the interview process on which he built Standard Operating Procedure: "At first no one would talk to me, and then as I did additional interviews and additional interviews, it became easier and easier. Now I have a backlog of people who want to be interviewed, and I have a movie that's almost done, if not, for all intents and purposes, completely done. So, I don't know what I did. At the New York Times, my editor suggested that I release some of this material to the Times."

On the origins of the Abu Ghraib project: "I ended up with Abu Ghraib photographs... through [the photographer] Roger Fenton, through a passage by Susan Sontag for a series of articles that I'm doing for the Times. I originally though that I would make a movie about Fenton, Alexander Gardner and the Abu Ghraib photographs, and then it quickly morphed into just Abu Ghraib."

On acceptance by the mainstream: "It hasn't happened yet. It would be nice. It's odd. You make these movies, and then you make other movies. I somehow seem to forget about what I've done in the middle of struggling to produce something else, and that is always in the forefront of my mind. I like to think I'm doing something daring each time, but there's no market calculation - will people be interested in this, or will people be interested in that? I had just made Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, and an interviewer asked me whether this was a calculation on my part to create an obvious audience-pleaser, by making a movie about a robot scientist, a topiary gardener, a mole rat photographer and a lion tamer. I tried to assure him that there was no market calculation there. I was actually surprised that anyone went to see the movie. I hope I'm presently surprised the next time around, if I'm lucky."

On the relationship between technology and creativity: "I don't think it hinders creativity. Creativity is creativity. I think the tools are something else. I know that my interviews have been transformed by new technology. When I first started doing interviews, I was what I call the eleven-minute psychiatrist - 16 mm, 400-foot roll; 35 mm, 1000-foot roll. With eleven minutes and a couple of frames, you're basically the eleven-minute psychiatrist. Every eleven minutes you have to stop. Someone takes the magazine off the camera. Someone reloads the magazine, or a magazine that's already loaded is put in its place. You have to slate again. So it's this interview interruptus, this process of putting something together, and it's expensive. I never had the money to really shoot all that much. Now I have this high-end Sony camera that I used for Standard Operating Procedure, a high-def 24-frame camera. It's the same camera that was used to shoot Star Wars, and I never have to stop. All that's involved is popping out a 2-hour cassette and popping in another one. Total elapsed time, a couple seconds. No need to re-slate, no need to stop the interview, no need to do anything. You just go on. The result is that it's changed my interviewing. My first interview  for Standard Operating Procedure with Janis Karpinski (commanding officer of the prison) was 16½ hours over two days - the woman with the strongest bladder in the human race."

On penguins in documentaries today: "The publisher of the book, Standard Operating Procedure is Penguin. There is a penguin in my life. There you go. I've been shown up."

On watching his earlier films: "Sometimes I'm forced to, because I'm invited to a festival and they show the movie. Robert Ebert has been a fan of Gates of Heaven for years and years and years, and he has a festival in Champagne-Urbana. I've been invited there, and watched the film, because he always shows it. It's a strange feeling. I've seen most of my films long after the fact, but it's not something that I try to do. I suppose I could try to purge myself of them before beginning anew, but it would be purging myself of myself. I'd love to purge myself of myself, but somehow I think I'm un-purgible."

On what is perceived to be his predilection for odd characters, and his stated belief that the human species has an inexhaustible capacity for self-delusion: "Very fortunately. God in his infinite wisdom has provided an almost unending supply of wackiness in this world. One never has to go wanting for a crazy story. And sometimes they come to me."

-David D'Arcy

"Harry Knapp, an assistant director, said, 'There is a silent war on the set. We're all in a state of shock.'" Daniel Zalewski has a long piece in the Observer on the making of Rescue Dawn.

Christopher Sturman talks with Herzog for the Telegraph.

Posted by dwhudson at November 4, 2007 11:01 AM