Photo by Bridget Laudien
Academy
Award winning documentarian Errol Morris is one of the greatest filmmakers of
all time. Who else could spin such engaging yarns about pet cemetery
proprietors, cutting-edge robotics
designer and a
former U.S. secretary of defense? In his latest film, Tabloid, he tells the
tale of Joyce McKinney who was accused of abducting and committing
indecent assault against her ex-boyfriend, who happened to be a Mormon missionary.
To go into too much more detail would not do the story justice and, frankly,
would serve up a slew of spoilers on a film that really needs to be seen ASAP.
But
before he was a much-lauded director, Morris had an unusual job. At a recent
press event he talked about his years as a private investigator and how that
informed his interview style for the documentaries that followed.
As Morris
recounted, “I was a private investigator briefly in Berkley. And I worked for [P.I.’s]
David Fechheimer and Jack and Sandra Palladino but that was very, very briefly.
That was probably in the ‘70s. And then my film career, which never really
amounted to a film career per se just went completely belly up and I had to
find a way of earning a living and so I worked as a private detective in New
York… It was in the early ‘80s.”
Morris
also recalled his post-graduate work in a fascinating, if not totally eerie
discipline. “I started interviewing murderers… I interviewed [convicted
murderer] Ed Gein. I interviewed a whole number of different murderers in northern
California and Wisconsin… It goes back so many, many, many years.”
He
continued telling his own chilling tale, “I had this, do you call this a
relationship? I had a relationship with Ed Kemper. I had gone to all of these
trials. I was going to write a PhD thesis on the insanity plea. I went to all
of these trials. In those days there were three mass murders in Northern
California — the big three, Ed Kemper, Herbie Mullin and [Charles Frazier]. And
so I had gone to the Kemper trial, part of the Kemper trial, part of the Mullin
trial. And I was really, really interested in writing about, they had [invoked]
the insanity plea. I was interested in writing about them.”
As a
result, Morris started to hone a skill that would come in handy for the
filmmaker. He remarked, “I started interviewing people. I believe those are my
first real interviews. And then I went back to Wisconsin. I had been an
undergraduate at Madison. I went back to Wisconsin. I started interviewing
people in Wisconsin. I developed this whole style of interviewing… I would play
this game where I tried to say as little as possible. So I had tapes that I was
particularly proud of where my voice wasn’t on the tape. I would see if I could
get the person I was interviewing just to talk for a full hour. [The tapes]
were an hour on a side — a full hour without my voice being on the tape. And
the idea was just this pure stream of consciousness. It’s the, for want of a
better way to describe it, the Joycean interview.”
Morris
explained how he then used that style during production of his first film.
“That certainly informed Gates of Heaven
and it became the idea behind Gates of
Heaven. And I never included my voice I always excluded my voice in editing
these movies.”
He had
also hoped to apply the skill to another form of expression. He admitted, “I
wanted to publish a book. No one was really interested in publishing any of my
writing. And I really stopped writing. I stopped writing for years and years
and years and years and years.”
But the
tides have changed on that front and besides Tabloid, Morris fans will be happy
to know he’ll be generating quite a bit of written material in the next few
months. He mentioned, “Now I’m publishing all of these books. I have a book
coming out September 1 from Penguin Believing
is Seeing. I have a second book coming out from Penguin on the Jeffrey
McDonald murder case. And I have a third book coming from U. Chicago Press
based on a set of essays I did for the New York Times called The Ashtray. So I’m writing a lot.”
And still
there are those classic Morris films. Tabloid
opens on July 15 in New York,
Los Angeles, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Minneapolis, Chicago, and
Washington D.C. and expands nationwide beginning July 22.
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