Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, whose “Tabloid” opened Friday, is usually on the “Q” side of Q&A’s. So he’s endearingly considerate to the journalists who must interview him.
During our 30-minute talk, he apologizes four times, tells me twice how he strives not to repeat stories from older interviews, and generously defends reporters who begin with the banal “What got you interested in this story?” He even admits to a nervous interview-opening tic of his own.
When he was working on his 2008 Abu Ghraib documentary, “Standard Operating Procedure,” he recalls that journalist Philip Gourevitch sat in on a lot of the interviews. “At one point he asked me, ‘Do you know you always start the same way?’ Evidently, according to Philip, I always say ‘I don’t know where to start . . .’ ”
Morris has told this story before, actually. But it hints at what makes his interviews so successful: Like Columbo, Morris (a frumpy man who used to be a private investigator himself) masks his acuity with apparent ignorance or aimlessness, leading subjects to admit things they’ve never revealed to more goal-oriented interrogators.
The sensationalistic “Tabloid” lacks the kind of “gotchas” that highlighted Morris’s hit cop-killer investigation, “The Thin Blue Line.” That’s fine with him. He’s less concerned with the core mystery of “Tabloid” — whether former beauty queen Joyce McKinney kidnapped her ex-boyfriend — than with the bizarre ways McKinney mythologizes her own life: In the course of the film, she produces an astonishing repertoire of excuses and evasions, a funhouse-mirror exaggeration of ordinary self-deception.
The probing footage of McKinney — enough for years of psychotherapy — all came from a single meeting. Asked how that can be, Morris says, “It’s surprised me over the years, how much can come out in one interview.”
Well-honed strategies help. Morris is famous for shutting up and letting others talk, trusting them to fill awkward silences with unexpected revelations. He invented the Teleprompter-like Interrotron, which lets people see his face while looking directly into the camera. And, unlike the reporters who get 30 minutes apiece to interview him, Morris talks to people for a very long time — up to 11 hours in one sitting.
“I used to joke that when we both started hallucinating, maybe things started to happen,” he laughs. But he now suspects that “having these unending interviews is really not such a good thing.”
He earns his subject’s time by being well prepared. After interviewing Robert S. McNamara for his Oscar-winning “The Fog of War,” Morris recalls, the former defense secretary “told me he was surprised I had actually read his books. He said that was usually not the case. When that interview started, he had only agreed to give me a half-hour. Then that was extended to an hour, and in turn extended to two-hours-plus. Then he agreed to come back for a second day.”
Morris has concluded that “there’s no way to conduct an interview correctly. It’s a human relationship. If there was a way to have human relationships correctly, maybe we could interview correctly.”
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