For ‘Tabloid’ director Errol Morris, 1 question yields a million stories

However sympathetic he is to interviewers, even Morris can pretend not to understand a challenging question. He’s a prolific director of TV commercials, some for companies that have become synonymous with scandal. I ask if there are any he regrets — a campaign for the insurance giant AIG, for instance, in which the company (whose bad decisions would require the largest bailout in U.S. history) claims that “the greatest risk is not taking one.”

Instead of offering remorse for burnishing the image of a corporation that helped trigger a global financial crisis, Morris focuses on a single creative disagreement he and AIG had: He didn’t like an on-screen graphic in which the word “risk” was scratched out. “I would’ve liked them to correct that one small detail,” he laments, “because I thought it makes the ads less powerful. I think those are beautiful ads, really beautifully shot.”

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(TOBIAS SCHWARZ/ ASSOCIATED PRESS ) - US director Errol Morris poses with his Silver Bear, the Jury Grand Prix, during the awarding ceremony at the 58th Berlinale International Film Festival in Berlin, in 2008. Morris was awarded for his movie 'Standard Operation Procedure'.

“I have declined to do ads. There’s a whole list of ads that I did not take,” he says when pressed, although he won’t name any client he has turned down.

Morris enjoys doing ad work in a mix alongside documentary-making, writing (he pens rambling philosophical and investigative pieces for the New York Times’s Web site) and, soon, fiction films.

“I’m doing a feature with [“This American Life” host] Ira Glass,” he reveals, a surprise given the failure of his only previous fiction film, 1991’s “The Dark Wind.” The new film is based on the life of cryonics pioneer Bob Nelson and will star Paul Rudd.

“You could call it a tabloid story,” he says, noting the Weekly World News-ish title of Nelson’s memoir, “We Froze the First Man.”

But Morris doesn’t need Glass to find macabre stories for him. He has lived a few, or come close: He and German film director Werner Herzog, while researching serial killers, once plotted to dig up the coffin of murderer Ed Gein’s mother. (Gein had stolen corpses; Morris wondered if he had sneakily taken his mother’s as well.) Years later, Morris publicly apologized for not meeting Herzog, who had been willing to go through with the dig, at the appointed hour. Was Morris sincere about that apology?

“I was, actually,” he says today.

Does he wish he had gone through with it?

“Um, no. I don’t think that if I’d shown up we would have done it,” he admits. “It was a time in my life when I could ill afford to be arrested for grave-robbing.”

“By the way,” he adds hastily, “I think I’m at that same place in my life right now.” However congenial he is in interviews, it seems, the filmmaker has no interest in becoming the subject of somebody else’s Errol Morris-style true-crime documentary.

DeFore is a freelance writer.