Errol Morris

Voice By Matt Zoller Seitz @ Roger Ebert

Errol Morris’ documentary “Separated” is about an act of cruelty carried out on a massive scale: the forcible division at the US-Mexico border of immigrant parents from their children. It’s illuminating in the most chilling way. Morris’ characteristically cool, analytical approach contains the inherent emotion of the subject matter. Horror arises from the uninflected presentation of information. The movie feels less like a prosecutorial document than an autopsy of a government’s conscience, pinpointing the time of death.Read More »

Throughout his work, documentary filmmaker Errol Morris has sought out characters lost in their own eccentric worlds, and he has managed to convey their sense of wonder with their passion, be it a topiary gardener arguing the merits of hand shears in Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997) or astrophysicist Stephen Hawking discussing the origin of the universe in A Brief History of Time (1992). In his most provocative work since The Thin Blue Line (1988), Morris details what happens when this interior dreamscape collides with the hard facts of history. As a young man accompanying his father to work at a state prison, Fred A. Leuchter, a bespectacled mouse of a man, learned how inefficient and inhumane most executions were, and he set out to design and build a better electric chair. Soon he began getting offers from state institutions throughout the country to redesign their electric chairs, along with gas chambers, gallows, and lethal injection machines. Read More »

Unlike many of the filmmaker’s subjects, John le Carré knows who Errol Morris is, and more importantly, the author of spy literature also knows Morris’ techniques of getting to some core of the person whom he’s interviewing. Le Carré, the pen name of former intelligence agent David Cornwell, has been on Morris’ side of an interview many, many times, too, but if he was talking to a subject in an enclosed room, that discussion was usually an interrogation.Read More »

Quote:
Gates of Heaven is a documentary film by Errol Morris about the pet cemetery business. It was made when Morris was unknown and did much to launch his career.Read More »

What do an elderly topiary gardener, a retired lion tamer, a man fascinated by mole rats, and a cutting-edge robotics designer have in common…Read More »

Smallpox was always present, filling the churchyard with corpses, tormenting with constant fear all whom it had not yet stricken, leaving on those whose lives it spared the hideous traces of its power, turning the babe into a changeling at which the mother shuddered, and making the eyes and cheeks of the betrothed maiden objects of horror to the lover. (1848)

— Lord Thomas Macaulay, History of England.Read More »

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader wrote:
In The Fog of War, Errol Morris interviews an 84-year-old Robert S. McNamara, who served as secretary of defense under presidents Kennedy and Johnson and is widely regarded as the architect of the American war in Vietnam. There’s something undeniably masterful about the film, which also includes archival footage, but that mastery is what sticks in my craw: it’s a capacity to say as little as possible while giving the impression of saying a great deal, a skill shared by McNamara and Morris. I’m not sure what we have to gain from this — the satisfaction that we’re somehow taking care of business when we’re actually fast asleep?Read More »

Oscar-winning director Errol Morris presents his most provocative and sexiest film yet. In the late 1970s, Miss Wyoming Joyce McKinney became a tabloid staple when she kidnapped her former beau, a Mormon missionary named Kirk Anderson, and tied him to a bed to deprogram his religious beliefs by having nonstop sex with him. Morris (The Fog of War, The Thin Blue Line) follows the salacious adventures of this beauty queen with an IQ of 168 whose single-minded devotion to the man of her dreams led her across the globe, into jail and onto the front page. Funny, strange and disturbing, Tabloid is a vivid portrait of obsession, delusion and scandal sheet notoriety.Read More »