April
15
Standard Operating Procedure: Morris Talks
Friday night I interviewed Errol Morris at the Apple Store in Santa Monica. The guy is nothing if not charming, even when talking about such a dead-serious, ugly topic as Abu Ghraib.
Even so, Morris's 9th documentary, his first in cinemascope, Standard Operating Procedure (April 25), which took him the usual three or so years to make, is quite beautiful. When Morris interrogates his subjects in the Interrotron--a gizmo that projects the interviewer and subject to each other and creates a remarkable intimacy--he picks up certain key images that he then films as cinematic reenactments. But they're more like slo-mo poetry.
When letter-writer and Abu Ghraib "specialist" Sabrina Harmon (profiled in this New Yorker article) penned hand-written letters home in 2003 to her wife about a 16-year-old kid who was crawling with giant-size Iraqi ants in his cell, of course Morris had to shoot that.
The shot of an exploding helicopter --an image from a bad dream of Harman's--came from outttakes Sony gave him from Charlie's Angels. And Morris couldn't resist filling a shot of the prison with shredded paper, to illustrate the vast cover-up that went on after the scandal broke. Morris gets reverent when he talks about the high-tech digital camera that shoots so fast that he could shoot the water drops pouring down from a shower.
Mostly though, he shows the photos--the ones that got these "bad apples"-turned-scapegoats into so much trouble. Lynndie England, the diminutive 20-year-old private who held a crawling detainee by a tie-down strap, is surprisingly articulate, now, about what happened. (She has a baby, too.) "People said I dragged him, but I never did," she says in the film. "I'm a 95-pound woman, I'm dominating him. He [she's referring to her then 34-year-old boyfriend and photographer, private Charles Graner] wouldn't have had me standing there if the camera wasn't there." She was the last person Morris interviewed. He had to wait for her to get out of prison. "I liked her," he says.
"When you join the military it's a man's world," she tells him in the film. "You have to be equal to a man or be controlled by a man. You're going to have to be strong to step up to them. I was blinded by being in love with a man."
The person who knocked me out (who Morris interviewed for seventeen hours) is ex-Brigadier Army General Janis Karpinski. She was given the daunting assignment to run Iraq's prisons, including Abu Ghraib. Her competence and anger are palpable. And she was demoted--informed by a reporter ten days before she was relieved of her command in the mail--- in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal. "We discipline ourselves," she said. "We're Americans. We know right from wrong. The fear of the truth silenced people."
When asked at the Apple Store Q & A how he makes up his mind which of his many projects to make, Morris replied, I do what someone will pay me to do. (In the case of Standard Operating Procedure, Participant and Sony Pictures Classics.) Next up: a comedy. Morris has had enough of two war movies in a row. (He won the Oscar for Fog of War.) He wants to lighten up a bit and be funny with the fiction film The End of Everything, which includes his ramblings on a volcano, Laura Bush, a wingless bird, and Gone with the Wind author Margaret Mitchell. Participant may back him again.
UPDATE: The NYT's Frank Rich thinks no one will go to see SOP, no matter how upbeat the reviews, while the Village Voice's Anthony Kaufman says that comedy is the new way to approach Iraq..
[Photo of Sabrina Harmon by Nubar Alexanian, whose set photos from Errol Morris's movies are included in the handsome coffee table book Nonfiction]
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