THE HERO

ERROL MORRIS

THE LEGENDARY DOCUMENTARIAN TURNS THE LENS ON HIMSELF…

Everybody has their guard up in some sense,’ remarks Errol Morris, the veteran docu filmmaker famed for true-crime tales (The Thin Blue Line, Tabloid) and incisive portraits of figures like Robert McNamara (in Oscar-winner The Fog of War). Now he turns to John le Carré in The Pigeon Tunnel, a fascinating attempt to prise open the enigmatic spy novelist shortly before his death in 2020.

In The Pigeon Tunnel, you call David Cornwell – aka John le Carré – ‘an exquisite poet of self-hatred’. Why?

Maybe because I looked at David as a kindred spirit. And maybe I see myself as filled with a certain level of self-hatred and self-loathing. David started off as an enigma to me, and probably remained an enigma to me. To say that somehow, by making these things, that I resolve all of the questions or the issues that I might have about a person, would be ridiculous. It’s just not true. They’re contradictions, paradoxes, conundrums… whatever you want to call them. That I was really struck by. I think I’m more cynical than David Cornwell. And yet I see him as a person who is capable of extreme cynicism.

Was it always your plan to use le Carré film adaptations, like The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, to illustrate?

There’s no ‘always’! There’s always no ‘always’. I mean, these films, at least my films, are emergent phenomenon. They come slowly together in the process of actually making them. It’s not like I have a chessboard and a sequence of moves planned out in advance, a plan that is strictly adhered to.

I don’t. I usually say to my subject, ‘I don’t have any idea where to start.’ And that’s true enough.

Is that always the case? You start with a blank canvas? Yes, I think that often, always, maybe always… I don’t know. And one of the interesting things about the beginning of my interview with David… he immediately raises this whole question about interviewing versus interrogating.

Do you mean as to what a documentary filmmaker does, whether they interview or interrogate?

I have no idea what the fuck a documentary filmmaker does! By the way. Probably you don’t either. But it sounds like a good phrase!

‘I SEE MYSELF AS FILLED WITH A CERTAIN LEVEL OF SELF-HATRED’

You’ve made documentary portraits with Robert McNamara, Donald Rumsfeld, Steve Bannon and Stephen Hawking. Do you enjoy this approach?

I do. One of the things that I do enjoy about it, is it breaks a certain kind of rule. Or at least when I started doing it. This is not so much true of the film with Stephen Hawking, because I interviewed a lot of scientists, and a lot of friends of the family. But it was certainly true of the McNamara film, the Rumsfeld film, the Bannon film. And this film, as well. I mean, the usual schtick for this sort of thing is that you interview a lot of people and you cut it all together. What does x think about your protagonist, what does y think about your protagonist. And I eliminated all of that. There is no one else.

Do you feel it’s a specific style you developed?

It’s a style of presentation that is, I believe, unique. It’s certainly a conscious choice that I made that – for better, for worse – was an attempt to go inside of somebody. Not by having others reflect on them, but by having them reflect on themselves.

You said earlier that you feel self-hatred. And yet you’ve made game-changing films like The Thin Blue Line. Does that not satisfy you?

It’s nice if people like your work. It’s nice to be successful as opposed to unsuccessful. But I feel uneasy about my work and about myself. It’s never as good as perhaps I would like it to be. But you keep going.

THE PIGEON TUNNEL IS ON APPLE TV+ FROM 20 OCTOBER.