"Where Movie Critics Get A Taste Of Their Own Medicine"
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AN INTERVIEW WITH:
ERROL MORRIS
by Peter Sobczynski

January 23, 2004

When you first see the man, you can’t help but think that he looks like...well, like a schnook. When he is described by someone as being "An IBM Machine with legs", you can’t help but agree because he has an aura around him and that aura say "numbers cruncher". However, the subject of the powerful new documentary "The Fog of War" is not your ordinary run-of-the-mill bean-counter. Rather, it is Robert McNamara and, as both witness and participant, the numbers that he crunched determined America’s involvement in some of the most critical events that our country has faced. He was involved, for example, in the 1945 fire-bombings of 67 Japanese cities in the months leading up to Hiroshima that killed more than 1 million Japanese civilians before the atomic bombs fell. As an advisor to John F. Kennedy, he was a witness to the Cuban missile crisis and saw first-hand how close both sides came to the point of no return. Most infamously, he served as an advisor to both Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson about the emerging problems in Vietnam and helped to create the policies that led to the increased American involvement (and which later caused him to be called the "architect" of the war).

In "The Fog of War", McNamara takes us through those events through the eyes of a man who has not borne witness to devastating events but has directly influenced them and has to live with both the good and bad. Even today, it is impossible to a fix on the man and the film never tries to "explain" him-it merely allows him, via interviews, documents and archival footage, to tell his story and lets viewers decide what to think of him. In many cases, making such a determination is all but impossible-he has been painted as an unfeeling technocrat but the recorded telephone conversations about Vietnam with Johnson that we hear paint a picture of a different man as he advises against troop increases. No matter what your views on McNamara or the events he influenced, viewing this film will force you to re-examine them.

"The Fog of War" was directed by Errol Morris, arguably America’s finest and most innovative documentary filmmaker. In the past, he has turned his cameras on such odd characters as pet cemetery owners ("Gates of Heaven"), naked-mole-rat specialists ("Fast, Cheap and Out of Control") and an execution-device-technician-turned-Holocaust-denier ("Mr. Death") and one of his films, the landmark 1988 film "The Thin Blue Line" actually solved the murder of a Texas policeman and freed an innocent man from Death Row. In this film, however, his subject is someone who has been documented countless times and yet there is nothing about the film that feels like a rehash of familiar material. Using his quirky method of interviewing subjects, impressively researched archival material and a haunting Philip Glass score, "The Fog of War" is one of his very best films to date and with interest in theatrical documentaries at an all-time high, it should expose Morris to the wide audience that he has long deserved.

Recently, Morris sat down to discuss "The Fog of War", his views on Robert McNamara and his distinctive approach to the documentary form.

With the exception of Stephen Hawking, the subjects of your previous films have been people who were completely unknown to the public and who had rarely, if ever, been interviewed before. Robert McNamara, on the other hand, is a well-known figure who has been interviewed countless times. Did that in any way affect the approach that you took when making "The Fog of War"?

It did make me wonder what I hoped to hear in an interview that other people hadn’t heard again and again and again. To be absolutely truthful, there are things that he said to me that he had said to other people before and, in some cases, he said them in more or less the same words. But there are things that he said that he hasn’t said anywhere else before and a lot of the important stuff, to me, is stuff that he hasn’t said elsewhere and he certainly has never said all of these things before in the same place in this form-for example, the stuff about the fire-bombing in Tokyo. I had known about Dresden and Tokyo as being examples of Allied atrocities-after all, the one thing that we known about fire-bombing is that it isn’t about military targets, it is about civilians and the focus of the war becomes different. At the time, people were describing what they were doing to Japanese civilians as "dehousing". There were debates about how many people died that night in Tokyo-between 80-120,000 people.

What I didn’t know-I didn’t know about the other 66 cities. I was aware of all these debates about the A-bomb-I am sure you are familiar with all the arguments that it was used to force Japan to capitulate to avoid a mainland invasion-but I don’t remember anything about Tokyo and the other 66 cities. It is an extraordinary story and McNamara brought it up out of nowhere. There are about five full-length biographies of McNamara and none of them even mentioned this! It is an amazing story and that is new.

How did you go about stylistically conceiving the film? For example, there are familiar elements that you have used before, such as the Philip Glass music and the use of archival footage.

I was doing this series for television-I had done a series for two years for Bravo and IFC. The idea was that I would interview one person only per show-"Mr. Death" was intended to work that way originally. That didn’t work, which is a story in itself, but I thought that it might work with McNamara-I could possibly tell a story with one person. It is a contrarian idea where history is involved-someone would look at it and ask about balance. Apparently, you are supposed to interview X-number of people in order to get a balance viewpoint. My answer to that is that I wasn’t concerned in a balanced viewpoint and that I am actually not a great believer in balance. People think in the back of their heads that if you interview people with different points of view, you have put the necessary ingredients into the meat grinder and that, somehow, "truth" will emerge.

What ultimately fascinates me is what is going on in the heads of people. My answer in that you may not know exactly what is in their heads but people tell you a lot about themselves by how they describe themselves and how they use language in describing themselves. And when I am in my more grandiose mode, I think of it as a new way of doing history. I describe it as "history inside out"; instead of what you normally see-which is a considered narrative that takes you through events-I have provided a stream-of-consciousness narration from one man. In a normal work of history, you would have a footnote that takes you back to a book or a magazine or archival material that you have to find. I always wondered if you could do that in reverse-I wanted to see the original source material and go to the footnote. When you have this intensely subjective account that is dotted with pieces of evidence, the stuff that would normally be relegated to a footnote suddenly takes center stage. When you see those numbers falling over Tokyo, we went to the National Archives and pulled the original McNamara memoranda from 1945. I am pretty sure that no one had actually looked at those documents since the end of World War II. He, McNamara, was amazed that we had found it. The numbers that we see falling over Tokyo are his handwritten numbers from his notes. That whole story is buttressed, if you like, by my own odd form of using the material behind the footnote, and yet, there is that memo with McNamara talking about the bombing efficiency and accuracy of the B-29 and how it would markedly increase when you brought the plane down lower. As he says, and it is a very powerful and suggestive line, he was "part of the mechanism", whatever that means. Was he the bullet or the trigger or the finger on the trigger?

Then there is that phone call. One thing about Vietnam is that there are just volumes of paper-this paper tsunami. The State Department maintains a website and you can actually get many of the documents on-line about the war from ‘62, ‘63, ‘64 and when you read these reports, you get an idea...when you write a memoranda, you aren’t just writing it for yourself, you are writing it for the person who will be reading it and who wants to hear something. Phone calls, however, are different. There is the President of the United States and McNamara-in Johnson’s case, he is going on and on and he sometimes doesn’t let McNamara get a word in edgewise. This is very powerful and it changed a lot of my thinking.

What led you to do "The Fog of War"? Was it the broad subject of Vietnam or the specific focus of Robert McNamara that led you in? Along those lines, what were your original thoughts on McNamara before starting work on the film?

I came out of student demonstrations of the 1960’s and McNamara was hated by a lot of people-they called it "McNamara’s War" and he was often described as "the architect of Vietnam" as if it was simply his own idea and he came up with it. I certainly went into the project with those ideas in mind. I read his book in 1995, "In Retrospect", and had a lot of questions about it. The book was interesting and the response to it was interesting. Other than that, I never knew-one of the reasons I like doing interviews is that I never know what I am going to here and I don’t go in with a fixed agenda. I knew what I expected to hear, given that he had been interviewed millions of times, but within five minutes of the first interview, he was talking about war crimes. The stuff about LeMay and how if our side hadn’t won World War II, he would have been prosecuted as a war criminal came very early on in our first discussion. We just started talking and all of a sudden, the issue of My Lai came up-there was a "60 Minutes" and New York Times piece about Bob Kerry’s possible war crimes. I might have mentioned the article and he had-he talked about the article and defended Kerry and the difficulty of telling the difference between the combatant and the non-combatant, one of the big questions of Vietnam to begin with, and I also mentioned an article about LeMay in which his war crime remarks was quoted. McNamara then went into this long description of the fire-bombing and his relationship with LeMay.

I think I look at certain stories and think that if something interesting might occur, I should pursue it even if I don’t know exactly what it is that will happen. I can honestly say that I don’t know but I can also honestly say that he always interested me and still interests me-probably more so than ever. I still talk to him all the time. There are all these conversations, many of which still haven’t been released, but no one has taken them and gone over them with McNamara. It seems to me that all these people are gone except for Schlesinger, Sorensen and McNamara-a lot of them are just gone. No one has actually gone through these conversations with McNamara and asked him what was going through his head and in Johnson’s head. I’ve been trying to go through them with him one by one and I am still doing it.

I used to work as an investigator when I was an out-of-work filmmaker. I had made my first two films and there were people who liked them, Roger Ebert being the principal man among them, but there weren’t enough of them that I could get additional film work. There was a long period of time between "Vernon, Florida" and "The Thin Blue Line" where I couldn’t get any money to make films and I had to work as a private detective. One of the really good things about being a detective is that when someone tells you that they aren’t paying for you to investigate any more and they want you to stop, you stop. When you are investigating for yourself-when I was doing "The Thin Blue Line", I would think, "What if I can’t get him out of prison? I could be investigating this for the rest of my life!" I thought about writing a book on "The Thin Blue Line" because there was the whole investigation that wasn’t even a part of the movie-you don’t see the investigation but you see the results. You don’t see the time and effort in following David Harris over the years or the insane relationship that developed.

Was it a conscious decision to avoid any mention of the Pentagon Papers, which McNamara commissioned, in "The Fog of War"?

It was a conscious decision for many reasons. It didn’t seem to be a part of the story-the story of Daniel Ellsberg and the leaking really happened after McNamara’s time. They were commissioned by him to provide a historical record. I had asked him off-and-on where he was when he first learned that people were leaking the papers and his feelings about Ellsberg, who didn’t work directly for McNamara but for McNamara’s deputy. Actually, one of the amazing things is that Daniel Ellsberg came to work at the Pentagon on August 4, 1964-the day of the imaginary second attack!

The Pentagon Papers is actually an odd collection of things that is no way comprehensive in and of itself. For example, the October 2nd Security Council meeting in which you hear McNamara talking to the President-that is not in the Pentagon Papers. Was this movie intended to me a comprehensive history of the 20th Century or Vietnam? No-it couldn’t possibly be even if I wanted it to be and I didn’t want it to be. Are there things left out? With the Pentagon Papers, there isn’t even a definitive version of it. It is a document and I have read what is supposedly the most complete version of it. It is something you use as a reference book as a source. So is the "Encyclopedia Britannica" and that isn’t in my movie either.

There is one extraordinary scene in the film that consists of nothing but a long piece of archival footage of John F. Kennedy while McNamara talks about him in a voice-over. Many have written that it is one of the most moving scenes in the picture and I would concur with that assessment. What was the conception behind the scene and where did you find that particular footage of him-a piece that seems to somehow sum up every thought and belief about the man, no matter how contradictory, even though he remains silent throughout it?

People tell me that it is the most powerful moment in the film. That came from the UCLA Archives and it was amazing that it had just been sitting there. McNamara himself even commented that it looks like a freeze-frame until you see him blink a couple of times. Obviously, it was shot while Kennedy was having a portrait done or something like that. It also has these remarkable colors as well. Someone commented to me that the film was like an odd history of photography-you had all the black-and-white material from World War I to various versions of Technicolor. There is a really amazing movie that not many people know about called "The Last Bomb", which was about LeMay and the B-29, and I used footage from that. Then it goes from there to the early uses of videotape. I liked that and I actually tried to preserve that quality of the imagery changing over time.

-- PETER SOBCZYNSKI

Copyright © 2004 Peter Sobczynski
All rights reserved.
Used with permission
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