E-mail a friendErrol Morris
airdate February 27, 2004
"One-of-a-kind" is often used to describe documentary filmmaker Errol Morris. The British newspaper The Guardian named him the seventh best filmmaker in the world. Morris' breakthrough effort was 1988's The Thin Blue Line, a film that helped set an innocent man free. His latest work is the Oscar-nominated The Fog of War, about former defense secretary Robert McNamara.
Errol Morris
Tavis: Is that what saved us? Luck?
Errol: Possibly so. Here is a story of luck, error, mistakes, uh, self-deception. Uh, the odd thing about working on this movie, I know my first interview with Robert McNamara was before 9/11. But as we continued to work on the movie, it became more and more relevant. McNamara's talking about events that happened 40, 50, 60 years ago. He might as well be talking about things that happened yesterday. That was a surprise.
Tavis: I was fascinated by--to your point--the parallels that are drawn between then and now, between 50 years ago and now. This documentary is shot around 11 different lessons of McNamara's life. And one of the lessons is that belief and seeing, uh, sometimes can be both wrong. Extrapolate for me.
Errol: I sometimes like to point out that believing is seeing, and not the other way around. That if you want to see something, somehow your mind can play tricks with you, and you can end up seeing it even though it's not there. There's a story about the Gulf of Tonkin that goes back to 1964. We imagined an attack on 2 of our destroyers in the gulf, an attack which we now know never happened. Why is this important? Because we went to war over what happened that day. Sound familiar? Uh, do we have events today that remind us of these past events? Most certainly, we do.
Tavis: The WMDs. The weapons of mass destruction that we were told were there, that we've not yet found. Is that a good example of all those parallels?
Errol: I would say yes. You know, the interesting question is whether people lie about things or they actually deceive themselves. They convince themselves that there are things there that in fact do not exist. That frightens me even more, our capacity to basically pull the wool over our own eyes. And my hope--I never intended at the outset to make a political film. It's somewhat of a surprise to me. But, yes, it is a political film, because it tells us how history has enormous bearing on what is happening today. I would love to have this film shown to some of the people in government that are making decisions. Let them think about these events that happened years and years ago and ask themselves whether we are today making the same damn mistakes we made yesterday.
Tavis: I was fascinated by a number of things about this documentary, not the least of which is the absolute--trying to find the right word here--veracity, openness, frankness with which Robert McNamara spoke. I mean, the guy is now 85 years old. He's--
Errol: Now 87.
Tavis: 87, OK. 85 you talked to him. He's 87 now. He's 87. He's 85 at the time you were speaking to him. All right, so he's got years now to look back on his experiences, the lessons, the mistakes, as it were, and I'm always struck by how it is--to my open tonight--people like Muhammad Ali and Martin King could've gotten it so right and McNamara could've gotten it so wrong. What is he now seeing at 85 that clearly King and Ali saw--and obviously other young protestors of every ilk in this country saw back then?
Errol: It's strange. Maybe when you're a part of the government, it's as if you have blinders on. Because for many people outside of the government in the sixties including myself--I demonstrated against the war in the late sixties and early seventies--it was clear that the war was wrong. But to people in government, it looked very different.
Tavis: One of the other lessons in this movie, as I said, it's built around 11 lessons. One of the ones that I found interesting was to be prepared to reexamine your reasoning, to be prepared to reexamine your reasoning. Talk to me about that particular lesson, why McNamara found that to be so important.
Errol: Well, I find the world particularly scary today, because we're endlessly talking in terms of absolutes: absolute good, absolute evil, absolute this, absolute that. One of the things that 'The Fog of War' reminds us of is our fallibility, the fact that not only can we make mistakes, but we do make mistakes. We've made mistakes in the past--many, many, many mistakes. The clip that you played about the Cuban missile crisis. This is not a story in 'The Fog of War' about how the Kennedys saved the world. This is a story about how the world almost came to an end.
Tavis: But you know--Not to interrupt you--but you know that's what we've been told for years. Those in my generation have been told the Kennedys saved us, that it was about resolve, not about, as McNamara said, luck. Your story is not what I've been taught my entire life. You realize that?
Errol: Yes. I think that there are different stories that emerge here, but stories worth thinking about. I know that it is a relief to think that someone is pulling the strings somewhere, someone's in control, someone's in charge, someone knows what they're doing. But this is a story of, again, confusion, error, self-deception. And at the heart of it is this one central question: do we have to repeat the errors of the past or can we learn from history? Simple question.
Tavis: Speaking of simple questions, I don't know how simple this one is, but I wonder whether or not, to your point earlier, that you did not set out to make a political film. But given the timing of the film, the timing of the release of the documentary, and that it has been, in fact, nominated in Hollywood for an Academy Award, the fact that it is political, and of all the films nominated in your category, this one, I sense as I move around the city, is being talked about the most--in part, because of your fine work--but also because of the subject matter and the timing, again, of the release of the film. But does the fact that it is so political hurt you or help you in terms of the academy nomination for best documentary? You're gonna tell me you don't care.
Errol: No, I'm not gonna tell you I don't care. I do care. I'm gonna tell you I don't know. I made the movie because it was an important movie for me to make. McNamara has fascinated me for years. He's unusual among public figures in that he has felt this need to go back over the past again and again and again and again to try to figure out what went wrong. And I also believe he has an important message. There are a lot of people who do not like this man. They hate this man. They hate him for the role that he played in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Notwithstanding, he has important things to tell us.
Tavis: And others hate him because of his frankness these days about the mistakes that he did make.
Errol: I think for people of my generation--I grew up during the Vietnam war--it's hard to remember how much that war divided this country. I sometimes look at someone like Robert McNamara, who was born in 1916, as part of an optimistic generation. You know, they survived the Depression. They won World War II. They participated in this great postwar economic boom. I'm not from an optimistic generation. I'm from a generation that has come to truly distrust the government, to be suspicious of government. But I am moved and interested by his struggle with history. There will be people who'll say he hasn't gone far enough, he hasn't gone deep enough, but to me, there is a lot of important material in his story, a story that has relevance today.
Tavis: Our time is getting real tight here, but for persons in my generation or the millennium, the hip-hop generation, to come behind me even--
Errol: Is that what they call it now?
Tavis: The hip-hop generation, the millennium generation. I'm part of that Generation X. I hate that term. It sounds like a laboratory experiment that blew up somewhere. But anyway, in a minute, tell me what the abiding legacy--the abiding lesson, I should say--of the Vietnam War and era is for this generation, in about 45 seconds.
Errol: That we are fallible and we should try to understand our enemies. As McNamara says, we should try to empathize with our enemies. We should try to look at the world from their point of view. We should instead of rejecting all shades of grey, we should think about complexity. We should think about subtlety. We should think about the world in some terms other than just pure good and evil. We should try to figure out a way to find a solution to our problems short of war.
Tavis: Maybe if you want the folk in government in the White House to see this, you should send them a copy of it.
Errol: Yeah, I want them to see it.
Tavis: Send them a copy of it. Maybe they'll check it out.
Errol: OK.
Tavis: All right. Nice to see you. Thanks for the film. I appreciate it. Errol Morris' Oscar-nominated documentary is called 'The Fog of War' and is in theaters now. We'll be right back with actor John C. McGinley from the NBC show 'Scrubs.' Stay with us.
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