Heralded as perhaps the greatest espionage novelist of all time (though some find this label horribly reductive), David Cornwell, best known by his pen name John le Carré, wrote 26 novels over the course of his 60-year career. But filmmaker Errol Morris decided to chronicle the life and career of the English writer and former British Intelligence agent through the lens of his 2016 memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life. This decision makes perfect sense on paper: why wouldn’t Morris utilize Cornwell’s own recollections and reflections as the backbone of his documentary profile, particularly with a subject who, […]

In 2000, Filmmaker, timed to a traveling retrospective, asked four directors to reflect on the work of legendary French film director Alain Resnais. We are reposting this piece now as another retrospective, Film Forum’s Alain Resnais 100, opens tomorrow. The below films, with the exception of Je T’aime, Je T’aime, are all also streaming now on the Criterion Channel. See as well this article’s original sidebar, in which producer Anatole Dauman reflects on the making of Night and Fog and Hiroshima, Mon Amour. — Editor Perhaps more than those of any other modern director, the films of Alain Resnais are […]

Marc Smerling’s true crime docuseries for FX, A Wilderness of Error, debuting September 25, is a deep-dive reinvestigation of the case of convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald, who has spent the past nearly four decades serving time for the 1970 killing of his wife and two young daughters – a gruesome triple homicide that the onetime Army surgeon and Green Beret blamed (and still blames) on Manson Family copycats. The five-part series is based on Errol Morris’s non-fiction book A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald, a deep-dive reinvestigation of the case – specifically the case laid out by […]

The following interview of Errol Morris originally appeared in Filmmaker‘s Fall, 1998 issue. In 1988, Fred A. Leuchter, an engineer from Massachusetts who made a living designing more “humane” electric chairs, was hired by Ernst Zundel, the publisher of several pro-Hitler, Holocaust-denying tracts, to conduct a forensic investigation into the use of poison gas in Nazi concentration camps. On his honeymoon, Leuchter travelled to Auschwitz and, with his wife sitting in the car reading Agatha Christie novels, illegally chipped away at the brick, collecting mortar samples which he transported back to the States. Testing these samples for traces of cyanide […]

This past fall, the stage was perfectly set for the launch of Errol Morris’s latest documentary, American Dharma: An Oscar-winning director takes on Steve Bannon, perhaps the most controversial figure of the Trump Presidency; the film nabs Oscar-season festival premieres at Venice and Toronto; and it’s an acquisition title launching during one of the hottest documentary markets in a decade. On Twitter, excited fans declare, “Can’t wait!” while the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, and several other major press outlets all publish interviews with Morris where he sets up the project as a portrait of Bannon’s “bullshit,” […]

The program for the 31st International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (November 14th – 25th) — the first under the new artistic directorship of Syrian documentary filmmaker Orwa Nyrabia — feels equal parts familiar and fresh. On the one hand, as in years past, it’s hard not to be overwhelmed by the sheer size of the world’s largest nonfiction film festival. Once again the fest will include exceptional industry events like the IDFA Forum (and Docs for Sale, the IDFA Bertha Fund, IDFA Academy, etc.), competitions (14 in total), and more meet-and-greets and parties than one can reasonably attend. (Do I […]

Errol Morris brings the full force of his filmmaking to a pair of PSAs he’s made as part of AT&T’s “It Can Wait” campaign, which raises awareness about distracted driving. Those who’ve seen his recent work, especially his Netflix six-part film, Wormwood, will recognize a number of stylistic devices here, including multi-angle talking heads material, unusual photo crops, and, of course, Morris’s pertinently shouted off-screen questions. But the films, particularly the devastating “Forrest’s Story,” go further than the usual PSA, exploring, in addition to Morris’s usual epistemological inquiry, the different forms of grief and the enduring mysteries of loss. The […]

Recounting a recent conversation, Errol Morris says that he’s happy his friend understood Wormwood, the documentary filmmaker’s epic new work, as “an essay on ‘doing history.’” “I think it’s a lot of things, too,” Morris goes on to say, “but I like to hear that it’s about my obsessions with epistemology.” Obsession and epistemology—doesn’t the latter usually require the former? It certainly does in these reality-challenged times, when the act of landing on some honest reckoning with the social and political record requires a scrupulous method, unrelenting tenacity and, indeed, some small degree of obsession. All these qualities have been […]

Sonia Kennebeck’s National Bird is a humanistic look at those responsible for and affected by America’s divisive drone war program. Those working in drone warfare are thousands of miles removed from the destination of their attack, so National Bird is primarily placed in suburban America, away from the crimes at the film’s core. Through three former air force workers turned whistleblowers (and their victims), Kennebeck’s film is equally about an emotional and spatial disconnect. We do not interact with those we are affecting most – please feel free to draw your own parallels to current American politics here – and therefore the country can […]

Every film not only tells a story but is a story. Lumping several movies together to find commonality is a perilous pursuit. For example, we have to determine if shared traits operate at the level of content, plot or characters. Or might they be more in the vein of form — style, perhaps, or generic membership? Last week, zeroing in on what I consider the six finest features screening in the first third of the New York Film Festival led me to a marked thematic thread, which we can file under “loneliness and the attempt to escape it.” From the […]