In his latest documentary, Standard Operating Procedure, Errol Morris is addressing questions no one has bothered to ask and finding answers no one has bothered to tell.
With an Academy Award under his belt for Fog of War, Errol Morris continues to investigate and research stories that many people have undoubtedly turned away from. Standard Operating Procedure, his newest film, delves into the lives of the soldiers and prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Using intrigue and intensity, Morris brings to life the stories surrounding the haunting and epic photographs of prisoners in the Middle East.
The Rake sat down with Morris to discuss his latest artistic achievement, and his thoughts on the importance of his latest film.
Roger Ebert compared you to directors like Hitchcock and Fellini. What does it feel like to be compared to some of the greatest filmmakers in history?
Well, what really feels good is actually having Roger Ebert as a champion for so many years of my work. He’s someone who I’ve come to know pretty well. At first it surprised me because he put the first film that I ever made on his list of the top ten films of all time. Sometimes I think I can’t actually make a film that Roger is going to like more than that first film, but he’s liked an awful lot of them (laughs). He’s an incredibly good guy. I’m delighted that he’s said so many kind things about me. The Hitchcock remark is one among many and I’m grateful.
Which film did he put on his top ten list?
Gates of Heaven
What is it that draws you to making documentary films?
I don’t know if it’s making documentary films or if it’s just making films. I’m a filmmaker. They’re films about real things, they’re things about reality but they’re constructed in many ways like a traditional movie. I’ve had the opportunity to work with some of the best Hollywood photographers and I think this [Standard Operating Procedure] is an interesting movie, as a movie even independent of all the questions you might address.
Do you enjoy making documentaries rather than fiction films?
Well, I plan to do a hybrid film with some fiction. I think I enjoy all of it. I enjoy investigating, that’s one thing I do enjoy. I made a film, the Thin Blue Line, where I was able to get an innocent man out of jail, which was the end of a two-year long investigation, and now I’ve been investigating the photographs of Abu Ghraib. In a similar kind of way I’ve been trying to ask questions that I don’t think anyone else has asked about: why the photographs were taken in the first place and what they mean.
When did you first get the idea to document the lives and photographs of the soldiers at Abu Ghraib?
Probably when I first started to become aware of the photographs. It would have been in April and May of 2004. These are photographs that have been seen by an awful lot of people. I started to wonder and have discussions with friends of mine and everybody had a different opinion on why the photographs were taken, no one seemed to know much about it. I thought no one has bothered to talk to the people who took these photographs, wouldn’t that be of interest.
Did you find this product to be emotionally draining at all?
Yes, very draining. I mean it’s really hard when you’re investigating with a camera to get people to actually agree to be interviewed and getting them to open up in the interview, that’s all really time consuming and hard. I know I’ve been asked quite often if it’s easy to get these interviews and the answer is no, it was not easy, it’s was really hard.
How did get the soldiers to agree to be interviewed?
It was kind of a crazy sort of networking. You talk to one person and they know someone, they like speaking to me, so they’ll say something nice and another person will come in and it’s gradually making your way into this whole group of people.
One of the biggest things I noticed, personally, when watching Standard Operating Procedure was my ability to become numb to the images and stories.
How so?
After a certain amount of time I started to understand that the soldiers used this technique as a survival tactic. And I could sympathize with where they were coming from.
Well that’s good! I think the idea is to put people watching the movie in their shoes so they can see them not as monsters but as people and to imagine what the hell would I do if I were put in that situation.
Well that was definitely the most powerful things I felt when watching the film.
Well that’s good, that’s what I hope to do, so thank you.
The film only tells the story from the soldiers’ perspectives. Did you attempt to interview any of the prisoners?
I interviewed one prisoner. I didn’t want to interview prisoners at random, just like I didn’t want to interviews at random, I wanted to stick to the photographs. There’s this incredible story about the hooded man, the iconic photograph of the man on the box with the wires tied to his hands, and there was this impostor, a guy who claimed he was the hooded man and in fact wasn’t. I was fascinated by that story of two people claiming to be the guy under the hood. It’s like the unknown soldier except the unknown Abu Ghraib victim. I tried really hard to find the people who were in the photographs, like the guy who they call "Gus" on the leash with Lynddie England, the guy with the hood on the box, I tried really really hard and I could not find them. I did find the impostor, of course he was well known at the time but I interviewed him. That interview was really interesting because I asked him about [the American soldier] Sabrina Harman, and as a prisoner, he has really nothing to gain from saying anything nice about any American, and he said he liked Sabrina and that she was "a good one," which was interesting to hear.
Did you contemplate putting that interview into the film?
I didn’t for a whole number of reasons. It’s tricky, I didn’t interview him on film, in fact it was over a series of phone conversations. The movie has its own style to it and when you start bringing in characters from left field, the movie could simply fall apart. I thought it was best in the end to stick with the soldiers. You feel what it must have been like to be a prisoner there, I think that’s part of the story as well and that’s in the movie, whether you’re looking at the dogs, the man on the box, the ants, any of that stuff.
The beginning and ending of the documentary opens and closes with pictures of the sunrise and sunset. Why did you choose to use photographs that stand in stark contrast with the mood of the rest of the film?
Well I don’t think they’re in that much stark contrast. They’re certainly photographs, and the movie is about photographs, so I like the idea that these were actual photographs taken at Abu Ghraib, not just sunrise or sunset. It begins with a sunset and ends with a sunrise and follows Tim Dugan’s (the khaki construtor who opens and closes the movie) story coming to Abu Ghraib and of course the story of sitting out watching what he calls the birdies fly away at sunrise every morning.
The main focus of the film was the stories and photographs by the soldiers. Do you think there is room for interpretation?
I think that we’ll know more and more about as time goes on. The surprising thing, and I hope this is what the movie does, is that you look at a photograph you thought you understood and you see you do not understand it and that the photograph really has a different story connected to it than the story that you thought. Wether it’s Sabrina Harman smiling with her thumb up, you think
she’s connected to the murder of this prisoner, but you find out she’s trying to expose a murder, there’s a huge difference, in how we view these people and how we look at these photographs, it’s two different things.
Was there a particular moment in the film that stood out the most to you?
Well, there’s a lot of stuff in there, from the leash photograph to the worst night of all, the human pyramid, it’s going into the world of those photographs, which are all burned into our minds, particularly mine since I spent so much time with them over the last couple of years. I like a lot of moments in the film. I like Lynddie England at the end when she talks about her son Carter, and how she would do it all over again. I like Javal saying "I think I know what I can do, and I think I know what I can’ do". We often think about these people who were at Abu Ghraib as being faceless automatons, evil-doers or monsters, what I like is that they emerge as people. And they’re all asking ethical questions. There’s a deep feeling of being trapped there, like some kind of Samuel Beckett play and that there is really no way out. I asked myself, what would I do? Your commanding officers have essentially told you to shut the fuck up. You’re in the military and people seem to be shocked that you follow orders in the military. What do you think people do in the military? If your commanding officer tells you to do such and such in the military, you DO what you’re told to do, yet they all questioned it. Sabrina knew what she was doing was wrong and she struggled constantly with ethical issues and ethical questions. I think it’s very powerful.
Why did you choose to use re-enactments during the filming of Standard Operating Procedure?
The term re-enactment might not be the best term.
What term would you use?
Well, I have used re-enactments, so I have myself to blame (laughs) but they’re visualizations of ideas. An interview is a kind of re-enactment, when someone is talking about the past. When Lynndie England is talking about the experience of being in a photograph or taking a photograph, she is re-enacting the past for us in words. Often I will take things that people say and I will put them in what you can imagine as a typography like bold-faced, italics or underlined. If a soldier talks about a drop of blood on his uniform and he wonders whether he’s complicit, and we see the drop of blood, not because I’m trying to pretend that you’re back in Abu Ghraib in 2003, but because I want you to think about what he’s thinking, his own complicity in the war and the meaning of that drop of blood. Across the board I think visualizations help bring the photographs and stories about the photographs to life.
Why do you think this documentary is important for the public to see?
I think it’s the issues at hand, not issues about torture but issues about fair play. We’re talking about scapegoats, people who have been blamed for the failure of the war and I’d like to set that record straight. I do not like the idea of powerful, important men at the top of the chain of command walking away from all of this pinning medals on each others’ chests and the lowliest soldiers taking all the blame, to me it’s un-American and wrong, I would go so far as to say even cowardly.