Errol Morris, an American documentary filmmaker and writer, is one of the most innovative and trendsetting narrative storytellers alive today. His documentaries set the standard for evidence-based, truth-seeking cinematic investigations. He has often been compared to German director Werner Herzog, another pioneer whose techniques have been copied and modified time and time again.
Morris is responsible for two important contributions to documentaries: dramatic reenactments and conducting interviews with his subjects looking directly into the camera. To achieve the latter, Morris invented a device called the Interrotron. Instead of text, Morris projects a live video feed of himself into a teleprompter, where he can engage with his subject while keeping their focus on the lens. In honor of this vanguard filmmaker, here are 10 works by Morris any documentary fan should watch as soon as possible.
Gates Of Heaven (1978)
This is Morris’s first feature, and its subject is a bit strange: the pet cemetery business. Werner Herzog was so convinced Morris wouldn’t be able to put a film together about this topic he told Morris he would eat a shoe if Gates of Heaven ever made it into theatres.
Not only was this film an underground success, but it did a lot to launch Morris’s career. Instead of narration, Morris relies solely on interviews to render his story here, which is told in two parts. Roger Ebert went on to call the find a legend, and Werner Herzog did, in fact, eat a shoe. He even recorded his foray into footwear consumption in the 1990 documentary Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.
Vernon, Florida (1981)
Vernon, Florida is a classic slice-of-life documentary about residents in a small Florida Panhandle town. Morris’s original intention was to focus on residents of the town who cut off their own limbs for the insurance money, but, after said residents threatened his life, Morris reworked the focus of the film.
Instead, he chronicles this decaying town’s aging population, from the man who traps and collects possums on his property to the romantic turkey hunter who waxes poetic about his favorite past time.
The Thin Blue Line (1988)
Morris broke major ground in the genre with this true-crime documentary about a man falsely convicted of murdering a police officer in Dallas, Texas. Randall Dale Adams was sentenced to death for the shooting of Robert Wood despite the lack of concrete evidence as well as testimony from the real shooter, David Ray Harris, who was a juvenile when the crime occurred.
Using dramatic reenactments for the first time, Morris established a trend that would come to define most true crime television, from Unsolved Mysteries to Forensic Files. A year after the film was released, the case was reviewed by authorities and Adams was released after serving 12 years.
A Brief History Of Time (1991)
Instead of obscure criminal cases or life in backwoods Florida, Morris moved his focus toward a much better-known subject with this feature: theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. The title is taken from Hawking’s bestselling book. While the book focuses on Hawking’s astronomical studies, Morris’s documentary focuses on the life of the man responsible for reshaping humanity’s view of the stars.
Morris was exhaustive with his research, interviewing everyone Hawking knew, from his childhood nanny to innumerable colleagues he came to know over the years. Morris captures the imaginative and expansive philosophical beliefs of this beloved cosmologist perfectly, and the documentary is considered one of his best works.
Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997)
This kaleidoscopic documentary explores the lives of four men with unusual careers: a lion tamer, a topiary artist, an expert on hairless mole-rats, and an MIT robotics scientist. Morris’s film is imbued with an excitable and fanatical style, one that seeks to match the obsession each man carries for his trade.
With this film, Morris used the Interrotron for the first time while conducting his interviews. All four men narrative the movie through their interviews. The storytelling is enhanced with 35mm and 8mm camerawork, and the documentary also incorporates footage from older movies and television shows.
The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003)
Morris aims his attention at former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara with this feature. Regarded as the architect of the Vietnam War, McNamara is a divisive figure with a complicated legacy. Morris relies on 20 hours of Interrotron footage and archival materials to develop his story.
McNamara was 85-years-old when he was interviewed for the documentary, and he provides extensive details about his times as an Air Force officer in World War II and as Secretary of Defense under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. The documentary is framed around eleven lessons of war McNamara establishes in his book Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam.
Standard Operating Procedure (2008)
This documentary uses the heinous photographs of torture and abuse taken by U.S. military police at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in 2003 as an entry point into a larger examination of what images mean and how they are used in the retelling of history. Morris won an Oscar for this harrowing film.
While placing appropriate blame on the officers directly involved in the acts depicted in the photographs, Morris draws parallels between their choices and the overall tone of the War in Iraq. Morris’s investigation of the incidents at Abi Ghraib seeks to alter the “bad apple” narrative and instead raises larger questions about what gave those responsible the incentive to act so abhorrently in the first place.
The Unknown Known (2013)
Morris sought out another controversial former U.S. Secretary of Defense for this compelling documentary: Donald Rumsfeld. While known in recent decades for his role in the post-9/11 U.S. War in Iraq under George W. Bush, former Congressman Rumsfeld first served as Secretary of Defense under Gerald Ford from 1975 to 1977, going on to work as an advisor to four presidents in total.
Rumsfeld has been present for many of the most contentious moments in foreign relations during the modern era, and some claim he has quite a bit of blood on his hands. While trying to establish a thread of truth about Rumsfeld’s career, Morris provides astonishing insight into the bureaucratic reality of D.C. by highlight the thousands and thousands of memorandums Rumsfeld became infamous for disseminating during his tenure.
Tabloid (2010)
Tabloid digs into a strange case that made headlines in the late-1970s, one involving international travel, kidnapping, and Mormonism. Morris does a fantastic job in Tabloid of accentuating the incendiary nature of tabloid journalism while trying to settle upon some semblance of truth.
In the documentary, Morris’s main subject is a woman named Joyce McKinney. In 1977, she was accused of kidnapping and sexually assaulting a Latter-Day Saint named Kirk Anderson. While McKinney claims she and Anderson were in love, the reality of the situation is still debatable. Featuring extensive interviews with McKinney and others involved in the case, as well as reports from various news sources, Tabloid shows how many varying accounts can exist for one incident.
Wormwood (2017)
Morris’s latest documentary is also his most ambitious, a six-part Netflix miniseries about a recently declassified Cold War-era CIA experiment known as Project MKUltra. Along with comprehensive interviews from those involved, Wormwood features hallucinatory reenactments from well-known Hollywood actors like Peter Sarsgaard, Molly Parker, and Tim Blake Nelson.
Sarsgaard plays the main focus of the film, a biochemist working for the military named Frank Olson who died under strange circumstances in 1953. Olson’s family has since come to believe he was exposed to LSD without his consent as part of the MKUltra experiments, which sought to figure out whether or not the psychedelic drug could be used as a biological warfare agent.
