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ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Do you see Standard Operating Procedure as a political movie?
ERROL MORRIS: It's not intended to be a political movie, but having said that, it would be hard for it not to be, at least in the sense that it's about who we are, how we see ourselves. I have this old-fashioned American belief that it's wrong to punish the little guys and to let the big guys get off scot-free. But it's not a film that lectures to anybody about anything. It's an attempt to take you into a strange world and an opportunity to think about it. In a way, I feel hopeless to address the war as a whole. I don't know how to do that, even. I do know how to look at individual stories in the hopes that they tell us something about the nature of this war. People may not, ultimately, be outraged by torture, but I think people are outraged by a certain level of unfairness. I even have this theory Bush won the 2004 election because of the ''Bad Apples.''

How?
He can say to us that it's the worst day of his life, the day these pictures came out, but it gave the administration people to blame. If you want to say, Why is the war going south? Why were all of these beheadings [happening]? Why are the insurgencies growing? Why does the Arab world hate us? These are the people.

It's amazing how frank and open the interviewees are. Who surprised you the most?
Lynndie, because she had been described as completely inarticulate, perhaps couldn't even talk, might have been brain damaged. I believe she is articulate. She is endlessly interesting. When I first started to screen some of the material, there might be a stretch of 20 or 30 seconds in the interview where she seemed to manifest seven or eight different characters.

Let's go back to Sabrina, who continued to haunt me long after the screening. I think a lot of that had to do with her soft voice and the vulnerability she expressed in her letters to her wife, Kelly, which you were able to use in the movie. I felt such a strange mix of emotions.
That's great, that's good. I find [Sabrina] unendingly complex. And I also have this need to turn these people back into people, to rescue them, if you like, from how they are currently perceived, which is basically a group of monsters. Whenever I feel that people kind of drop a simplistic interpretation on all of this, I rebel. Speaking about Sabrina, you can't say that there is no ethical dimension here. She's constantly wrestling with it, the desire to be tough, even though she is a girl in the army, even though she's empathetic with people she is supposedly lording over. It's really interesting. I like to think if I've done my job correctly, I've captured something of the complexity of what is there. I've captured the nightmare and I've captured the complexity of that nightmare.

How has winning an Oscar changed your work?
Well, it certainly has opened me up to a wider audience. The importance of an Oscar, aside from the personal satisfaction of winning one, is the fact that you can bring your work to more people. That's great.

NEXT PAGE: Standard Operating Procedure's Clint Eastwood connection


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