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ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Feature films about the war have not fared well so far. How do you feel about how this might affect your film?
ERROL MORRIS: I don't know. I want the movie to be seen by the widest possible audience. And I hope that the movie will be judged on its own merits, rather than as a film in a certain category. I think it's a movie that does something no other film really has done. The closest to it, oddly enough, is Clint Eastwood's [Letters from Iwo Jima, which] tried to address the idea of a photograph and its interpretation, taking the famous Rosenthal photograph of raising a flag at Mount Suribachi.

What are you doing next?
I keep thinking that I should make a [dramatic] feature. I have a project I've been talking about doing with Participant [Productions]. This would be a hybrid project, part documentary, part [dramatic] feature. I'd like to go on with it. I kinda still like doing this. Go figure. [Laughs] Someone who pounds his head against the wall.

You just need your friend Werner Herzog to say he'll eat his shoe again, to motivate you [as was chronicled in the 1980 documentary short film Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe].
Aww.... [Laughs] He always tells me I'm much, much, much too slow, that I should stop thinking so much and just make more stuff. And he's probably right.

Well, that's not really fair, since he's so super-humanly prolific. Do you have a premise for the hybrid project?
Oh yeah. There was a photograph that I found, and if you could imagine: You walk through the photograph into the reality that it depicts. These photographs are bizarre. They were taken in 1892 on a remote island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, close to 1,000 miles from Honolulu. Think of it this way: The way we normally like to tell historical stories is we set a stage, we make an argument, we show the antecedents, we arrive at the consequence. What if you could do away with all of that and just enter history through something specific, like a photograph? The photographs on this island show this sea of Albatross eggs as far as you could see. [Laughs] The picture is so strange you have to ask yourself, What am I looking at? When was this taken? What is this? There were a couple of people in the photograph and we found out who they were. We found out who took the photograph. And we started to enter into this world, and this world emerged that is so insane and so interesting that I've been captivated by it. What can I say?

Hmm.... Okay, I'm trying to wrap my head around this concept...
Likewise! [Laughs] It becomes a story about a number of these characters, in that traditional sense. It's an excursion into the past that kind of brings us into the present.

When can we expect that, then?
Well let's see. I hope soon. I'm trying to take Werner's advice: Work faster.


Posted Apr 25, 2008 | Order Article Reprints
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