Errol Morris

"I've always been a person who thinks about stuff," says director Errol Morris. "I think that's probably the best way to describe me." It's a good thing that Morris is describing himself because no one else can.

Believing Is Seeing (Observations on the Mysteries of Photography) Errol Morris Penguin Press: 310 pp., $40 In the brutally hot summer of 1936, Arthur Rothstein, a young photographer working for a branch of the Farm Security Administration, made a series of images that soon took on a bizarre life of their own. They were photos of a sun-bleached cow skull resting in a bone-dry corner of South Dakota, one of several drought-decimated states...

"Tabloid" is tabloid journalism with a difference. The Errol Morris difference. Though his most recent documentaries (the Abu Ghraib exposé "Standard Operating Procedure" and the Oscar-winning "The Fog of War") have featured weighty subject matter, Morris has always had a weakness for the wilder shores of human psychology, for the odd and eccentric patterns of personal behavior, the odder the better. In Joyce McKinney, he has very much met his match. A cheerful, bubbly woman with a forthright manner and an inexhaustible willingness to talk, McKinney was the central figure in one of the great tabloid newspaper yarns of the 1970s, the infamous "Case of the Manacled Mormon," a tale so irresistible that, as one observer accurately remembers, "the British Isles were on fire with this story.

"Tabloid" is tabloid journalism with a difference. The Errol Morris difference. Though his most recent documentaries (the Abu Ghraib exposé "Standard Operating Procedure" and the Oscar-winning "The Fog of War") have featured weighty subject matter, Morris has always had a weakness for the wilder shores of human psychology, for the odd and eccentric patterns of personal behavior, the odder the better. In Joyce McKinney, he has very much met his match. A cheerful, bubbly woman with a forthright manner and an inexhaustible willingness to talk, McKinney was the central figure in one of the great tabloid newspaper yarns of the 1970s, the infamous "Case of the Manacled Mormon," a tale so irresistible that, as one observer accurately remembers, "the British Isles were on fire with this story.

A documentary filmmaker known for his ironic take on the world, Errol Morris no doubt was struck by the, well, irony of the situation. Morris was asked this year to help change the rules for the Oscar documentary film category by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences--the same academy that failed to even nominate some of his critically acclaimed films: "The Thin Blue Line" (1988), "A Brief History of Time" (1992) and "Fast, Cheap & Out of Control" (1997).

"The concept of the interview is endlessly interesting to me," Errol Morris said with a wistful smile. The filmmaker tapped his fingertips together. "I have given interviews a lot of thought through the years, and I still think about them quite a lot. In a real sense they are a basic human relationship. But an interview is also an artificial frame, a focus, and that, well, that's even more interesting."

Errol Morris knows reality. Making singular documentaries such as "A Thin Blue Line" and "Fast, Cheap & Out of Control" for 25 years does that for you. And what he knows is that reality is a lot more nuanced and complicated, a lot more troubling, than we are ready to accept. "We like to think of the world in terms of good and evil, it makes it more tractable," the filmmaker says in his quietly confident way. "Otherwise it's far more difficult to deal with -- and it's problematic as it is."

Believing Is Seeing (Observations on the Mysteries of Photography) Errol Morris Penguin Press: 310 pp., $40 In the brutally hot summer of 1936, Arthur Rothstein, a young photographer working for a branch of the Farm Security Administration, made a series of images that soon took on a bizarre life of their own. They were photos of a sun-bleached cow skull resting in a bone-dry corner of South Dakota, one of several drought-decimated states...

"Vernon, Florida" (1987), directed by Errol Morris. 60 minutes. Not Rated. This bizarre travelogue is a sometimes hilarious portrait of rural life. And though the discourse dips deeply into the inane, the viewer never feels Morris is ridiculing his subjects.

In his taxing, fascinating 1988 film, Errol Morris builds a powerful case against Texas-style justice while attempting to bring to the documentary form an ultra-cool, neo-film noir look. The result is an experiment in non-fiction screen narrative that yields darkly amusing observations of Americana that are so characteristic of the filmmaker.

Majestically swathed in a pink evening gown and tugging the leash of one of her cloned pit bulls, Joyce McKinney was ready for her close-up. The zaftig former Miss Wyoming was milling outside the Vista movie theater in Los Feliz, minutes after a Wednesday night screening of "Tabloid," the latest film from Oscar-winning documentary maker Errol Morris. "Tabloid," which opens in theaters Friday, unspools the outlandish tale of a '70s transatlantic caper involving McKinney's alleged abduction of her Mormon missionary boyfriend, kinky sex, ethically challenged Fleet Street reporters and a shadowy cast of supporting characters straight out of a film noir.

Late in the summer of 2003, former senior administrators of American correctional institutions were busy refurbishing the cellblocks at Abu Ghraib. Saddam Hussein's prison had been a symbol of torture and abuse, and after the U.S. Army routed the tyrant's forces, American officials set out to remake the prison in our own image. That was the plan: Instead of dungeons and torture, there would be a modern corrections facility, guided by humanitarian values and the rule of law. That was the plan.

"Standard OPERATING PROCEDURE" is not the first documentary on Iraq. It's not the first film on America's embrace of torture as a weapon of choice. It's not even the first picture to focus on the notorious Abu Ghraib prison. What it is is the first time Errol Morris has looked at these issues, and that makes the difference. Morris, one of the world's premier documentarians and an Oscar winner for "The Fog of War," has done something quite unusual. He's taken the prison everyone's heard of, the photographs everybody's seen and the torture that people are either ashamed of or in denial about and looked at it all with such a fierce specificity that to experience "Standard Operating Procedure" is to feel as if we haven't focused on those things at all. And focus is really the heart of Morris' unsettling film, which strikes a remarkable balance between art and disturbance, between beauty and pain.

"The concept of the interview is endlessly interesting to me," Errol Morris said with a wistful smile. The filmmaker tapped his fingertips together. "I have given interviews a lot of thought through the years, and I still think about them quite a lot. In a real sense they are a basic human relationship. But an interview is also an artificial frame, a focus, and that, well, that's even more interesting."

Re "Not Across My Daughter's Big Brass Bed You Don't, Bob," Commentary, April 16: My hat is off to Leslie Bennetts for having the chutzpah to make the implicit, explicit. As a poet, a male, a pacifist and a soon-to-be 50-year-old with his draft card still in a personal archive, I wondered, as I heard of Bob Dylan's newest enterprise, if I'd gotten stuck in one of writer-journalist Hunter Thompson's mind warps. What comes next? A JFK line of unisex thongs? Chicago Eight body jewelry?

In the highly competitive documentary feature category, Errol Morris' "The Fog of War" walked off with the Academy Award on Sunday night. It was the first Oscar -- and nomination -- for the veteran filmmaker who saw releases such as "The Thin Blue Line," "A Brief History of Time" and "Fast, Cheap & Out of Control" bypassed by the academy. "I'd like to thank the academy for finally recognizing one of my films.... I thought it would never happen!" said an ebullient Morris.

The Florida Panhandle, tucked beneath Alabama, is a long strip of desolate swampland, small, sleepy towns and miles of lonely highways that have more road kills than cars--hardly the place most filmmakers would choose as a setting, unless they were making a bass-fishing video. But the region, specifically a remote city just south of Interstate 10, is exactly the place that director Errol Morris selected when he made his quirky 1987 documentary "Vernon, Florida."

"We like to think of the world in terms of good and evil, it makes it more tractable," Errol Morris said when his remarkable new documentary, "The Fog of War," debuted at Cannes in May. "Otherwise it's far more difficult to deal with -- and it's problematic as it is." Never one to shy away from challenges, Morris has come up with one of the best documentaries of this or any year. Part filmed biography of the eternally controversial Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert S.

Errol Morris knows reality. Making singular documentaries such as "A Thin Blue Line" and "Fast, Cheap & Out of Control" for 25 years does that for you. And what he knows is that reality is a lot more nuanced and complicated, a lot more troubling, than we are ready to accept. "We like to think of the world in terms of good and evil, it makes it more tractable," the filmmaker says in his quietly confident way. "Otherwise it's far more difficult to deal with -- and it's problematic as it is."