INTERVIEW WITH EROL MORRIS DIRECTOR STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE

INT: How does SOP fit in with the many other Iraq war documentaries that we’ve seen? I mean why do another one?

EM: I really don’t think it does fit in. It’s about Iraq, I can’t really pretend otherwise but I don’t think it does the same thing. I haven’t seen every Iraq documentary that’s out there. I’ve seen a fair number of them but I’m not really interested in telling the story of torture memos in this movie. I think it’s important that people have made many attempts to tell that story. I’m friends with Mark Danner who’s the person who’s written about torture from the beginning, even before the beginning of the war. I think he’s an American hero. I just didn’t want to make those films. I wanted to make something odder. I often think when I’m directing commercials, I direct a lot of commercials and one rule of thumb is that if you do things in the same way you get the same results. If make the same documentary you’re going to wind up with more or less the same story. I just felt that for me to tell one more version of the story of the torture memos, the complicity of this administration, I have my strong feelings about it, don’t get me wrong, but I decided there was an untold story that I didn’t know anybody else would tell if I didn’t tell it. The story of these people who’ve been demonized, who are they, these photographs that have been misunderstood, what do they really show? And in answer to your question I’m interested in photography. I’ve been writing about it. I’m interested in how photographs reveal and conceal. They do both, at the same time.

INT: Is SOP a call to judgment or a call to understanding or both?

EM: I don’t know. Because those people are all different and they did different things. I don’t think they were all involved in abuse in the same way. I’m endlessly fascinated by the fact that you’re supposed to look at these people as if they are amoral, perhaps even automatons and in fact they’re addressing all kinds of moral questions. I think that in itself is really interesting. But anyway that’s not so responsive. I think as a question I don’t know if it has a simple answer. I wonder what I would do under a similar set of circumstances absolutely. I don’t know.

INT: SOP seems similar to Blowup in that it questions the nature of perceived reality. Did that occur to you while filiming? The idea that SOP had its own frame?

EM: You know I watched Blow Up again recently. I hadn’t seen it in I don’t know how many years, many, many years. And I always hear Blow Up as that movie that mixes reality and illusion. I saw a different film when I watched it again. I don’t think they’re mixed up at all in Blow Up. There’s a murder, there’s a body. He sees it in the photographs the first time and then he goes back to the park and sees the body in the park. There’s no doubt what has occurred in Blow Up. You know that someone has been killed. What’s interesting is that people turn away from it. One of the photographs in S.O.P…. I have a series of essays on S.O.P. in the New York Times and I’m struggling with an essay that I may or may not put up Friday, but it’s about this one photograph of Sabrina Harman smiling, thumbs up with this corpse, this Iraqi prisoner Manadel al-Jamadi. One of the weird things about this story, and you know it is a Blow Up story, if I was smart I would write it as a Blow Up story. In fact I wish I was recording this interview as we speak. It is a Blow Up story because the story in Blow Up is that we know that there’s a real world out there in which things happen, that there was a murder, and that we turn away from it and we choose not to see it. The same could be said of this photograph. We see the smile and we don’t see the murder. The fact that there is a body in the frame, Sabrina didn’t kill him, Sabrina didn’t try to cover up the murder. She took a picture of the corpse in part because she wanted evidence that she had been lied to by her commanding officers who told her that this was a heart attack victim. That’s pretty amazing. We see the picture one way and yet the picture shows us something really different.

INT: The implication though is that photographs here may not show us enough.

EM: I think there are all kinds of reasons. I mean you look at a photograph and you make all kinds of assumptions because things are juxtaposed in a photograph. You see a body and a person with a completely inappropriate facial expression, smiling, thumbs up, I suppose the natural inclination is to think, particularly if you pile that photograph in with a lot of other abuse photographs, it’s not such a stretch to think that the photograph really is a photograph showing her complicity in a crime. And in fact it shows no such thing. The reality of what we are looking at has to be investigated. It’s simply not obvious in the frame. I like the fact you brought up Blow Up a lot I think that there is a similarity.

I recently watched Blowup and I watched The Conversation. I didn’t like The Conversation and I loved Blow Up. I thought that Conversation was kind of cheap imitation and it had truck with the idea that the truth is subjective. It did have this idea of not knowing whether something was really happening or whether it was in his mind. It became the popular conception of the Antonioni film when in fact I think the Antonioni film is more interesting.

INT: So what are you hoping to achieve as a filmmaker here? The documentary has been increasingly geared towards holding people in power to accountability.

EM: I’m not gonna solve all the problems of the world by making a couple of movies. I think it’s part of who we are. We’re easily deceived by ourselves not just people in power. That would be much too simple much too easy. I think it’s all of us. I think we haven’t really tried to understand this war and I think that’s unfortunate. And I think that people keep talking about smoking guns. There’s been an enormous amount of evidenced amassed about this current administration. The question is not whether there’s a smoking gun. The question is why so many smoking guns everywhere are ignored. That is a really strange question in and of itself. I don’t have any real answer.

INT: People seem less able to believe there are answers these days.

EM: There’s a glut of information available but less good information so people are less interested in investigative reporting, newspapers are downsizing. I don’t know what it all means. I’ve never thought of myself as picking up the slack but I do see myself as telling stories that I think need to be told and if I’m not going to do it then I don’t know who will. That’s my choice.

I actually think that investigation, for me at least, is therapy, because, and maybe this goes back to your question, the photographs came out, and someone who came to interview me today left me this paper, it’s floating around here someplace. Oh here it is. They were giving the responses of the American public in the weeks following the release of the photographs. It really fascinates me. Here’s a theory I have. Photographs come out and everyone is shocked. I’m shocked. America is embarrassed, administration is embarrassed, military is embarrassed- embarrassed, embarrassed, embarrassed. I don’t know how fast it occurs but I think it happens almost instantly, it’s politicized. So then you have the left saying such and such is a lie and the right saying no, no, no and then it’s back and forth. I have a friend who often says that if an argument goes back and forth three times you’re supposed to say stalemate. And that’s what happens here. No one investigates, or bothers to actually answer these questions. And it is a real question. When I’m looking at a photograph from Abu Ghraib am I looking at policy, or just the actions of a few rogue soldiers…. To me it’s really powerful when one of the major government witnesses tells you that the iconic image of torture and abuse of the Iraqi war is S.O.P. It’s not a political blog, or the conjecture of someone who is charged with telling you what S.O.P. is, it’s something very different, something very shocking. I like Britt Pack, I feel guilty every time I say this, like I snuck one past him or something but he really does believe this. He’s a straight guy. He clearly has his opinions about it. I know a lot about Abu Ghraib. I don’t think all of this was just policy, the place was just too fucked up. It was bedlam half the time. You’re looking at a war that’s being prosecuted by under trained, under equipped, understaffed military. You’re looking at the prescription for a nightmare. And then you throw in various kinds of interrogation policies, throw in the desperation to find Saddam, you mix it all up as my interrogator Ken Dugan would say, with a big stick and this is what you see, a colossal mess.

INT: Was it hard to gain the trust of these people after they had been interviewed so many times and sold down the river by the system, done jail time- in some instances clearly because they had been scapegoated?

EM: It’s very hard to fully get the trust of any of these people and I don’t know if I did fully get their trust. These people have been really fucked over. They’ve been incarcerated, they’ve been disgraced, in some instances they’ve been blamed for the entire war. I don’t look at them as lily white but I do look at them as scapegoats. Lynndie England, the day that we interviewed her, was a person we’d heard described as hillbilly, mentally deficient, she comes into the studio and we have no idea what to expect, and she turns out to be perfectly articulate. I think I can say with no if ands or buts that we were all shocked.

INT: So what do the photographs ultimately reveal?

EM: There’s a whole lot of stuff. I suppose I could say, that the hidden truth is who’s the real killer, who’s the fall guy. But it goes deeper into all kinds of broad themes. I think it’s a mistake to call them reenactments really. I can tell you the images that to me are really powerful. The drop of blood on Diaz’ uniform, when he is wrestling with I’m involved with this. I’m not involved with this. He says, “I tie him a little bit higher and I tie him a little bit higher. I realize he’s dead, blood gets on my uniform.” He’s like Lady Macbeth, he’s looking at this spot of blood and wondering what it means. I find that very, very powerful.

INT: It’s the difference between the meaning of something and the thing itself.

EM: You know the photographs get politicized and everybody dumps on the bad apples. As far as anyone is concerned they are evil, evil-evil-evil, end of discussion. To the left they’re evil because of Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush and to the right they’re evil because they’re rogue soldiers, bad apples, bleah-bleah-bleah. You need to do more than simply posture, you need to go into the story! That’s the thing about the photographs is that they lead to a kind of weird dogmatism. Everybody thinks “Oh I know what’s in that photograph, I understand that photograph. “Fuck you! It means this!” ”Fuck you it means that!!” Investigation is therapy. You have to make an effort, to the best of your ability, to go deeper than that, to find out, not once and for all, but what’s going on here.

INT: But our political process doesn’t really play out that way.

EM: Bush, I believe, actually won the 2004 election because of these photographs and the fact that all this was going on. He had someone to blame for the stupid war. “The war is a mess? Blame them. The insurgency is growing? Blame them. Arab world hates us? Blame them. I went into this with the purest of intentions bleah bleah bleah. If things didn’t work out so well it’s because of these photographs, these damn photographs, that pissed everybody off.”

There’s something even more disturbing for me. Certainly it’s important to remember, I remember McNamara telling me this story that he had an argument with Johnson about the necessity of raising taxes. He felt that it was just unconscionable that you’d wage war in a deficit. Obviously this administration feels differently. To me the biggest loss has been a sense of American values, of who we are. We now a virtual monarchy in this country, a spineless congress, and an executive branch that believes they aren’t accountable to anybody or anything. What do you do about that? Hopefully elections will change things. The country is so angry so polarized, so hopelessly divided. I wasn’t alive during the American Civil war but this seems much, much worse to me than Vietnam.

I’ve given money to Obama. I would be happy with either Hillary or Obama, I’d prefer Obama. I just hope to God a Democrat wins. I don’t think this country can afford more of the same. The war has been costly not just in terms of gross national product but in other ways. It has completely undermined what I think is great about America and I think that someone has to acknowledge that.

INT: Your documentaries almost always set about the difficult task of rehumanizing people who’ve been demonized.

EM: I don’t even know where this damn quote comes from. But I once read that art is extending compassion where it’s never been extended before. I think there’s some truth to that. I do like the idea of these people who are utter pariahs. Mr. Death, Fred Leuchter is beyond the pale in many ways. He’s an electric chair repairman who also happens to be a holocaust denier. Fred has an awful lot of politically incorrect notions floating around in his head. With a large group of people that limits his social acceptability. But I like Fred. I don’t understand Fred, but he’s one of my all time favorite characters.

Lynndie? I like Lynndie England. I’ve done interviews that I’m really, really proud of but the two interviews in S.O.P. that I’m really proudest of are of Lynndie England and Jeff Frost. They are so unexpected and endlessly interesting. Jeff Frost agonizing about the keys and how he should have taken both keys… he’s completely worried, it’s a moral issue. She he have taken those keys, it consumes him. If I had then they wouldn’t have gone into the shower room and they wouldn’t have taken the pictures and now it’s caused all this trouble. I love this kind of endless moral questioning. Of course I feel like saying to Jeff that, “Hey there was a murder….a murder.” And then Lynndie? I hadn’t even noticed it. Someone was in a screening room the other day and they said to me, “I love when Lynndie talks about the drama in life, how you can’t have one without the other. She’s making that connection for herself and it’s an incredibly sad, incredibly disturbing revelation.