An Interview with Errol Morris on the Occasion of His New Movie, Standard Operating Procedure
By Marilyn Ferdinand
There are few film fans and no documentary buffs who don't know the name Errol Morris. During a long and distinguished career, Morris helped free an innocent man from prison with his investigative documentary The Thin Blue Line, had Gates of Heaven made one of Roger Ebert's Great Movies, and finally won an Oscar for his 2003 documentary The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. Morris' skillful blend of interviews, reenactments, and archival and new footage moved the documentary form away from the monotonous talking-head format and toward a more engaging, contemplative form. His new film, Standard Operating Procedure, mixes his time-tested techniques with the infamous photographs of the torture and humiliation of Iraqi detainees at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison to help viewers get beyond the borders of the images and consider the bigger picture. How could an American president and his staff approve of torture and how could the American Congress and public sit quietly by and let the low-level MPs take all the blame?
My interview with Morris took place on April 15, 10 days before the film's official opening. After a rocky start, we settled into a more contemplative conversation about what seems to be the (hopefully) temporary insanity of the American populace and America's need to come to terms with a radical change in its self-image dating back perhaps as far as Vietnam. I hope to post an audio link to the entire interview very soon, but this article represents a nearly complete transcript of the entire interview. My comments are in italics.
After watching this film, I felt that the people in it were guilty as hell and being self-justifying.
Let me ask you a question. What is Sabrina Harman guilty of?
I would say that she participated in some of these abuses, and she didn’t speak up.
What would you have done if you had been at Abu Ghraib the night of Al-Jamadi’s murder, you saw that all of your commanding officers were participating in a cover-up, you realized that much of what was going on around you was a matter of policy, what would you have done?
It’s a difficult question. If it were me, I probably would have excused myself and gone somewhere else.
You’re in the middle of a war zone. Where do you go?
To my quarters, anywhere away from the abuse. But it’s a tight situation. The Army is chain of command. I suppose if you’re told to shut up, that’s exactly what you do. That’s what they felt they needed to do. But I will also say…
And yet Sabrina took these pictures.
And that’s a good question. Why? She said it was in order to document what was going on. There were a number of people who took videos, a number of people who took photographs, several hundred.
Thousands. And it was an amnesty period where the guy who essentially ran the prison ordered the destruction of all the evidence. These were not destroyed, I think, for one simple reason: they provided evidence to deflect blame from people who were really responsible.
And yet if they were destroyed, nobody would have ever known.
Why do you say that?
No physical evidence.
How do you think the media have become aware of these photographs?
I imagine somebody turned them over to a newspaper, a journalist.
Which is what happened. We live in a digital age in which it’s very easy to take photographs and easier to distribute photographs around the world. Hard to destroy everything. The photographs taken of Al-Jamadi, the corpse, we wouldn’t have any knowledge of this murder if they had not been taken by Ivan Frederick, Chuck Graner, and Sabrina Harman. They had nothing whatsoever to do with the murder or the cover-up. The people responsible have never been charged with the crime. In this instance, what makes them the center of evil?
I don’t think they’re the center of evil and I’m not trying to suggest that they are. I’m merely suggesting that was my reaction when I watched this film, and that I would have liked to get interviews with higher-ups.
I was not interested in interviews with higher-ups. If people want the same cookie-cutter movie about Iraq, there are plenty you can go see.
But you talk about putting the photographs in a context, otherwise we don’t really understand what we’re seeing.
And to that end, am I required to interview every single person in the U.S. government? You have so much god-damned context. America puzzles me at the moment. There is an immense amount written about the higher-ups. What the fuck does America need to be convinced that the material is staring them in the face? Do they have to be hit over the head with a smoking gun? What would you like? What is your dream interview that you would have liked to have heard in this particular movie to clarify things for you?
Not to clarify…
Then to do what?
If you’re only going to present, just as in a trial, only the evidence that the lawyers want you to hear. I’ve been on a jury, and I had lots of questions that I was not allowed to ask. I only got what they wanted me to see, and from my point of view, if I just look at what these people are saying and what they’re doing…
If it seems like I’m saying they’re lily white, I’m not saying that, and my apologies, because I’m not making that argument. But I’m making a somewhat different argument that…hard to know where to even start. You look at a photograph, you think you know what the photograph is about. You don’t. You look at the photograph of Sabrina Harman smiling next to Al-Jamadi’s corpse, you think she’s responsible for the murder. She isn’t.
To me, which is the worse crime—the thumb up or murder? People don’t see the murder. People are obsessed with the thumb and the smile. It’s an essay on the Cheshire Cat. You see the smile, you don’t see the cat.
You see what you want to see. I think that does stick out more than the gruesomeness. You can only handle so much gruesomeness, and there is a level of disbelief in the American public. These are not who Americans are.
It’s denial. Much easier for all of us to blame the seven bad apples. That’s the easy way out. I think it’s really interesting and I don’t think any accident here that both the left and the right accept them as monsters. It doesn’t matter. The left says, oh, they’re monsters because of the three-headed monster in the wings—Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. That three-headed monster made them into monsters in its own image. The right says no, no, no, no. They’re monsters to be sure, but they’re monsters because they’re monstrous, self-directed monsters, rogue monsters. Seven bad apple monsters. But monsters, both left and right.
It allows us to blame somebody, to actually push this away from ourselves and not deal with it. It allows us actually not to look any further than the photographs because then we can say, “Oh this is it. Done. Finito."
It seems a theme through a number of your films to take the monster and put a human face on.
This is correct. Thank you.
I think this film carries on in that grand tradition. I also think it will be misunderstood.
I think all of them have been. Look, you’re talking about a film that’s coming out about a story that has fingerprints all over it. This is not The Thin Blue Line, this is not a story that people don’t care about, that they don’t know about. Everybody knows about it. They’ve seen the pictures. Along I come claiming there’s a story hidden here that hasn’t been seen that is also a story about scapegoating, that Abu Ghraib really needs to be investigated. It never has been. The photographs I think effectively prevented an investigation. Easier just to look at Lynndie England or Chuck Graner or Sabrina Harman and say this is the problem.
I even think the bad apples got George Bush reelected in 2004 because they gave him someone to blame. It’s them, not me. You want to know why the war is going south, why the insurgency is growing, why there are all these beheading videos. Actually, with the beheading videos it's even more cause and effect. These guys embarrassed America. The crime here is so perverse and so odd, is not the stuff depicted in any one picture, it’s the existence of the pictures embarrassing the administration, embarrassing the Army, embarrassing America.
Why did they do it? Why did they photograph these things? Why did they video them?
Go back to Sabrina. In a way it’s an essential question and I don’t pretend that I have some definitive answer. I think, in general, we photograph things because reality is peculiar. Maybe we need to stop it and look at it and memorialize it so we can scrutinize it at some later time, refresh our memory of our own experiences.
Sabrina says she took the pictures, she says this again and again in the letters, to expose the military as “nothing but lies." She was lied to. She also knew that a lot of the things around her—this is just the opposite of the faceless automaton picture we’re given of these people—she was aware that what she was doing was wrong. She was aware that there was some horrendous moral compromise here. She was uneasy with it. She imagined…that was a way of creating moral distance, but it was also a way of analyzing and also perhaps imagining yourself as the whistle-blower, imagining yourself as standing up against this. I somehow think that some of those pictures were acts of disobedience. They were saying, “We know what you’re doing. We can show people what you’ve been up to, the real cards you have in your hand." The real irony of it is the pictures were turned around and used against them. They thought that in many instances they were protecting themselves.
It’s unfortunate that you were not allowed to talk to Graner. Graner certainly did seem to be the ringleader. Did you get that impression?
My impression is that this all comes down to one night, the night of the pyramid. There was horrible, horrible abuse in that place that goes far beyond some photographs. We’re fighting a war of humiliation—sexual humiliation. We have been from the very beginning, a war, I guess, to show Saddam who’s boss, who’s got the biggest stick. We’re a country of 300 million people who had a foreign policy of "Kill Saddam." I don’t mean a foreign policy for the Iraq region or the Middle East. That was our complete foreign policy, the sum of it. What I’ve watched is a story of humiliation and rehumilitation, the administration’s attempt to humiliate Saddam, the use of women in American military prisons—American women to humiliate prisoners.
Do you think that was a specific directive to them?
Absolutely. It’s one of the sickest things about this war—how women have been used. To think the fact that there are women in the military, suddenly the military is egalitarian. I think there’s a sick—I don’t know how to describe it any other way—undercurrent to all of this. Using American women to humiliate Iraqi men.
Which is simultaneously humiliating to the women, who didn’t want to be in the picture in the first place.
There you go. I often think that Graner in his crazy-type way when he put Lynndie at the other end of that tiedown strap and took the picture and later cropped Megan Ambuhl out of the picture, that he was creating a little vignette about the war, you know, American male dominating his American girlfriend, who in turn is dominating an Iraqi man. It’s a crazy, crazy story. These bad apples humiliate America. The administration tries to humiliate them, and so it goes.
Somehow, we remain blissfully unaware of the real nature of this war, the real content.
I was looking at some polls, and only two weeks after the photos came out, the public were already not wanting to see them anymore. They said, the press has covered this too much, they were wrong to show those photographs. Just two weeks after, when earlier they said, this is an outrage. The American psyche switched that fast.
I really want to know where you read that stuff. That’s really fabulous.
I’m not saying anything remotely original or even interesting—we live in a world of spin. There’s a glut of information. It’s spun, the photographs come out, they essentially become a political football. Nobody stops to say maybe we should find out what really transpired there. There’s tons of investigations, a laundry list of investigations, none of which really produce a conception of what went on, almost as if the goal was obfuscation, and it becomes this crazy, polarized world where we’re all concerned with blame.
There’s information out there. If we wanted to, we could impeach this president. How many torture memos do you need to see before you realize the administration is into torture? The odd thing about the world we live in now is do people care about the information that’s right in front of them? I thought, and this is a crazy idea, to come at the story in a different way. It may irritate people because they have their own ideas of what the story should be, but if you approach it in a completely different way, you’re liable to find out something that people don’t know about. If you’re following that same herd path, the chances of finding something are much, much, much less.
It goes back to that Cheshire Cat concept. We see the smile, and we don’t see the murder. It’s almost a metaphor for the entire war. You can’t force people to see what they don’t want to see, what they’re not predisposed to see. I don’t really know how things have gotten to this point, it’s one of the great mysteries of America at the moment. The values that make this country a great one seem to be forgotten. And one value that I keep going back to is It’s a Wonderful Life and Potterville. It’s a movie in part about little guys sticking together against the big, bad guy. It’s almost like a version of It’s a Wonderful Life where we’ve jumped to blaming the little guys, that Potter and his cronies can walk away scot-free. I’m a populist. It’s not a level playing field, no society will ever be, but you can pay lip service to it, you can try to move in the direction of greater rather than lesser equality.
You don’t watch the big guys pin medals on each other’s chests and the little guys go to jail. I think restoring them as people is important, I really do. It’s a first step. I bristle at the idea of seeing them as evil incarnate because it’s a way of abdicating our own role.
If we don’t face our shadows, we’ll never conquer them.
I think you have to and I think one of our great shadows is this war. I feel it much more so than I did of the war during which I came of age—Vietnam. This one seems crazier to me. Maybe it’s ideology that I didn’t grow up with, but it’s hard to see rhyme or reason in any of this, and it’s hard to know why there is so little opposition in Congress and America to it.
Can we have an update on “Nub City"?
I still want to make it, I have the script. There’s two kind of quasi horror movies that I wanted to make. One of them is “Nub City" and the other the movie about Ed Gein. I think of all the movies I’ve wanted to make that I haven’t made. I’m too slow. Doing this kind of movie is just plain exhausting. But I hope it sparks questions. l
My review of Standard Operating Procedure is here. Be sure to read Errol Morris' blog on the New York Times.
One benefit of my trip to Hawaii is that I will be blogging from the 
calls on her tenants, she brings Irène and Fabien with her to carry the clothes and soup. One tenant gets up to heat a bowl of soup for herself and her husband. “No, no," says Madame, “It’s my turn to serve you. Irène, put the soup on the stove."
The next day, Charley passes a very attractive woman on the street who is looking for the address of his new next-door neighbor. I had to be told by the hubby that she was a hooker, because a lot of women dressed like her back then—tight, short skirt in an impossibly bright blue; big, blonde hair; shocking nail polish. Naturally, Charley sees her again, stripping in his neighbor’s window. Leering lasciviously at her through binoculars—also a very ’80s accoutrement in movies—he gets a big shock when he sees the man of the house bite her. A very cool shot of three rivulets of blood trickling down her bare back caps the scene.
Like just about every woman alive, I’ve got a thing for vampires. Not like every woman (or man, for that matter) I find Chris Sarandon’s face disturbingly out of proportion—kind of a massive head with a tiny, straight-down nose. Oddly, however, Sarandon as a vampire was kind of attractive. A Keanu Reeves lookalike, William Ragsdale showed about the same acting chops as Reeves—earnest, but not very convincing. At least he couldn’t convince anyone that Sarandon’s character was a vampire. Roddy McDowall had to notice Sarandon didn’t appear in McDowall’s hand mirror to be convinced.
Images of naked Iraqi men apparently being taunted by female MPs Lynndie England and Sabrina Harman and posed in a human pyramid shocked the nation. Other photos of humiliation showed prisoners handcuffed in stress positions with women’s panties on their heads. One particularly heinous scare tactic was the use of attack dogs. And of course, the iconic photo of a prisoner nicknamed Gilligan dressed in sack cloth and a hood, awkwardly balanced on a box, his outstretched arms attached to wires became the image of torture Americans now had to understand was being done in their name. Perhaps predictably, the American public blinked. The “bad apples" were prosecuted, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski was relieved of her command of the 800th MP Brigade in Iraq and busted down to colonel, and Abu Ghraib receded back into its dark, dirty corner. Out of sight, out of mind. 
Errol Morris didn’t forget. After an exploratory interview with Karpinski, he determined that the story of Abu Ghraib hadn’t been fully explored, that the pictures had, in fact, closed down a wider investigation of the truth because they made it so easy to point a finger at the grunts on the ground and be done with it. Morris was sure that there was a story outside the frames of those pictures, a human face to the low-ranked monsters who were punished that deserved to be seen as well, a cover-up to be investigated. Returning to the investigative mode he so brilliantly executed with The Thin Blue Line, Morris doggedly pursued interviews and information, eventually getting Javal Davis, Tony Diaz, Lynndie England, Megan Ambuhl Graner, Sabrina Harman, Janis Karpinski, Roman Krol, and Jeremy Sivits—all prosecuted or otherwise punished for the abuse—to speak with him. Former Abu Ghraib MPs Ken Davis and Jeffrey Frost provided their version of events. Military interrogator Tim Dugan discussed what he saw and gave his opinion of the effectiveness of the MPs’ softening techniques. Finally, Brent Pack, a special agent for the Criminal Investigations Division, showed how he put together a timeline of events and corroborating evidence of who took part in the abuse through the use of the photographs themselves.
His technique of placing artistically rendered mood pieces throughout the film to break up the talking heads presentation worked less well for me. Some of these visuals were so stunningly beautiful, coming as they did from ace directors of photography Robert Chappell and Robert Richardson, that they simply didn’t seem to belong in such a brutal film. Perhaps it was Morris’ intention to provide us with the equivalent of Yasujiro Ozu’s “pillow shots" as a way to take us out of the horror for a few moments and help us reflect on what we saw, or simply just rest our minds and eyes. The effect on me, at least, was a bit jarring and distasteful. Other reviewers have found Morris’ graphic depictions of the abuse excessive and exploitative, a charge with which I personally do not agree. A film about torture and humiliation shouldn’t worry about the taste or tolerance level of its audience. The detainees couldn’t back away from it; why should we, especially since it was done in our name. 
