When author and journalist Jacob Soboroff approached revered US documentary director Errol Morris to ask if he knew anyone who might be interested in making a documentary of his 2020 book, Separated: Inside an American Tragedy, Morris promptly replied, “Yes, me.”
Morris had been as dismayed as anyone by the main issue tackled in the book, namely the Trump administration’s viciously cruel and contentious border policy of separating immigrant kids from their parents when they didn’t have the right papers.
“It’s an important issue because I hate Trump and I, in particular, hated this policy,” Morris explains what inspired Separated (which world-premiered Out of Competition in Venice). “I found it unusually despicable…unusually despicable,” he repeats the words.
During his interview with Business Doc Europe in the Hungaria hotel on the Venice Lido, the 76-year old director reacts a little testily when it’s suggested to him that the dramatic reconstructions in the film are similar to those in his ground-breaking 1988 doc The Thin Blue Line, credited with getting an innocent man off Death Row.
“I like to think of all my documentaries of being heterogenous in quality and character,” he protests at the idea he is repeating an old technique. He lists the many different “kinds of media” included in Separated: journalistic footage, interview material, art photography and the scenes with the actors.
“It’s an assembly of a lot of different kinds of material ably put together by my editor,” Morris gestures toward Steven Hathaway, also in the room but at the back and staying silent.
The doc was made through Jeff Skoll’s Participant Media, the once prolific funder of socially committed documentaries – but which announced earlier this year it was shutting down.
“They’re dead…my favourite person Diane Weyermann who has been involved in so many of my films also is dead,” Morris states grimly.
Weyermann died in 2021 – and Separated was one of the last projects on which she was involved. “It’s an enormous loss. I really miss her. She was the best. She is missed by a lot of people…she was receptive, enthusiastic to new projects, a loyal champion of my work, really, really smart, a good person, a good egg!”
Morris insists that Separated wouldn’t have happened without her.
The film chronicles how Trump was eventually forced to abandon arguably his most inhumane policy. That should have been that. Morris, though, points out that the policy hasn’t yet been extinguished altogether. One of its enforcers, Tom Holman, an ex-cop who worked as Director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement under Trump, wants to bring it back.
“He’s a good candidate for a high-level position in a future Trump administration and he says he will start it all over again,” says Morris.
The director acknowledges that this is far from the only time that US immigration policy has been “crazy.” The difference about this policy, though, was its deliberate cruelty – its sheer “meanness of purpose.”
To some, it still seems surprising that someone as antagonistic toward Trump as Morris should once have made a film like 2017’s American Dharma, about Trump’s former political strategist, Steve Bannon. Morris clearly doesn’t endorse Bannon’s world view but he still gave the right-wing ideologue a hearing.
“I included a scene of him [Bannon] being at the premiere of Fog Of War [Morris’s classic 2003 doc about former US defence secretary, Robert S. McNamara]. He loves my films.”
But, no, Morris hasn’t seen Bannon since they were at the Gritti Palace together when American Dharma premiered in Venice. Bannon has been in prison since then.
“I wouldn’t say that I got close to Bannon,” Morris protests when asked why he wanted to make film about such a man. “I was intrigued by him. I am intrigued by all this. There is nothing more interesting than evil. Ask Shakespeare!”
And, yes, there was very obvious evil in Separated. One of the film’s stranger interviews is with Scott Lloyd, the exec from the Office of Refugee Resettlement who oversaw all those kids being torn away from their mums and dads. Morris remembers him as being a particularly “weird” person to grill. It was an “incredibly awkward” encounter. The director had prepared thoroughly. “I even read his novel, his self-published anti-abortion novel which probably killed whatever remaining brain cells that are functioning in me,” he boasts of the lengths he went to in order to understand his subject.
Even so, when they finally met, Lloyd wasn’t forthcoming at all. Morris credits his editor Hathaway with making such an awkward meeting into one of the most powerful scenes in the film.
The veteran director doesn’t agree with the late New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm’s famous line at the start of her book, The Journalist And The Murderer. “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows what he does is morally indefensible.”
As an interviewer himself, Morris tries not to be “adversarial,” He is there to listen even when his subjects espouse options that appal him.
In his book A Wilderness of Error, Morris wrote about the same case covered by Malcolm in The Journalist and The Murderer. He admits Malcolm sometimes exasperated him. “[But] it’s hard not to be influenced in some way by her work and I certainly am. I am not necessarily somebody who agrees with everything that she said…Janet Malcolm always refused to be interviewed by me. Maybe she was too smart for me. Maybe she knew that I was going to be difficult – and she would be right!”
The veteran director is continuing to work on his Digging Up The Past project, a dramatic film based on real events and that will deal with both how he met his wife and his youthful encounters with the serial killer Ed Gein. And, yes, he will eventually cast an actor as himself as a young man – and an actress as his wife. He’s looking for “someone smart and someone kind” to play her but won’t go into details needed for the person playing him.
Always busy, Morris is also finishing a film on Charles Manson for Netflix and is going to Ukraine to make a film about war crimes. Then it will be onto Digging…
Despite his gloom about the loss of Weyermann and the closure of Participant, Morris is sounding an upbeat note about docs. “This is very different from when I started to make films in the 70s. There are endless ways of financing documentary today. It’s my usual line from Conan the Barbarian. It [documentary] used to be just a snake cult and now you see it everywhere!”
