In light of the release of the new documentary Tabloid, we recently sat down for a roundtable discussion with filmmaker Errol Morris about his unique perspective on books, crime and of course, Tabloid.
Q: You had a little time as a private investigator, correct?
Errol Morris: I was a private investigator briefly in Berkeley, but that was very, very briefly, this was probably in the seventies. My film career, which really never amounted to a film career per se, went completely belly up. And I had to find a way of earning a living and so I worked as a private detective in New York in the early 80s.
Q: And did your work as a detective inform your interview style?
EM: I think it’s the other way around. I started interviewing murderers, I interviewed Ed Gein, I interviewed a whole number of different murderers in Northern California, and Wisconsin. I’d gone to all these trials I was going to write a PhD thesis on the insanity plea, in those days there were three mass murderers in Northern California, the “Big Three” Ed Kemper, Herbert Mullin, and John Frazier. I had gone to the Kemper trial and part of the Mullin trial, and I was really interested in writing about them because they all involved the insanity plea. I believe those were my first real interviews and then I went back to Wisconsin, I’d been an undergrad at Madison. I started interviewing people in Wisconsin, and I developed this whole style of interviewing and I would play this game, where I tried to say as little as possible. So I had tapes that I was particularly proud of where my voice wasn’t on the tape. I’d see if I could get the person I was interviewing to talk for a full hour without my voice being on the tape. The idea was this pure stream of consciousness, it’s the “Joyce-ian” interview. And that certainly informed Gates of Heaven and it became the idea behind Gates of Heaven. And I never included my voice, I always excluded my voice, in editing these movies.
Q: What books were you reading at the time you were making Tabloid, and which of those influenced you?
EM: I’ve always been a fan of Frank Norris, I don’t know if I’ve read everything he’s written but I’ve read a lot. It’s interesting because they always pair The Octopus and The Jungle together, and they’re really disparate, they really have nothing to do with each other they come from different traditions. What I didn’t understand was there was a relationship between Norris and Dreiser, and why was I thinking about Norris and Dreiser was because Joyce McKinney told me that when she was in high school, she had read a short story by Theodore Dreiser called The Second Choice. And I got the short story and read it and I started compulsively reading Dreiser. I read a lot of Dreiser, and Second Choice is just an amazing short story, it’s one of the most amazing short stories. It’s not by accident that Dreiser called his greatest novel an American Tragedy. And it’s about a woman, and the short story starts with a series of letters written by her lover. It’s clear the guy really isn’t as interested in her but she is completely in love with him, he is not in love with her. And there is a man who wants to marry her, but she’s not particularly interested, she doesn’t want to end up like her mother who has a very boring marriage, and in the end, she settles for the guy she’s not really in love with and she ends up like her mother. I think simply to call it bleak is an understatement, it is one of the darkest American short stories. And Joyce told me about this, I know about it from Joyce, she had decided this was not going to happen to her, she was never going to end up as this Dreiser character in a loveless marriage, and the question apropos of books, is whether what happened to Joyce is worse?
Q: When Kirk Anderson was taken away, why did [Joyce McKinney] come to California?
EM: I don’t know. Maybe she believed she could earn a living in California. I don’t know why anyone comes here.
Q: How do you decide the course of the documentary before you begin to make it?
EM: These stories have a logic of their own, it’s not really a decision per se. Once I made the decision to put Joyce on film the rest of it follows in due course, the other interviews and the material is certainly funny, it’s sad, and I would say it’s also sick.
Q: It’s a love story, but it’s also a film noir. Can you speak to that?
EM: I like the idea of it being a film noir, I love film noir. One of the things that has always fascinated me about noir is that people don’t really have control over their lives in noir, they’re part of some infernal tapestry or design, there’s a sense of inexorability. There’s a sense of inexorability in this story, the books ends to me are the strongest element, I feel very lucky to have stumbled on that material. Trent Harris had filmed material with Joyce in the early 80s and very kindly allowed us to use that material which is at the very beginning and very end of Tabloid. And the material of Joyce reading from her still unpublished book is amazing because it’s a self fulfilling prophecy among other things.
Q: With the recent Casey Anthony trial, did you watch that with different eyes than the rest of us?
EM: I was never involved, it came as a surprise to me. It’s a terrible thing to admit to, but I did not follow the Casey Anthony trial but I’m aware of it now, and I wasn’t following the whole story about News of the World but of course I’m aware of it now.
Q: Did you follow the McKinney case when it was happening?
EM: No. That was a case not known over here, for all intents and purposes.
Q: Why didn’t you ask Joyce how she made her money?
EM: I’ll give you one simple reason, I didn’t interview Kent Gavin until long after I interviewed Joyce, so the whole LA story was unknown to me until months after I did the initial interview with Joyce. I’m not sure how much I would have learned asking her questions about LA, she’s not really inclined to talk about it. But no, people love adversarial journalism, like you’re supposed to ask the difficult questions and back people up against the wall, and I think I would have learned very little by asking that question and certainly wouldn’t have cleared up anything. I think the material is there.
Q: Does Joyce [McKinney] like the film?
EM: No, she’s had lots of problems with the film, and she said, I believe, that she thought she was going to be the only person interviewed, I mean I haven’t really had a chance to say this to Joyce directly, but I’d be perfectly happy to. This is all part of her story, for me not to talk to anyone else, that’d come back to haunt all of us, it’s not as though that material is just going to vanish, or just go away, it is part of her story and I think I’ve told her story in a very complex and interesting way that actually works to her benefit. She’s kind of an amazing romantic heroine of sorts.
