Interview: Errol Morris (Standard Operating Procedure)

Standard Operating
Procedure, the new Morris’ documentary about Abu Ghraib and the tortures perpetrated there by American soldiers against Iraqi prisoners, is both a puzzling and endless subject to discuss especially within the timeframe of a typical interview. When the infamous pictures were leaked over three years ago, the American government was already in deep down into their spiral of human rights illegalities and so far, nobody from a rank higher than sergeant have been condemned what has taken place at either for Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo or the CIA secret jails.

Morris’s docu is a detailed account of the Abu Ghraib tortures told by the ‘bad apples’ (the same words that Bush and the whole government used to describe the soldiers that committed them), the filmmaker even employs realistic re-enactments of the crimes (which may be unnnecessary due to the magnitude  of the powerful pictures themselves). He defended voraciously his weakest choices – not to interview the soldier who denounced the abuses, not even trying to interview a higher military rank person than the ones that were condemned for the case – and defended the movie making really interesting political reflections about the meaning of the Abu Ghraib pictures. Unfortunately, those words and those ideas are difficult to grasp from his documentary. During the roundtable interview (which took place at the beginning of April in New York), Morris wanted to make sure that the groupoing of journalists got the main idea of his discourse: he has
made a really good movie because he only concentrated on the main
characters involved in that tragic scandal. And whoever tries to attack
that idea, is wrong.

Errol Morris

Have you met with any resistance from the government on doing this movie?
ERROL MORRIS: Not so far but the movie is not in release yet. There was always the question of documents, even more so than the interviews because I’ve assembled tens of thousands of pages of documents over the course of the last couple of years and the rules of course have been in flux during this administration. The movie is part of it. There is a book written by Phillip Gurevitch and myself coming out in May. There is a website in which I plan to put a lot of this material so that it’s available to the public at large.

What will the book contain?
EM: It’s going to contain interview material from many of the interviews that are in the film plus stuff that isn’t in the film at all. I interviewed probably twice the number of people that I used in the movie so there’s a lot of stuff.

How did you decide which subjects you used in the movie to those you didn’t?
EM: Because I kept going back to the photographs. If the center of the story is the photographs, it was important to feature those people who were directly involved in taking them, it’s as simple as that.

In the film, the photographs aren’t redacted and are shown unedited. Why did you decide to keep the photographs untouched in the film?
EM: One of the things so fascinating about this story is the fact that people were blamed for taking pictures, not so much for what is depicted in the pictures. That in itself is endlessly interesting. People were blamed for embarrassing America, for embarrassing the administration and embarrassing the military, but it loses sight of one fundamental thing. The crime here is not photography. The war isn’t shown in photographs. The crime here is what is depicted in the photographs and as such the photographs represent very significant and important evidence not to be hidden, suppressed, or redacted. They should be shown and discussed.

Why wasn’t Joseph Darby interviewed for the film, being he the person who let the world know about the scandal?
EM: I did interview him. He’s one of the people who I did in fact interview at length. I believe I have a six or seven hour interview with Joseph Darby. I chose not to use the interview for a whole number of reasons. I find Darby an endlessly interesting character but he is really not part of the story that I wanted to tell. First of all, most of those photographs were widely known before Darby brought them in to CID. I also think CID is implicated in a lot of ways in what happened at Abu Ghraib. To me this story is these people who took the photographs and why. It’s not a story about seven bad apples that got caught because they were so stupid. It’s a different kind of story and I like to think that I am trying to tell it in a way that’s never been told before.

We do have people that don’t follow orders. Not everybody all the time does follow orders. By removing Darby from the film, does it noble Sabrina (one of the main people depicted in the pictures)?
EM: Take my good word for it, nobody knows the real story. Everybody loves to imagine what these stories are. The natural human tendency is to imagine that these people are beyond the pail. They’re not like you and me, they’re in some deep sense sub human. On the flip side, they’re real heroes, they’re these people who stood up and said I won’t allow this to happen. Now I’m not saying that there aren’t people beyond the pail and they aren’t real heroes. I just think that this story is far, far more complex. The bad apples for both the left and right, it doesn’t matter, there’s this odd construction. Everyone has this investment of seeing them as bad. If you’re on the left, they see them as bad because we have a bad government. If you’re on the right, they’re bad because they decided to be bad on their own. The common ground here is bad bad, bad bad bad bad bad! Part of what the movie is trying to do and I think it’s a terrible, risky thing to do because people don’t want to see that these are people struggling with a kind of nightmare. I don’t like the idea of “Here were the bad guys” and “here’s the good guy.” I don’t see it that way. I have this theory that Bush won the 2004 election for two reasons. One was that the Democratic candidate was no good. The other thing that was enormously helpful was that he had the bad apples.

Could you talk about your reaction to these pictures the first time you saw them and how those impulses transpired into you making this film?
EM: The pictures are unique. They are not taken by war journalists or photographers or by people who are assigned the task of covering the war. They are taken by the soldiers themselves so the question became are these pictures of policy or are these pictures of abhorrent behavior on the part of as the phrase became known “a few bad apples.”? It’s an endlessly interesting story. It’s one of the central stories of our time I think. I remain as fascinated now as I was when I first heard about it. A feeling of shame really, this idea which I think is more or less inescapable that what happened there has something to say about us and this country regardless of politics and that’s something that is a question.

The left will say it’s Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. The right will say it’s a few bad apples acting on their own and it has nothing to do with our administration and policy and they disgraced our country. But aside from the political debate, there’s the question of what the hell was going on there. Why not talk to the people who were actually there? I mean if this is so much a concern, it really amazes me that people will say “How come you didn’t interview Cheney? How come you didn’t interview Rumsfeld? Why do I have to listen to fucking privates and specialists talk about this?” Well there’s a very simple answer. You have to listen to them because they are right there at the center of it all. Is it policy? Is it the criminal behavior of a few people? You have the chief investigator for CID, for the Army telling me that the iconic photograph of the Iraq War is Standard Operating Procedure? I mean think about it. Good God!. They’re policy. I think for a number of years the entire foreign policy of the United States was “Kill Saddam.” That was our foreign policy, seriously. “Prove to Saddam who’s boss, shock and awe”, the terminology. The sexual humiliation is so much part of the war. I ask myself “Ok, it’s fine when you put someone in a stretched position and you put women’s underwear on their head and you have a female strip them naked, but that’s not sexual abuse, this other stuff is.” It becomes this strange, whacked out world, it’s bedlam. Maybe the administration didn’t order up these things at some luncheonette menu and I don’t think they did. What they did was they created a setting in so many ways where things could devolve into this insanity whether it’s this relaxation, definitions of what is regarded as torture, conventions, treatees, international agreements, whether it’s sending an army that’s ill equipped or understaffed to an area where bad things will happen. There’s not one thing that tells you things will turn out badly, it’s a myriad of things that produces a disaster.

Did you try to talk to the prisoners themselves?
EM: Again, it’s about the people who took these photographs and their reasons. I’m not making a survey about Abu Ghraib. There were certain prisoner stories that did interest me. I didn’t want to talk to prisoners at random. I wanted to talk to prisoners who were in the iconic photographs. I wanted to talk to “Gus” and I wanted to talk to “Gilligan.” Those were the two people that I really wanted to talk to and I couldn’t find them. It’s not that I didn’t try. I tried really hard to find both of them and could not.

Why was necessary to do re-enactments?
EM: I was trying to tell a story about photographs and how do you tell a story about photographs? You show the photographs and you put white borders on them to show that they haven’t been adulterated. That’s how I think they’re read, I could be wrong but that was my intention. I then have retrospective accounts, they’re re-enactments from people speaking two, three years after the fact about why they took a photograph or what happened in the photograph whether it’s Sabrina or Jamal or Megan. They’re all retrospective, re-enacted verbal accounts and I hear what the people say to me. Inevitably, there are lines that suggest images that allow me to bring their retrospective accounts alive. The images are there to bring you into that moment of photography, that moment when the photograph was taken. They are re-enactments in the sense of trying to imagine or re-imagine what might taken place. It’s not because you are reconstructing reality perfectly, you could never do that but you want the audience to join you in thinking what transpired.

At what point as a filmmaker do you feel that exposing the truth is not enough?
EM: I like to think that some of the things that I’ve uncovered are relevant to the war. I imagine that this is a war of humiliation and that the idea was to show Iraq and Saddam Hussein who was boss. I think it’s taken various kinds of expressions. I went to the MPAA to argue for an R rating for the movie while telling the same people I did not want to redact the photographs. I didn’t like the idea of blurring them out so I started to tell the head of the MPAA my feelings about this war and humiliation and he said “It’s really funny because the horror movies that have been coming in since the war started are about humiliation.” Now you don’t kill people, you humiliate them. The killing is kind of the afterthought. I think there is some truth to it. I believe that Abu Ghraib teaches us something about ourselves. It is a State of the Union address in its most perverse form. It tells us more than what we want to hear or what we want to know. The photographs became iconic for reasons that had nothing to do with me. They seem to express something and it’s not even clear what they express. Having years thinking about them, I can’t even understand them fully. They are these weird things created for the cameras because they captured something about the zeitgeist, something unpleasant and something disturbing. I think there is something to be said from this story, there is so much to learn from it. The critics haven’t weighed in on this movie but I see stuff here and there and I noticed that there’s this idea that I’ve done something which really is not the central issue. The central issue should be attacking Bush or attacking Cheney, that this represents the administration.

What is your responsibility to the audience?
EM: I think that we have a responsibility to think about this stuff. Why this country is so apathetic about the war, I can’t answer why. I have my theories about it. It’s devolved into a battle of the blogs. I truly believe that before you decide what something is you have to investigate it. The photographs were something that I saw horrified me and made me ashamed but I did not know how they were produced and what they were about. If the head investigator takes these central, iconic photographs of abuse and says that it’s standard operating procedure, what does that mean? I think the important story is with people here. These people were the scapegoats. Who are these people and how did they become for all of us this metaphor for the war? What is our role in all of this?

You’ve talked to the people who made these photographs so we are as audiences seeing documentaries coming out of Iraq that’s shot by soldiers. What do you think of this process?
EM: I think it’s an incredible process because so much more information is becoming available to us. It’s not necessarily good information but it doesn’t have to be. The US Government and the military would’ve loved to have suppressed all of these photographs that actually rendered an enormous public service. In an ironic service, they opened a curtain and gave us a glimpse into Abu Ghraib but we stopped as if somehow the photographs shouldn’t lead us deeper into the place and what it was about.

Sony Pictures Classics releases Standard Operating
Procedure in theaters today.