Profile of Errol Morris on Famous Like Me

Errol Morris (born February 5, 1948 in Hewlett, New York) is a Jewish-American Academy Award winning documentary film director. His documentaries are almost invariably received with widespread critical acclaim, and The Guardian listed him as number seven in their list of the world's 40 best directors. .

Morris gained fame after the release of The Thin Blue Line, a film arguing that a man convicted of murder in Dallas County, Texas had been convicted wrongfully; the film was submitted as evidence to secure the retrial leading to the man's eventual release. Before his career as a film-maker, Morris was briefly a graduate student at Princeton University and later a philosophy Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley. Morris left school shortly before finishing his studies, however, to make Gates of Heaven. Morris also spent some years as a private investigator between making Vernon, Florida and The Thin Blue Line.

Starting in 2000 Morris also had a television show, First Person, featuring 30-minute-long documentaries. The series ran for seventeen episodes and featured Morris' trademark Interrotron.

In December 2001, the United States' National Film Preservation Foundation announced that Morris' The Thin Blue Line would be one of the 25 films selected that year for preservation in the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress, bringing the total at the time to 325.

In 2002, Morris directed a series of television ads for Apple Computer as part of a "Switch" campaign. In July 2004, Morris agreed to direct a series of ads for the liberal advocacy group MoveOn PAC.

He won the Academy Award for Documentary Feature in 2004 for The Fog of War, a life and times of Vietnam-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.

The Interrotron

Perhaps the most distinctive stylistic feature of an Errol Morris film is the use of his own invention, the Interrotron. The name "Interrotron" was coined by Morris' wife, Julia Sheehan, who, according to Morris, "liked the name because it combined two important concepts — terror and interview." The device is similar to a teleprompter: Errol and his subject each sit facing a camera. The image of each person's face is then projected onto the lens of the other's camera. Instead of looking at a blank lens, then, both Morris and his subject are looking directly at a human face. The feeling of the monologues that Errol captures on film is human and conversational in way that is usually impossible when a person is talking directly to a camera. Ted Bafaloukos said of the Interrotron, ". . .the beauty of it is that it lets people do what they do best, namely watch TV."

Films by Errol Morris

• Gates of Heaven 1978
• Vernon, Florida 1981
• The Thin Blue Line 1988
• The Dark Wind 1991
• A Brief History of Time 1991
• Fast, Cheap and Out of Control 1997
• Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. 1999
• The Fog of War 2003

Films about Errol Morris

• Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe
• A Brief History of Errol Morris

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