Errol Morris on Tabloid Truth, Media Fury and Kissing Reality Goodbye

For a guy who has spent the last three decades mapping the contours of human frailty and folly, director Errol Morris is awfully upbeat about the future. Of course, his is not just any map: It illustrates redoubts of genius (A Brief History of Time, Mr. Death) and islands of quirk (Gates of Heaven, Vernon, Florida) in vast seas of systemic failure (The Thin Blue Line, the Oscar-winning The Fog of War, Standard Operating Procedure). Its moral compass points mysteriously inward, challenging viewers to orient themselves accordingly. His latest film, Tabloid, exists as its own sort of hemisphere in this schema, marking milestones of crime, gossip, sex, religion, love, science and indiscretion in the jaw-dropping story of Joyce McKinney.

A one-time beauty queen whose youthful journeying took her from North Carolina to Wyoming and finally Utah, McKinney first earned notoriety in the '70s for allegedly kidnapping and sexually commandeering her Mormon paramour Kirk Anderson in London. The local tabloids reacted to her exploits with bold-print zeal, stirring a mutual obsession that would find McKinney both chasing and evading the media spotlight for years to come -- all the way up to McKinney's pseudonymous effort to clone her dead dog.

Morris explores this relationship with his trademark wry compassion, inquisitive to the end and oddly content in its irresolution. This latter impulse, perhaps, with its tendency to color the screen and Morris's subjects in troubling shades of gray, had McKinney pledging to sue the filmmaker for defamation as recently as last weekend in The New York Times. Movieline caught up with Morris soon afterward to talk over Tabloid, the wrath (and restitution) of Joyce McKinney and the seismology that is contorting modern media -- and Morris's painstaking cultural cartography -- before our very eyes.

So I heard Joyce McKinney is mad at you. Or something.

Well, I was onstage with her Saturday night, and we got along just fine. We were onstage for over an hour. John Anderson's piece that appeared in The New York Times this weekend is, I believe, a little bit out of date already. I'm trying to get a transcript -- it's taking a little longer than I would like -- of that Saturday conversation.

Do you need Joyce? Would it compromise Tabloid if its subject is uncomfortable with it?

That's an interesting question. There's always tension between a subject and a journalist, simply because there's always tension in any human relationship. Human relationships can work out, or, as we all know, they can not work out. One example that I cited recently I had nearly forgotten about: I just got the rights to Brief History of Time which I see as one of my very best movies. A lot of tension in making it, oddly enough, because Stephen Hawking had a different idea of what the movie should be than I did. And it worked out well in the end: He didn't want elements of his biography in the movie. He wanted the movie to be solely about physics -- general relativity, cosmology, blah blah blah. I felt that the biography -- his biography -- had to be part of the story. It was an essential part of the story. And guess what? You read the book A Brif History of Time, and his biography runs all the way through it. It's part of the book, as I explained to him many times.

So there was this kind of wrestling back and forth about what this movie could be or should be. And when he finally saw it, I was worried. We saw it in a screening room at CAA -- the old CAA building at Wilshire and Santa Monica. And he came out of the screening, and the first thing he clicked out in the voice synthesizer was, "Thank you for making my mother a star." Things never work out -- or rarely work out, let's put it that way -- perfectly. And I've been able to preserve a relationship with almost everybody I've worked with, and I would like to be able to preserve a relationship with Joyce McKinney as well. I truly believe -- self-serving of me to say so -- but I truly believe this is a loving portrait of Joyce. I like Joyce. I think Joyce is an amazing, romantic character who puzzles me in many ways.

You've cited your interest in entering history from a particular point of view as opposed to something more general -- through a photograph, for example. Is Joyce McKinney a particular point of entry into a general discussion about media?

Yes and no. I used the example of photography as a way of entering history for the first time when I was writing about these two Roger Fenton photographs, "The Valley of the Shadow of Death." That book is coming out, by the way, Sept. 1 -- Believing is Seeing, from Penguin. And yes, the particular rather than the general does fascinate me. This is a way... How can I best characterize this? I didn't intend this movie, in the beginning, to be a criticism of tabloid newspapers, because I'm really in love with tabloid stories.

Tabloid stories can be some of the most interesting stories; they can be a way in, really, repeating what you just said. They can be a way into something far more interesting, more complex, deeper. So the idea of simply attacking the idea of tabloid stories in general is not something I'd want to do. It's too much like someone in a glass house throwing stones. Gates of Heaven is based on a San Francisco Chronicle article, "500 Dead Pets Go to Napa." That is, properly speaking a tabloid story. And over the years I've tried to make movies out of many tabloid stories that have fascinated me. I have a project as we speak -- a fiction film based on a true story -- with Ira Glass. It was reported on This American Life -- "We Froze the First Man." It's the story of the first cryonics freezing. What's going on now is something different. Maybe it's a product of the tabloid idea. You tell me.

Joyce does have an ideological point of view, though, right? At least in a way that we don't get from, say, Kim Kardashian or the Real Housewives of New Jersey? She's a valuable prism through which to gauge how tabloids were then versus how they are now.

I agree. And she was damaged by the tabloids. I think that is inarguable. I don't see her as a complete victim, because she did a whole number of things to generate attention.

She has an IQ of 168! She knows what she's doing!

[Pauses] Yes. I think she knows a lot of what she's doing. I don't know if any of us know completely what we're doing. I asked her when I appeared with her on Saturday night. She said the movie was so funny, people were laughing. I said, "Joyce, when you use language like, 'A woman raping a man would be like putting a marshmallow in a parking meter,' you -- yooouuuuu know that's funny! You're one of the funniest people I've ever interviewed! You're really, really, really funny!" And she knows she's funny. But she is a great lens to look at this stuff, to answer your question. Yes.

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