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

Speaking of Gates of Heaven, Tabloid features dog cloning! Have you come full circle from your first film's pet-cemetery culture?

Well, yeah. The whole dog thing, of course, is me coming full-circle. I have all these dog stories -- there's another dog story I've wanted to do for years, and now I'm tempted to do it again. Except it's a feature film, not a documentary. I just want to work. I'm actually excited about... I don't know what it is. All of the sudden, there are so many movies in me that were struggling to get out over the years. I feel like I actually have a chance to make them now.

Why?

I don't know what's different. I'm writing; there are books coming out, much to my amazement. The first interview that I did for my new book seemed surreal. I'm being serious: I never thought I'd be able to write one, and I'm being interviewed about appearing at the New York Public Library in November to talk about the new book. That's really different. The fact that I'm planning to make [dramatic] feature films again after all these years is different. I've always been a visual guy. It's not as if I'm wedded to documentary. I love documentary -- don't get me wrong -- and I'm enthusiastic about making more documentaries and other kinds of documentaries as well. I'm excited to be working.

And this film is pretty topical: The journalists in Tabloid speak with relish about the very types of working methods that may yet sink Rupert Murdoch, their most prodigious patron.

What's appalling to me about the News of the World story -- and I can find lots of things to be appalled by in that story -- is the idea that journalism is no longer tethered to reality or to the truth. It's just run amuck. My favorite line in the movie is [former Daily Express reporter] Peter Tory saying -- and it tells you all you need to know -- "I think it was ropes, but 'chains' sounds better." What is he telling us? He's telling us that the story that resulted was manufactured. It was an artifact of selling newspapers, of increasing circulation. There was a circulation war going on between these two tabloids. One was going to end, one was going to lose. And quite clearly, they were pretty damned unscrupulous about what they needed to do to construct a story.

And it's gotten worse! It's gotten worse in the sense that at least then, you got the sense the story was somehow connected to reality. Now you don't even know anymore.

Is that unscrupulousness -- the News of the World scandal, for example -- really catching up with media? Can it use this to correct its course, or are we just past the point of no return?

I don't know why I'm persnickety about this, but I am: I don't think it's tabloid media per se. Although if the point is that there's a certain type of tabloid journalism that we want to eliminate... I like certain kinds of tabloid stories. Would I want to throw out stories about, you know, Lobster Boy, or "We Froze the First Man," or stories about "500 Dead Pets Go to Napa." I like that kind of thing! What I don't like is journalism being used simply to fabricate stories independent of the truth, independent of what really happened, or stories that are hurtful. Now, Joyce is on that edge, absolutely. But if someone took all the tabloids and all the tabloid stories away, I would be so sad.

I was just re-watching your short film of Donald Trump discussing Citizen Kane, which was part of a larger 2003 Oscarcast short--

I should do something with those. I did all these interviews, of course, to make that film, and one of them was with Donald Trump. Another one was with Mikhail Gorbachev, which was quite amazing. I did a longer piece with Gorbachev that I've never put out there. But yes, go on.

Well, the thing about Trump was what seemed like thoughtful, sincere ideas about the confluence of power, love and media. Doesn't it speak to a throughline you've developed over the last decade of your career -- The Fog of War perhaps less so, but certainly with Standard Operating Procedure and now this?

I think the answer is yes. You're the first person ever to talk about it, and I thank you. With S.O.P., what really interested me is that here you had a story really driven by photography/ I think that's an accurate description. Yet no one really knew what the photographs were of. No one had really bothered to investigate what the photographs meant, the circumstances in which they were taken, who took them and why, blah blah blah. I saw myself as reporting a story behind the story.

You might look at Tabloid in a very similar way. It's not taking the tabloid story just at face value. It's looking behind it, telling the meta-story. Or why not go for broke here? It's telling the real story -- or attempting to tell the real story -- behind the story that was provided in the media. And isn't that the real goal of media? To look behind itself and to create some kind of greater depth?

I don't know if that's true.

Well, that's my goal!

Fair enough, but let's consider the papers underreporting the News of the World story, or a guy like Trump. Is the guy who articulated about Rosebud in 2003 the same guy who's today railing to the press about Obama's birth certificate, who's hosting Celebrity Apprentice, who's basically reduced to a persona?

I don't get anything, really, to tell you the truth. I've been the subject of two, maybe three profiles by this writer named Mark Singer, who writes for The New Yorker. So I asked [New Yorker editor] David Remnick if I could do a profile of Mark Singer for The New Yorker. I wanted to turn the tables! But Mark had done this big piece on Trump, and Trump had gone batshit crazy and attacked him. He wrote all these nasty articles about how Mark was a bad writer, blah blah blah. I never looked at that commentary on Citizen Kane as particularly self-aware on Trump's part. It seems deeply un-self-aware. It may have been a commentary, but it was an unwitting commentary.

Is Trump undergoing his own 'Rosebud' moment?

You know, I don't know what goes on in Donald Trump's head. If I were to sit here and tell you I have some idea of what Donald Trump is thinking... I mean, I found the whole Obama thing miserable and annoying, but the whole level of political discourse in this country is miserable and annoying. This just becomes part of it.

Tabloid opens Friday in limited release, with expansion to follow in the coming weeks.

[Top photo: Getty Images]

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