|
|
ABOUT THE PRODUCTION |
| This page was created on January 20, 2004
This page was last updated on
January 27, 2004
—Review
—About this Film
—Spiritual Connections
—Forum |
| ABOUT THIS FILM |
A DISCUSSION WITH ERROL MORRIS
You're old enough to remember McNamara and Vietnam.
As I have told McNamara, I demonstrated against the war as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin and as a graduate student at Princeton. Although these demonstrations were after he had left office, they were very much protests against the war in Vietnam.
Where did the idea of doing a movie about McNamara come from?
I started to think about making the movie in 1995 following the publication of his book In Retrospect. I found the book endlessly fascinating. But for me it raised more questions than it answered. At the same time, reading the book was an unusual experience because many of the reviews seemed to be about a book that was different from the one that I was reading.
How so?
The book has been described as a "mea culpa" and as a "confession," but I found it different and far stranger than that. It's not so much an apology as an attempt to understand how he and many others blundered into a disastrous war. There's no question that McNamara now feels that the war was wrong. But I wanted to know his own feelings. There's a big difference between saying "A policy is wrong" and saying "It's wrong, I caused it, and I'm sorry." Those distinctions--these questions of
individual responsibility--lie at the heart of the movie. At first, I thought McNamara's failure to apologize was a weakness of the book; now I think that it is one of its strengths. It is much more difficult to analyze the causes of error than apologize for it.
Are you saying that he isn't responsible for what he did?
No. In fact I ask him the question: "To what extent did you feel you were the author of policy? Or to what extent were your policies the product of historical forces outside of your control?" It's a central question. McNamara answers that he tried to serve the President. This answer could be seen as just an evasion, but, nevertheless, it's true. At the end of the movie McNamara talks about counterfactuals, questions of whether history could have taken a different course. Historians do
not like these kinds of questions but McNamara clearly believes that history would have been very, very different if President Kennedy had lived.
Was it difficult to get him to agree to do this?
In fact it took very little convincing. I started talking to him in the spring of 2001 right after his book Wilson's Ghost was published. I honestly think when I called him that he thought I was part of the book tour. He loves coming to Cambridge. He loves going to Harvard and seeing the places where he used to live... But two days before the interview he called saying that although he had agreed to come up, it really didn't make much sense. He didn't really know why he had agreed to come.
It was a bad idea. He went on and on but after going through a fairly extensive list of reasons as to why he shouldn't do the interview, he said, "But I said I would do it, so I will." And he did.
Were you planning to make a full length film from the start?
I had in my mind that I was going to make a feature film, but I was worried about the interviews. It's not like I was talking to someone who has never been interviewed before. It's the exact opposite. He's someone who has literally been interviewed by thousands of journalists. He is not a person who is unsavvy or naïve in any way. And I was worried that he was going to give me the same interview that he's given everybody else.
So this is a man who is comfortable in front of a camera?
He was the only person who has ever objected to the Interrotron. He's so used to doing interviews in a different way. He came in to the studio and saw this contraption and said, "What is this?" I told him it was my interviewing device, and he said, "Whatever it is, I don't like it." But then he sat down and never complained after that.
Was he intimidating?
I made an incredible effort to prepare. I don't believe in having a formal list of questions. But I was very much prepared in the sense of having read all three of his recent books and thought about them carefully. And I know he liked the fact that I had done that.
So he didn't give you the same old answers.
The whole remark about LeMay and war criminals was made within the first 20 minutes of the first interview. That past Sunday, The New York Times had published an article about Bob Kerrey which implicated him in possible war crimes in Vietnam. I believe that story was very much on McNamara's mind. We were talking about Kerrey when he launched into the discussion about LeMay and the firebombing of Tokyo.
Did you have a certain expectation of what he might be like?
I'm always open-minded when I go into an interview. And I'm usually apprehensive in some way. I have no idea about what's going to happen. I have no idea what I'm going to hear, and I'm not altogether clear about what I'm going to ask. I really do believe that good interviews can't be controlled. They emerge. There are all of these intangibles and it's important to let things happen.
Were you nervous?
I was aware of his reputation for brilliance, and I wanted to show him respect on some very basic level. Is he really as bright as they say he is? Maybe it comes back to my suspicions about government in general. We've certainly been disabused of the notion that our Presidents have to be on the ball. Yet when I heard the tapes of the recordings that Kennedy made of discussions about the Cuban Missile Crisis, I felt that I was listening to a very smart, dedicated and accomplished group
of people arguing the issues.
What happened after the first set of interviews?
We asked him to come back. But I needed to show him some edited material, which we didn't get around to doing for a while. Finally I put together a 40 minute segment which I called The Fog of War and sent it to him.
Was it just him talking or did you use some archival footage?
There was a little bit of archival material, some of which is used in the final version of the film.particularly the material from Japan. And we put in some Philip Glass music.
Why Philip Glass?
Well, no one does "existential dread" as well as Philip Glass. And this is a movie filled with existential dread.
So McNamara agreed to come back?
He liked what we had done, so yes, he came back. We filmed another set of interviews and I asked him about Vietnam and more questions about the firebombing. I had the list of the Japanese cities and the companion cities in the U.S. That was set up by us. One of the most striking moments in the film is when he goes through that list of 67 cities.
That and when he asks the question about what makes someone a war criminal.
Hearing McNamara raise all of these ethical issues and questions about a war which most of us see as morally unambiguous is very, very powerful. What I like about The Fog of War is that it has proved possible to make a movie about events - events that are removed from us by 40, 50, 60 years but which are very much about today. Many of the issues that McNamara is talking about in the movie are relevant to what's going on right now, and there's this surreal sense that nothing has changed.
I suppose it's the sense that we have learned nothing from the past, which makes the 11th lesson in the movie even more powerful and ironic.
The eleventh lesson being...
That you can't change human nature, that this is the way we are..confused, bellicose, and sometimes crazy. Essentially, we may all be fucked.
Yes, but that's not necessarily much consolation. Vietnam and Robert McNamara are hot button words to a lot of people...
At the heart of The Fog of War is this belief in human fallibility. It's one of the things that McNamara says at the very beginning of the movie. People make mistakes. People make the same mistake sometimes 2, 3, 4, 5 times. To me, the idea of people doing things because they're confused or guided by false beliefs makes the world a scary place. Because then instead of being agents of the devil they become one of us--just addled and confused individuals trying to make their way in the world.
The Gulf of Tonkin story is a very rich one. Not just as straight history but metaphorically as well. We pretty much know now that the second attack (on the US naval vessels) never happened, and that the first attack (which did happen) was provoked by us, maybe intentionally, maybe not. But I don't believe that we just manufactured that second event. I think that there were people who were confused and who genuinely believed that there was enough evidence to justify the conclusion that
the attack had occurred.
Where did the Gulf of Tonkin footage come from?
From a series of reenactments staged within a week and a half of the actual incidents. The footage of those reenactments are in the National Archives.
Didn't that strike you as kind of strange?
History is replete with stories of reenacted footage. When the Russians liberated Auschwitz in January 1945 there were no cameras present, so they returned with cameras and re-liberated Auschwitz several days later. Clearly, they wished to record it.
I asked McNamara about the reenactments but he didn't remember having asked to have them made or having ever seen them. I suppose you could say cynically that the Defense Department reenacted the Gulf of Tonkin incidents to trick the public, to convince the public that they really happened. But I believe it is more likely that they reenacted them to convince themselves. Historical events are reenacted so that people can think about them more clearly. It's a way of exploring the world,
a way of understanding what it means.
What about the archival footage and historical materials that you use in the film?
We made enormous efforts to avoid using the same material that's been seen in thousands of other films. There is a lot of new material from the firebombing as well as the story of McNamara's early involvement with the war and his advising President Kennedy to pull all of the advisors out of Vietnam. A lot of the reenactments of the Gulf of Tonkin are shots that came from the National Archives. The B-29 footage is from a film called "The Last Bomb." Kennedy recorded Security Council and
Executive Committee meetings, LBJ selectively recorded his phone conversations from the Oval Office.
In some ways this movies leaves more questions unanswered than answered.
There is the question of whether we are doomed to this kind of behavior: war, killing people. Let's face facts. Our DNA is the same DNA that we had in the jungle 50,000 years ago. But our destructive capacity has changed markedly. In the last 50 years it has become possible to talk about destroying the world.
I often think that if my movies have been any good, it's because there are unresolved questions, questions that an audience can keep thinking about. In The Fog of War it is the question: Are we doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past? I think about McNamara's first memory, which was Armistice Day 1918. I think about McNamara's strong ideological connection to Woodrow Wilson's belief that the first World War was a war to end all wars. I think about how wrong Wilson was. And I think about
the very phrase "a war to end all wars". Isn't it an oxymoron? War doesn't end war. It leaves unresolved conflicts that only serve to heighten already existing unresolved conflicts. War doesn't end war. War leads to war. |
| Continue: |
—Review
—About this Film
—Spiritual Connections
—Forum |
|
| COMMENT ON THIS FILM |
| BULLETIN BOARD (Rules)
Post your thoughts in the forum
View or post comments -click here..
Your Private Comments.
I will not post these comments. What are your personal thoughts? I also welcome your spiritual concerns and prayer needs. I will correspond with you, usually within two weeks. Click here |
OFFICIAL SITE
Publicity information and images © 2003 Sony Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
No other uses are permitted without the prior written consent of owner. Use of the material in violation of the foregoing may result in civil and/or criminal penalties. Credits and dates are subject to change. For more information, please visit their official site.
Hollywood Jesus News Letter
Receive the Hollywood Jesus Newsletter FREE.
Sign up here
|
| | |
|
|
