Standard Documentary Procedure? Imbroglio Surrounding Errol Morris Paying Interview Subjects Continues To Brew

So as we see it, Errol Morris has been pretty upfront about the fact that he’s paid some of his interview subjects and most recently the “bad apple” Abu Ghraib soldiers featured in his new documentary, “Standard Operating Procedure” which we saw this weekend. Ok, he’s somewhat reticent to talk about, but it’s only because his industry – the documentary scene – frowns upon the actions.

Morris admitted to all of this in a GQ profile that came out earlier this month (which we blogged about; and the interview was probably conducted some time before that, March? Feb?), but none of the writers blogging about this potential controversy seem to have read it. The brouhaha started on April 22 (presumably far after the GQ profile interview occurred) when the And the Winner Is blog posted a review about the film. In a tangential part of the review they wrote:

“I was a bit surprised by the answer Morris gave to a question about the interviews after the film. The questioner, a noted journalist, asked him how he convinced these individuals to agree to be interviewed, and specifically if he paid them at all, “which is not okay in my profession.” Morris eventually acknowledged that he did, in fact, pay his interview subjects, jokingly explaining that he did so because “I have a lot of money and want to share it.” (He did not disclose an amount of money or if this is his standard practice.) I, frankly, don’t really have a problem with this—it got these people to sit down and talk about their behavior, and I don’t see how it would in any way encourage them to speak anything other than the truth—except for the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, this compensation was not openly acknowledged, as it should have been since this is a documentary that purports not to have any agenda other than seeking the truth, and in my estimation does not. I worry that because Morris did not do so, those who wish to disparage SOP, for whatever reason,may latch onto this as evidence of some secret agenda.”

Here’s what we wrote about the GQ piece, condensing it down (it’s a 17-page online profile).

“I don’t know if it’s a great idea for me to talk about it. I’ve always felt that if someone specifically asked me, I wouldn’t lie about it, because I think that would be incredibly stupid,” Morris said of paying some of his subjects to talk. For “Standard Operating Procedure,” the first of the five “bad apples,” Javal Davis, asked for a fee and Morris agreed. “The rest just followed in due course” (he only paid those that make or break the film and only if they asked up front; Morris also does documentary “reenactments” or “dramatizations” which doesn’t sit well with doc purists either).

“I don’t think it influenced in any way the quality or content of the material. Maybe it did—maybe I’m just kidding myself. But I don’t… The amounts of money were relatively small, and I just don’t see it being a consideration…,” Morris told GQ.

But after the And The Winner Is post came out, the New York Times jumped all over it, calling Morris’ practices into question, though many documentarians said this was a standard practice.

“I perhaps should have,” Mr. Morris said to the Times about disclosing the payments. “I didn’t feel the necessity of doing it. I didn’t disclose at the end of ‘A Brief History of Time’ that Stephen Hawking was paid a considerable amount of money to appear in that film, and for the rights to his book.”

Jeffery Wells at Hollywood Elsewhere did a great job of recapping all of this back story and posted the full statement which basically explains the difficulty in getting subjects to talk.

“As documentaries have become more and more mainstream entertainment, people are aware that there is money involved. The more successful documentaries become, the harder and harder it is to get people to do them for nothing. “People [are] aware of my success and respond accordingly. I never paid people for the interviews in The Thin Blue Line, but Stephen Hawking was paid a lot of money for the rights to his book and his participation in A Brief History of Time. Fred Leuchter was paid when I asked him to appear in several scenes, e.g., the scene of him riding up and down in a van de Graff generator at the Boston Museum of Science. I did not pay him for the interview, but if he had insisted I might have done so. McNamara was not paid a fee for The Fog of War, but of course we paid his travel and hotel. Why wouldn’t we?”

“I didn’t pay Janet Karpinski, but we paid for hotel, travel and per diem. It is customary in the motion picture business. To do [otherwise] would be (I believe) unconscionable. It is difficult to ask people for such an investment of time without taking care of them in some way — and that may involve paying them. “I paid the ‘bad apples’ because they asked to be paid, and they would not have been interviewed otherwise. Without these extensive interviews, no one would ever know their stories. I can live with it.”

The main problem here is everyone holding Morris to traditional and often purist journalistic standards which are somehow supposed to be exactly what traditional and often purist standards of documentaries are. However, Morris deviated from and blurred the lines of “standard documentary procedure” (whatever the hell that might be – it’s not like there’s a dogma guideline on it) years and years ago when he started making reenactments for dramatic purposes – he was a storyteller and a filmmaker through the tools of documentaries, but again, if there ever was a SDP, he left that field long ago to create a new form.

Wells’ defense of Morris’s work is “(a) documentaries are different than news stories and (b) everybody wants something — it’s the way of the world. What matters is whether or not the subject passes along a portion of verifiable truth.”

Others interviewed by the Times see it differently.

Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a nonprofit organization that reviews performance by the news media, takes the conventional view on so-called checkbook journalism. “If you pay people for a story, you create an incentive for them to make it more dramatic than the facts might bear out,” he said.

David L. Paletz, professor and director of the film, video and digital program at Duke University and a co-chairman of the selection committee for the highly respected Full Frame documentary festival in Durham, N.C., called the practice of paying interview subjects “very dicey.” “My own position,” he added, “is that it shouldn’t be done.”

Former NPR and Salon arts editor, Hitsville’s Bill Wyman, took Morris to task that was sprung from a post in his comments section that read, “While some documentaries are surely ‘journalistic,’ I would love to meet the first asshole who decided that all documentaries be judged according to the standards of journalism.”

We like this anonymous commenter already. But Wyman wrote a lengthy rebuttal.

Well, I am that asshole. It’s worth explaining exactly why it’s wrong.
That ability [of objectivity] breaks down when a documentary that appears to be operating at a very high level of objectivity was actually put together with some rules broken behind the scenes.
2) When you pay someone to be in a documentary, or a source for a piece of journalism, you create an incentive for them to embellish their story. They are working for you now; maybe they should give value for money. The scene being described might take on a little more drama; the tears for the camera may come a little bit faster. A filmmaker of great integrity might work hard to minimize those corruptions of the truth, perhaps. Others won’t.

Wyman, makes some great points and more importantly raises concerns about the implications this could mean for future documentarians, but we’re still with Morris on this one – and we didn’t even enjoy ‘SOP’ that much.

Your thoughts on this practice? Do you think Morris did anything egregious? Our problem with a lot of these posits is that they’re based around “truth” (not to mention the myopic view of how a documentary should be made and what constitutes a documentary exactly – usually a view generated by people who’ve never held a camera in their life) What is truth? Even with by-the-book “Standard Documentary Procedure” (we should probably trademark this term, quick), is everything that’s being shot truth? What about the parts of the film that the documentarian can’t be present for? Are his subjects telling the truth? What is reality in documentary? Everything that’s on-screen? Everything that’s been paraphrased afterwards?

Is truth everything you read? For example. Even something the New York Times writes is wrong. They say Morris’ “works his way past a subject’s defenses with the help of a special device, the Interrotron, that allows interviewees to look directly at Mr. Morris’s image, not at the camera, when they are being recorded.”

The actuality is Morris invented this device not to “get past subject’s defense,” but to make sure the interviewee was looking into the camera. Morris was annoyed that when using standard over-the-shoulder camera techniques, the subjects would look at him and therefore not exactly at the camera (the sight lines would be slightly off). So his solution? Create a device where the subject would look at him, and also be completely in synch with camera site lines.

But look at that monstrosity. Does it seem normal talking into that thing? Would it make you more comfortable? Would it keep you at ease talking into a machine with the delicate title of the “Interrotron”?

But it “gets past a subject’s defense” because the Times says so, right? Shades and shades, people…