Errol Morris Talks Tabloid and Other Strange Topics

by Anne Thompson
March 14, 2011 7:55 AM
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Errol Morris's Tabloid was one of my fave films at the Toronto Film Festival, from which Sundance Selects eventually acquired the truth-is-stranger than-fiction doc. It's screening at SXSW. Morris discovered the nugget of this story, about Joyce McKinney and her obsessive love with a man she tries to save from a cult, buried in the jump of a Boston Globe article. Only Morris would see the potential in it.

In the interview below he talks about finding McKinney and tracking her story, the fallibility of all narrators, and how next he wants to tackle fiction for the first time -- he's adapting a TV show about the first man who was cryonically frozen.

Tabloid--made without distributor backing--is vintage Morris: idiosyncratic, disturbing and jaw-dropping in its depiction of unbelievable human behavior. An intellectual, questing filmmaker who can be hugely funny, Morris has gotten very good at a wide range of things, from Oscar-winning dead-serious docs like The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara, high-end commercials on beer and bacon and Oscar shorts to his long-form New York Times blog posts on such topics as truth in photography and the uncanny valley. His book Believing is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography is due in the fall.

Here's Tim Appelo's Telluride review and B. Ruby Rich's Toronto interview, in which Morris talks about how tough making docs is without his longtime editor, Karen Schmeer, 40, who was killed last year in a hit-and-run accident. Track @errolmorris on Twitter.

Part One:

Part Two:

More: Directors, festivals, Genres, Video, Stuck In Love, Reviews, Toronto, Telluride, SXSW, Independents, Documentaries, Interviews, Bloggers

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Errol Morris Talks Tabloid and Other Strange Topics

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Errol Morris Talks Tabloid and Other Strange Topics

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