The Big Picture · Interview
November 27, 2020/ 65 min/ Sean Fennessey
Sean Fennessey talks with documentarian Errol Morris about his new Showtime film on Joanna Harcourt-Smith and Timothy Leary, and about memory, denial, Trump, and the movies across his career.
14 films across 1 segment.
AI-generated This episode was transcribed and analyzed with AI models. The matches aren't perfect — expect the occasional misheard title or a link to the wrong film.
Errol Morris in conversation
The new Showtime film, finished the day before this taping. A first-person portrait of Joanna Harcourt-Smith, Timothy Leary's common-law wife, who died six weeks before release. Morris calls it his first love story.
The McNamara film Morris frames as the kin to the new one: a single-subject investigation of self by self.
The Rumsfeld companion piece to Fog of War (Fennessey misdates it 2014).
Morris's recommended starting point; the mystery he says he was lucky enough to actually solve.
Morris calls it a failure of nerve: a Harvard rough-cut left students doubting the Holocaust, so he added experts to tell viewers what to think, against his one-subject instinct.
The Steve Bannon film savaged after Venice as cancel-culture fodder. Morris says his aim was to show these people offer only destruction, and calls Trump the 'fuck you president' to Bannon's face in it.
The George C. Scott / Peter Sellers 'this person is psychotic' beat anchors Morris's Globe editorial on Trump: obvious, but not obvious enough that people will say it.
Morris rejects the received reading of it as an essay on subjective truth; he sees a film about the denial and hiding of truth.
His film about photographer Elsa Dorfman, who watched it through her last week of life.
The new Frederick Wiseman documentary Morris was asked to write about; occasion for their running 'king of misanthropic cinema' argument.
Cited as the flattering comparison for the FX series: a true-crime version of it, with a wild array of crazy characters.
The film Morris says he hated for selling a false choice between genius and a normal life; his foil for why he loves 'The Queen's Gambit.'
Not films filtered out: TV, games, ads
TV WormwoodA Wilderness of ErrorThe Queen's GambitFirst Person
Books Fatal VisionA Wilderness of ErrorThe Waves
Ads NOS EnergyFanDuelCarvanaFIFA World Cup Launch Edition (Netflix)Boar's HeadWhole FoodsStitch Fix