The information that top managers receive is rarely unfiltered. Unpopular opinions are censored. Partisan views are veiled as objective arguments. Honest mistakes are made. Few people know how to get an accurate read on a situation like documentarian Errol Morris. He expressed his obsessive gumshoe sensibility in scrupulous, poetic detail in a series of essays on the New York Times website about two Crimean War photographs—devoting about 25,000 words to raising and answering the question of which photo was taken first, leading readers through the evidence piece by piece. He had pored over the photographer’s letters, interviewed museum curators, studied various maps, traveled to Crimea, snapped his own pictures, consulted with a shadow expert and the cocreator of a forensic photography software program, and then circled back to the images themselves after a friend weighed in with keen observations about the blue sensitivity of nineteenth-century photographic emulsions, the positioning of incidental rocks, and the laws of gravity. That sort of analytical rigor pervades Morris’s films and has brought him much critical praise. (An article in the Guardian placed him among the top 10 directors in the world, describing him as “the world’s best investigative film-maker,” with a “forensic mind” and a “painter’s eye.”) It’s a quality that would serve managers at all levels well, as they sort through appearances to get to the real story. Who better to learn from than Morris, an ardent and acclaimed pursuer of facts? Morris worked as a private investigator years ago, so it makes sense that as a director he is inclined to scrutinize data and unravel preconceptions. One of his best-known documentaries, The Thin Blue Line, uncovered new evidence regarding the 1976 murder of a Dallas police officer, which led to the exoneration of the man originally sentenced to death for the crime. Morris’s most recent film, Standard Operating Procedure, closely examines many of the photographs taken at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, using commentary by the U.S. soldiers who took and posed in the pictures to fill in the gaps of our knowledge and call into question many assumptions the public and the press made about what those images proved. Given the credibility that his approach engenders, it’s not surprising that companies such as Apple, Citigroup, Adidas, and Toyota have hired Morris to direct TV ads. He brings more than a flair for advertising and marketing to the business table: In this edited interview with HBR’s Lisa Burrell, he shares insights about how to get to the bottom of things when you’re faced with incomplete information or conflicting accounts and how to present yourself as an authentic leader that others will want to follow. What prompted you to start the investigation that led to your documentary Standard Operating Procedure? It was motivated by my interest in the Abu Ghraib photographs and the realization that no one had bothered to contextualize them. People look at a photograph and think, “Well, it’s obvious what it means. It’s obvious what it displays or depicts or portrays.” And it’s not at all obvious. The goal was to take these photographs, which in many instances are known by literally hundreds of millions of people, and examine them. Let’s talk to the soldiers who took them. Let’s try to figure out who was there, what they thought they were doing, why the photographs were taken, and so on. Why didn’t you interview military leaders as well, to get their perspective? If Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney had taken a whole series of snapshots, perhaps I could have made a movie about that. But this was about these snapshots, and as such it was about soldiers way, way, way down in the chain of command: privates, specialists, corporals, sergeants. The one exception is Janis Karpinski, the former brigadier general who was in charge of the prison. I included her because in some sense, even though she was never court-martialed or imprisoned, she did in part take the fall for Abu Ghraib. Can you elaborate on specialist Megan Ambuhl’s comment that photos don’t allow people to see “outside the frame”? On some very literal level, when we look at a photograph, we think we see everything. It’s the proof Othello demands when he hears that his wife has been unfaithful. Othello says to Iago, “Give me the ocular proof.” Of course, he gets it, and it turns out to be no proof at all. It’s the engine of tragedy. We take what we see as being veridical. Somehow, if we see it, it must be the case. When we get a photograph or a group of photographs—270 of them were turned over to the criminal investigation division of the army—we look at them and say, “Well, this is all I need to see. This shows me the world of Abu Ghraib.” Brent Pack, who examined the photos for the prosecution, created a time line based on the metadata from the digital cameras. It’s really interesting to me that he did this, that there was this investigation. But all of this empirical information still doesn’t tell you what you’re looking at. You may think you know a lot about the photographs, but they don’t record what’s in people’s heads. They don’t record context. They don’t record why the photograph was taken or what is depicted. They provide evidence, but many, many additional steps have to be taken before you can say evidence of what. There is this idea about the cast of characters of Abu Ghraib: Ivan Frederick, Chuck Graner, Megan Ambuhl, Lynndie England, Sabrina Harman, and so on. You see these people, and you think that the whole story is about them. This affected journalists as well, I might add. No one looked behind the photographic screen to see what else was there. The minute you go beyond this glimpse of reality, you see that Abu Ghraib did not just concern these MPs; it involved thousands upon thousands of people. There were close to 8,000 prisoners at Abu Ghraib by the end of 2003. You’re looking at a small city. And you’re looking at policy. You’re looking at the face of America in Iraq. The line I think most accurately describes all this comes from Philip Gourevitch, who collaborated with me on a book about Abu Ghraib: The photographs served as both an exposé and a cover-up. They showed us something, but they also encouraged us not to look further. We thought we had the ocular proof. Business leaders often have to dig to get to the truth. When you investigate, at what point does your opinion come into play? Well, it always comes into play. I think there’s always a tug-of-war. Crime, of course, is a really great illustration of this sort of thing because the stakes are high. Did X commit this crime, or is he innocent? We want to know the answer. In my film The Thin Blue Line, the police were convinced they knew who the killer was. They had a narrative about what had happened, and they had a deeply vested interest in believing that narrative. People fall into patterns of belief. It’s not that they consciously choose to believe one thing or another. I don’t think the police, in the example of The Thin Blue Line, chose to frame an innocent man. I would say that their thinking was incredibly sloppy and influenced by an unconscious desire to believe in one thing. Often people do this because it’s simpler or it answers to some social need. It doesn’t have to be true. And once you choose to believe something or end up believing it, you surrender that belief reluctantly—if at all. Why did you suspect the police were wrong? Because the evidence was overwhelming: A lot of it had remained unseen or ignored. But then came the need to justify my suspicion, to convince myself that it had some basis in reality. I could see that Randall Adams had been wittingly or unwittingly framed for a crime that he didn’t commit. I couldn’t see all the details. I couldn’t prove it to somebody. But I felt there was something wrong with this. The story didn’t fit together properly. That was the beginning of two years of investigating to justify the belief. And then the whole thing became surreal because new information appeared as I was investigating. It confirmed the doubts I’d had earlier on. How do you know when you’ve looked far enough? I was a private investigator for many years. I worked on a lot of Wall Street cases. Back then, there was always someone telling me when to stop. Every project had a clear end. When you’re investigating on your own, it’s hard to decide when you’re finished. Getting Randall Adams out of jail was my stopping point for The Thin Blue Line. After you collect information, you need to present it in a way that’s engaging yet believable. Your reenactments are pretty stylized—do you worry that they pull people’s strings? The reenactments are not meant to be manipulative. Quite the opposite: The stylization openly signals that these aren’t recordings of events—that I didn’t happen to be hanging out on Hampton Road with a camera the night the Dallas police officer was shot. It invites people to step back, away from their preconceptions, and think about the events in a new way. In your interviews, your presence is understated. How does your Interrotron help you step out of the way? The Interrotron uses two cameras and two teleprompters. It’s a contraption I devised to allow the interviewer and the subject to look directly at each other—or at least at their live video images—and directly into the camera at the same time. The people I interview are looking at my video image, but they also make eye contact with the audience. If you want to preserve the role of an on-screen interviewer, where you are actually part of the drama and it’s the give-and-take you care about, then by all means include that relationship. What I try to do, though, is create a relationship between the person being interviewed and the audience. You’re aware that I’m there in the film, but at times there’s almost a stream of consciousness narration—a direct link between subject and viewer—and that’s by choice. I’ve found that filming interviews with the Interrotron helps me achieve greater intimacy. Of course, I’ve done a lot of interviews, and I’ve learned how to draw people out on my own—it’s not just the device, but it does help. I’ve read that you prefer the term “nonfiction film” to “documentary.” Does that have to do with how you define “truth”? No, not at all. I don’t believe in the postmodern notion that there are different kinds of truth. There is one objective reality, period. Either someone was shot or he wasn’t. Someone pulled the trigger or he didn’t. Countries are at war or they aren’t. The perception of reality may differ from person to person, but that doesn’t mean there are different kinds of truth or that truth is subjective. I don’t believe that there are different kinds of truth. There is one objective reality, period. When people think “documentary,” they often assume “fly on the wall,” no intervention from a director. Then there’s the idea of the auteur—the director who is all-present and shapes everything. Different films call for different treatments, no matter what the genre. But just because a director’s in control doesn’t mean that the director is not concerned with truth—with truth-telling or with seeking the truth. I’ve seen fiction films with moments of truth in them and nonfiction films with moments of egregious inaccuracy. I’m not sure I’d describe what I do as seeking “truth.” What I do is investigate. When I’m looking at the evidence for a crime, for instance, I like to break it up into two categories: exculpating and inculpating. It’s a way of looking at things from both sides. Let’s talk about inspiring trust. You’ve said that John Kerry struggled with credibility in his 2004 U.S. presidential campaign. How so? You need to present voters with a consistent story if you’re going to get elected. It’s marketing. It’s brand management. George W. Bush didn’t hide his past, and that served him well. Whether you liked it or you didn’t, Bush created a consistent narrative. He gave you reasons why you weren’t supposed to be concerned with his National Guard service. He told you, “I was a bad boy. I found Christ. I stopped drinking. I’m a new man.” Once he’d said that, you couldn’t attack him for being a bad guy. It’s a kind of redemptive story. Kerry, on the other hand, provided a completely confused narrative that elided certain major aspects of his biography. It was inherently disingenuous. He tried to do the band-of-brothers thing and sweep his war protesting under the rug. He would have done much better to hold up both elements of his biography and say, “Two rights don’t make a wrong.” It was right to be brave and courageous in war, but it was also right to speak out when he realized how wrong things were. I thought it’d be a good idea to get him on the Interrotron, looking like a real person rather than a cardboard cutout, being honest about both parts of his past. I thought his campaign might let me do it, too, but then it became clear that wasn’t going to happen. Why did you decide to start working on TV commercials for companies? I had to make a living, and I like doing them. They’re little 30-second movies about the world. For the first few years I did them, I didn’t even use interviews. It felt good to try something new. Why do companies want to hire you? What do they say they’re looking for that they can’t get from someone else? Well, by now I’ve established a track record in advertising. I’m not answering the question directly about what they’re looking for, but I can tell you what I think I can offer. I wanted to put Kerry on the Interrotron so he would speak using his own words—natural, unscripted material—and somehow Kerry’s humanity, which seemed to get lost in the campaign, could reemerge. I thought that was important and I’m pretty good at that kind of thing.
