Ever since his suspenseful narrative documentary The Thin Blue Line blurred distinctions between reality and dramatization, Errol Morris has found himself at the center of the question of what constitutes a documentary film. Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, Morris' latest film, featured in this weekend's Telluride Film Festival and in general release in October, probably won't do much to get him off that hook.
Though built almost entirely from the words and images of its four subjects - a lion-tamer, a topiary artist, a naked-mole-rat specialist, and a robotics scientist - the film dispenses with objective coverage and uses Morris' odd bag of filmic and technical tricks to weave the disparate stories into what he calls an "excursion into the mental lives" of these obsessives and dreamers.
"I've come to believe that there is no difference between fact and fiction film, save that we believe what we see to be either controlled or uncontrolled," he professes. The conventional definition of a documentary, he says, is based on "the idea that the things that happen before the camera are uncontrolled by the people making the film, unrehearsed, spontaneous."
He jokes that his new film passes that test in its inclusion of footage of autonomous robots built by MIT AI scientist Rodney Brooks, whose proposal of a swarm of small, self-directed robots for planetary exploration lent the film its name. Filming Brooks' robots as they independently evolve their own sets of behavior in interaction with their environment, Morris explains, makes it a documentary. With someone else's centrally directed robots, he says, "it would be a feature."
In reality, he adds, the lines between fact and fiction are less distinct. "In every kind of filmmaking the are elements that are out of control and elements that are in control," he says. In order to reduce the Heisenberg influence that the camera can wield over a subject, for instance, Morris has developed a system he's dubbed the Interrotron, a kind of TelePrompTer for images instead of text. Traditionally, he says, there has been a feeling of "the camera as this independent thing, standing apart observing the conversation. That's the kind of thing I'm trying to break down."
The Interrotron uses a video monitor placed in front of the main camera which projects an image of Morris, while an image from that camera is fed to Morris' monitor. "We are essentially looking at each other's live image and directly down the camera's lens," he explains. Having worked with the system for several years now, he's discovered that "people are perfectly willing to talk to a video image."
He says, in fact, that the system creates a surprising kind of intimacy with the subject. He discounts "Luddite" convictions that technologies like this one are inherently distancing. Rather, he contends, "It's not that technology removes the possibility of connection between people, it just redefines it."
Where he exerts more control, however, is in piecing together the film's disparate story lines and the myriad of film stock and emulsions to create a unified and lyrical style. The movie mixes video, 8mm, 16mm, and 35mm film, and black-and-white and color emulsions with wild abandon. There are even shots recorded on infrared surveillance video and some mole-rat shots done by Sewercam, a crude system developed by Roto-Rooter to find obstructions in drains. "Technically speaking, I couldn't have made a movie like this without the digital editing tools that became available in the last five years."
If the resulting amalgam looks familiar to those who have seen Natural Born Killers, that's not a coincidence, since the footage for Fast, Cheap was shot in 1992 and '93 with Oliver Stone's cinematographer, Robert Richardson. "A lot of the stuff that Stone used in Natural Born Killers I developed with Richardson on this project," says Morris.
To put together this hodgepodge on a traditional editing table would be extremely difficult and costly, he says, but with the new techniques he was able to create "this kind of collage of images - which is part of what our consciousness has become," he says. "Our whole world has become this collage: part real and part virtual images that become more and more removed from the real world."
This coming of some kind of new reality is largely what the film itself is about. The movie turns an elegiac eye on the waning of the nostalgic worlds represented by the topiary sculptor and the lion tamer, while staring into a future of inevitable scientific progress and accelerating evolution represented by the views of the two scientists.
It becomes what Morris somewhat abashedly, if appropriately, calls this his "millennial film." There is, says Morris, "this feeling that we are at some juncture - between the old world where we were very connected to the natural world and something emerging that is unclear what it will become. Technology is changing life in very big ways, though it's not clear what those changes will mean."
In the meantime, Morris continues to explore "representation and rerepresentation and the nature of our connection to the world" in his next film, Dr. Death, which is about an electric chair repairman and Holocaust revisionist. A career uncovering the meanings in such offbeat subjects have earned him this year's Gotham Filmmaker Award from the Independent Feature Project, which he will receive in New York on 16 September.
