Animal magnetism - Errol Morris' documentary animal stories - Interview

The leading players in Errol Morris's new documentary are a topiary gardener, a lion tamer, a robot scientist, and a mole rat photographer. They won't end up with stars on Hollywood Boulevard, but they tell us a whole lot more about the nature of existence than the people who do

Errol Morris is the philosopher-king of American documentary filmmaking, a longtime grad student and onetime MacArthur Fellow whose movies are a unique amalgam of tabloid sensationalism and lofty detachment, For bottom-line defamiliarizing weirdness, no movie surpasses Morris's Gates of Heaven, his 1979 account of two California pet cemeteries; and a decade before Seinfeld, Morris's Vernon, Florida (1981) was triumphantly about . . . nothing (or rather, about the idea of nothing).

Recording interviews is the Morris specialty. "The idea is not to listen to what people say, but to keep them talking," the affably morose director once told me by way of explaining the remarkably revealing, yet totally posed performances he gets from his subjects One of Morris's most compelling movies was an extended conversation with the paralyzed physicist Stephen Hawking (A Brief History of Time, 1992); all of them are founded upon epistemological inquiries (for example, How do we know that we know what we know?). Morris's masterpiece, The Thin Blue Line (1988), didn't simply recount a murder investigation - it actually was one. and it resulted in the retrial and subsequent release of a prisoner on death row.

The wonderfully smart, comic, and provocative Fast, Cheap & Out of Control - a hit at the Sundance and New York film festivals - is more expressionistic than Morris's earlier films (it was shot by Oliver Stone's favorite cinematographer, Robert Richardson), and a bit wilder. Something like the Nature Channel run amok, it's a bestiary that derives all manner of unexpected meanings from Morris's intercutting of four tales of bizarre life-forms and the men who love them: a topiary gardener, an MIT expert in artificial intelligence, a lion tamer, and a biologist obsessed with the hairless, subterranean South African mole rat.

The fifth life-form is Fast, Cheap & Out of Control itself, a movie that's as funny and lurid as its title, but with an unexpected melancholy backbeat.

J. HOBERMAN: Watching Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, we see plants that are shaped to look like animals, animals and robots that behave like insects, lions that are taught to perform, and in each case a human who is fascinated by this form of adaptation.

ERROL MORRIS: This is a low-concept movie, my answer to the high-concept idea: the movie that defeats the possibility of a one-phrase or one-sentence description.

JH: Were the connections between your four subjects and their various obsessions immediately apparent to you?

EM: They were all animal stories. I had been searching around for four stories of control.

JH: The title of the film comes from MIT scientist Rodney Brooks's description of the sort of artificial intelligence he creates.

EM: The joke is that when we're showing Rodney's robot. the movie is a documentary, because the robot decides where it's going to go. If it were a traditional robot, where everything was programmed inside it and what it did was according to plan, the movie would be a feature.

JH: Just like Babe. What's Fast, Cheap & Out of Control about?

EM: Since people keep asking me that, I've come up with a variety of different answers that I hope satisfy the need to hear something. One is the idea that it shows various incarnations of the Frankenstein myth: the need to create life and at the same time control it, with the codicil that something bad's going to happen; that this attempt at control will end in some kind of disaster, some kind of failure.

JH: That's certainly true of the gardener, George Mendonca, who suspects his topiary is doomed.

EM: That's one of the reasons I like him so much. You think he has to be aware that his enterprise is for nought, that it's going to come to some bad end. He keeps telling you that this hurricane came through and half of the garden was destroyed. There's light, there's birds, there's bugs, and last but not least there's the gardener's own mortality. He tells you, "It took me fifteen years to make the bear, and I'm probably not going to last that much longer." Topiary gardens have always fascinated me.

JH: Why?

EM: I like the idea of people creating some kind of landscape. In the case of animal topiary, it's creating a menagerie out of privet.

JH: What is privet?

EM: Privet is a kind of hedge that grows pretty tall. Boxwood is smaller and more manicured; it's a little harder to control. I have, God knows, lots and lots of material with George discussing the various merits of privet and boxwood - the more arcane aspects of topiary gardening.

JH: How did you feel about Edward Scissorhands?

EM: You mean was it topiary exploitation? [laughs] I liked it, it was fun. But I think my topiary story's about something different. I've been asked what line I particularly identify with in the movie, and of course the line is George's "cut and wait," because it most closely mirrors my own experience: the experience of actually making these movies.