Consider this, from Scott Feinberg, of the “And the Winner is …” blog, which tracks Oscars movies. Feinberg was writing about an early showing of “Standard Operating Procedure” at Brandeis University in NYC Massachusetts and a subsequent Q&A with its director, Errol Morris. The film contains lengthy interviews with some of the American service people who took the Abu Ghraib photos while working as prison guards, most notably Lynndie England, who was seen posing with a leash around the neck of one Iraqi prisoner.

Many grafs down in his discussion, Feinberg writes this:

A side note: I was a bit surprised by the answer Morris gave to a question about the interviews after the film. The questioner, a noted journalist, asked Morris how he convinced these individuals to agree to be interviewed, and specifically if he paid them at all, “which is not okay in my profession.” Morris eventually acknowledged that he did, in fact, pay his interview subjects, jokingly explaining that he did so because “I have a lot of money and want to share it.” (He did not disclose an amount of money or if this is his standard practice.) I, frankly, don’t really have a problem with this—it got these people to sit down and talk about their behavior, and I don’t see how it would in any way encourage them to speak anything other than the truth—except for the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, this compensation was not openly acknowledged, as it should have been since this is a documentary that purports not to have any agenda other than seeking the truth, and in my estimation does not. I worry that because Morris did not do so, those who wish to disparage SOP, for whatever reason, may latch onto this as evidence of some secret agenda, just as they do in response to the use of re-enactments in his films, including this one.

Emphasis added. I don’t want to disparage SOP, but I don’t think it’s right for journalists to pay for interviews. But the question here is what Morris meant. A post by Jeffrey Wells, on Hollywood Elsewhere, muddies the waters. He includes the following statement from Morris, one that he apparently solicited:

“As documentaries have become more and more mainstream entertainment, people are aware that there is money involved. The more successful documentaries become, the harder and harder it is to get people to do them for nothing.

“People [are] aware of my success and respond accordingly. I never paid people for the interviews in The Thin Blue Line, but Stephen Hawking was paid a lot of money for the rights to his book and his participation in A Brief History of Time. Fred Leuchter was paid when I asked him to appear in several scenes, e.g., the scene of him riding up and down in a van de Graff generator at the Boston Museum of Science. I did not pay him for the interview, but if he had insisted I might have done so. McNamara was not paid a fee for The Fog of War, but of course we paid his travel and hotel. Why wouldn’t we?

“The professor who asked the question at Brandeis is a print journalist. I don’t know if she has ever done a seventeen-hour interview over two days, as I did with Janis Karpinski. I didn’t pay Karpinski, but we paid for hotel, travel and per diem. It is customary in the motion picture business. To do [otherwise] would be (I believe) unconscionable. It is difficult to ask people for such an investment of time without taking care of them in some way—and that may involve paying them.

“I paid the ‘bad apples’ because they asked to be paid, and they would not have been interviewed otherwise. Without these extensive interviews, no one would ever know their stories. I can live with it.”

Emphasis added. I find this statement odd. There’s nothing wrong with paying for people’s travel expenses, of course, and if that’s all he did he would have said so. But it certainly looks like he’s clouding the issue by conflating different things. For example, it appears he did pay Leuchter, who was the subject of Dr. Death; I don’t really understand the distinction Morris is making about paying him only for one scene, when Leuchter’s in the entire movie. And then, at the very end of a long response, after yet again making a big deal of paying only for expenses, Morris seems to acknowledge that he did flat-out pay some of his interview subjects.

Even if you’re not as rigid as Hitsville on this issue it’s certainly true, as Feinberg said, that the fact should be shared with viewers.

The NYT did a slavering piece on Morris and his new film last week. Morris has been writing a blog for the paper on its web site. In the story, we were told:

That Mr. Morris was able to wrangle Ms. England—as well as Janis Karpinski, Abu Ghraib’s former commanding officer, and Tim Dugan, a contract interrogator, among others—came about through a careful and persistent cultivation of their subjects and their lawyers.

It seems that some checkbook journalism may have been involved as well.

Morris’s filmic charms have always been slightly opaque. Looked at one way, his work can seem profound; rearrange your mind slightly, however, and the films can be suddenly trite and vaporous. Morris has a knack, too, for the gnomic utterance that doesn’t really hold up. For example, this, from Feinberg’s piece:

What spurred him to make a film about these particular iconic images, he explained on Thursday, was his amazement that although everyone has seen these images, nobody really knows anything about them.

After that Feinberg asks about thirty questions we supposedly don’t know the answer to, most of which I could pretty much answer off the top of my head. (”What sorts of punishments did the soldiers depicted receive? … Would the public be as enraged about the acts depicted if we had never seen visual evidence of them?”) We know an immense amount about the photos; they created one of the bigest news stories of the year and there were multiple criminal trials held.

Similarly, here’s Morris in the Times story:

“One of the incredibly deep ironies,” he said, “is that the photographs could serve as both an exposé and as a cover-up. That they would encourage people not to look any further and make them think they had seen everything. And that is very interesting.”

That’s not “interesting.” It’s just wrong. How did they encourage people not to look any farther? How did they make us think we’d seen everything? Didn’t they provoke a half-dozen trials and a worldwide scandal?

In this month’s GQ, he’s less evasive:

Morris is fascinated by why nearly every interview in Berlin began with a variation of the same question: How did you get them to talk to you?

“Why is that such an interesting question?” he wonders.

I tell him that I am more fascinated by the question that they didn’t ask. For all their curiosity in this area, not one single journalist asked, “Did you pay them?”

“It is interesting,” he agrees. “I don’t know if it’s a great idea for me to talk about it. I’ve always felt that if someone specifically asked me, I wouldn’t lie about it, because I think that would be incredibly stupid.”

It is not the first time he has paid a subject of his films. When he returned to find Fred Leuchter, the subject of Mr. Death who fecklessly becomes a hero in Holocaust-denial circles, several years after first interviewing him, he paid him to continue the project—payments he rationalized in an interview at the time on the basis that he paid actors to act out scenes for his documentaries and he was asking Leuchter to re-create certain images from his life as an actor.

For Standard Operating Procedure, the first of the five “bad apples” Morris interviewed, Javal Davis, asked for a fee and Morris agreed. “The rest just followed in due course.” (Only the bad apples. If other subjects refused to be interviewed without payment, Morris didn’t pay them.) “In this instance, I justified it—I think that’s how the contracts were written—that I was paying them as consultants or advisers to the project. Yes and no. I was essentially, for all intents and purposes, paying them to be interviewed.”

Here again you can see that tic of asking a question that seems to be deep but really isn’t: “Why is that such an interesting question?” He’s even “fascinated” by the question.

Well, because it’s hard to get people to do stuff like that if you don’t pay them.