The NYT takes a look at Errol Morris’ payment to interiewees
Michael Cieply and Ben Sisario take a look at the growing concern about how Errol Morris got his interviews for his newest film, Standard Operating Procedure. This is the film about the Abu Ghraib prison guards, some of whom he paid to be in his movie. As we’ve seen recently, Morris thinks it’s OK for documentary filmmakers to pay people for interviews, but that’s not the way he behaves (because he doesn’t disclose the fact in his films) and that’s not the way he talks about it either.
In the Times story, he says the subjects were paid “for their time,” a sophistic distinction. When asked about his practice by Hollywood Elsewhere earlier this week, he said he paid a subject of one of his films for “several scenes,” but insisted he didn’t pay him for the interview, which seems, well, sophistic as well.
More on this tomorrow.
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I don’t see a problem with Errol Morris paying the soldiers for interviews, per se, because I don’t think it necessarily affects the truthfulness or untruthfulness of what they’ll be saying. A person who is interested in slanting events to their side of the story will likely do it whether there’s money involved or not…in fact, the money could actually be considered an inducer not to lie.
The problem lies in whether you trust the integrity of the filmmaker. Is he paying the soldiers simply because he believes they deserve compensation for their time, or is he paying them looking for them to put a particular slant on the issue? If it’s the former, it’s not a big deal…if it’s the latter, then yes, he’s compromised the integrity of his film. But then he could also be doing that anyway even if there weren’t money involved by accepting a story from one of the soldiers at face value and building his film around that.