To speak with the critically acclaimed film director Errol Morris is to look at him as one of the characters in his films. Like their dialogue, his conversation ebbs and flows, persistently returning to underlying themes even as he digresses. Also like them, if you let him keep talking you're bound to hear some remarkable things. Sadly, it is unlikely that he ever will be a character in one of his films or one like them, primarily for two reasons: it seems unlikely that Morris himself will ever run across another personality like his to interview, and it is even more hard to imagine another filmmaker like him to do the job.

Morris' entire body of work, which includes the films The Thin Blue Line, Fast, Cheap, and out of Control and most recently Mr. Death, which opened in select theaters in December, was featured in a retrospective at the Harvard Film Archive last month. The event was not only a remarkable opportunity to watch his films on the big screen; it also provided a unique perspective into the interrelations that are woven through these works.

Although the films deal with such diverse subjects as pet cemeteries (Gates of Heaven, 1978), Stephen Hawking (A Brief History of Time, 1992) and an autistic professor designer of human slaughterhouses (Stairway to Heaven, 1998), certain themes appear repeatedly, emerging from the tightly woven web of humor, philosophy and idiosyncrasy that is Morris' signature like ghosts of questions past, resurrected and back for more.

Morris the Artist

This thematic approach, common to all of the films, is perhaps best demonstrated in 1997's Fast, Cheap, and out of Control, in which Morris takes four very different people with very different obsessions and, like magic, weaves their ideas into a beautifully integrated feature. The integration is, as it turns out, no accident.

"I like the idea of making a movie where you took four things that were ostensibly totally unrelated and brought them together," Morris says. "I mean, each of the stories had themes that interest me, but the idea of making them into one film was the underlying idea." The director's emphasis on content over, or at least preceding form, does not date to his beginnings as a filmmaker. Unlike the light and audience-driven fare that has become the norm in movie theatres, Morris' work is guided more by his own curiosity than by a stylistic or commercial vocabulary.

"I always imagined that I would be doing stuff that interested me," he reports. "In fact, I'm always puzzled by people who say they want to be film directors independently of wanting to convey anything, as if somehow it's a job description, it's a container without content. Originally, I wanted to be a writer, and I started interviewing people well before I became a filmmaker. I don't think it was ever wanting to make films, per se, but I was becoming more and more excited by the idea that the stuff I wanted to say, I could say as a filmmaker."

Morris first grew interested in film while working on a graduate degree in History and Philosophy of Science at Berkeley. He describes "obsessively, compulsively" attending movies at the Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley's on-campus film repository, and becoming interested in the way the medium could be used to communicate the sorts of ideas he had been dealing with through other means. From there, he went on to work on several projects for the German director Werner Herzog before going on to make his own first film, a feat which Herzog commemorated by publicly eating his own shoe. Morris is quick to point out that he never went to film school, adding, "I somehow believe the real film school is the movie theatre."

Given his focus on communicating ideas and questioning the audience, it is surprising to note that Errol Morris considers his work to be patently anti-vrit. "I have nothing wrong with cinema vrit as a style," he says. "That's fine-handheld cameras, available light... why not? The crazy thing is to think that style guarantees truth, that there's a truth machine, like a meat grinder. That if you put in the right ingredients, that somehow, magically, truth results. I mean, that's nuts. Even a moment of reflection tells you how deeply wrong that has to be. You make decisions all the time, by choosing to be in one place rather than another, by choosing to record one thing rather than another... and the list continues."

"Truth can't be manufactured," he continues. "Maybe the appearance of truth. There's another word for the appearance of truth. It's called falsehood, and falsehood can be very easily manufactured."

This is not to say that Errol Morris has entirely given up on truth, although his views on the matter are notably more complex than those of most documentarians. "It seems a very odd conceit that film itself is a vehicle of truth, per se. It can be, but truth isn't something that's served on a platter. To me, truth is a linguistic kind of thing." As a result, he rejects the traditionally dichotomous relationship between documentary and feature filmmaking.

"We hear these distinctions between drama and documentary: one is true, the other is made up. I don't think that makes much sense. I mean, there's a big difference between using real people and having no script, and having actors and a script that they follow; that seems to be fairly clear. It occurred to me that the difference between the two was about control, more than anything, that when we think of a scripted movie, we thing about movies that are controlled by the director, or the director and the writer if they're not one and the same. Whereas documentaries are unrehearsed, they're spontaneous, they're out of control. Yes. But I think that dividing line often shifts and is hard to pinpoint."

Morris believes that films are so inevitably arbitrary that they do not necessarily produce truth, but this does not preclude a real belief in truth itself. He describes himself as a "at heart a realist," professing to believe in a real world and in right and wrong. "There is truth, and it's not subjective, not up for grabs," he says. "It's just hard to arrive at. But if there's anything noble about the human enterprise, it's trying to find out about the world."

In their pursuit of the truth, the films Morris has produced over the years do not feel bound to a traditional documentary notion of validity of sources. Once his interviews are completed, he works with sets, storyboards, and the rest of the production elements associated with feature filmmaking. Nevertheless, the films "do obey one central rule of spontaneity, and that's the interview. What people actually say on camera isn't scripted for them; they come into a studio and they say it. They write it for me, if you like, and then the text becomes the script for what follows."