Errol Morris

Errol Morris (born February 5, 1948, Hewlett, New York, U.S.) is an American film director, known for his meticulously researched, engaging documentary portraits of both ordinary and extraordinary lives and for his arresting visual style.

Education and early films

Morris earned a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1969. He attended graduate school at Princeton University and the University of California, Berkeley, but abandoned his studies to begin working as a film director. His first film was the documentary Gates of Heaven (1978), an offbeat exploration of two pet cemeteries in California and the people who buried their pets there. He followed it with another documentary, Vernon, Florida (1981), focusing on the eccentric residents of the titular town.

In the mid-1980s Morris worked as a private detective in New York City, and he applied his investigative skills to his third documentary, The Thin Blue Line (1988), which reviewed the case of Randall Dale Adams, a death-row inmate convicted of having killed a Texas police officer. Laying out a case for wrongful conviction, the movie played a major role in Adams’s release from prison the following year. Morris branched out into fiction with The Dark Wind (1991), adapted from a detective novel of the same name by Tony Hillerman, but he left the project before its completion. He resumed his documentary career with A Brief History of Time (1992), a film about the life and work of astrophysicist Stephen Hawking that won two awards at the Sundance Film Festival.

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Political and biographical documentaries

In the 1990s Morris invented a device he called the Interrotron, which allowed his interviewees to look directly at him and at the camera simultaneously. The first film to make use of the technology was Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997), in which Morris profiled four individuals with unusual occupations and used the structure of the film to illuminate connections between their diverse lives. Two years later he directed Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., about an engineer who designs execution equipment. In 2003 Morris released The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, a meditative study of Robert McNamara, a U.S. secretary of defense during the Vietnam War, that is centered on a probing interview with the film’s then octogenarian subject. The film won an Academy Award for best documentary feature.

Morris’s interest in U.S. foreign policy and wartime morality resurfaced in the documentary Standard Operating Procedure (2008), an examination of the abuses committed by U.S. military personnel at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison during the Iraq War. In 2010 he explored obsessive behavior and media hysteria in Tabloid, which focused on a 1970s scandal involving a former beauty pageant winner who falls in love with a Mormon missionary and allegedly abducts him. The Unknown Known (2013) consisted of a series of interviews with former U.S. secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld regarding his political past, particularly his role in the Iraq War. In The B-Side (2016) Morris explored the life of portrait photographer Elsa Dorfman. American Dharma (2018) profiled political strategist Steve Bannon. Morris then examined the relationship between Timothy Leary and Joanna Harcourt-Smith in My Psychedelic Love Story (2020).

Later films

In 2023 Morris directed The Pigeon Tunnel, about the life and work of the English novelist and former spy John Le Carré. Separated (2024), based on a nonfiction book by Jacob Soboroff, investigated the family separation policy—in which children were taken from parents who had illegally crossed the U.S.-Mexico border—of the first administration of Donald Trump. Morris turned to the world of finance in Tune Out the Noise (2025), which charts the creation of index funds and features interviews with economists Eugene Fama, Robert C. Merton, and Myron S. Scholes, among others. Also in 2025 Morris released CHAOS: The Manson Murders, about Charles Manson and the notorious Tate murders.

Television series

In addition to his film work, Morris produced a documentary series for cable television, First Person (2000–01), and he directed Wormwood (2017), a Netflix miniseries based on real-life CIA agent Frank Olson, whose death was alleged to have been part of a government conspiracy. Morris also directed dozens of television commercials.

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Writing

Morris wrote Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography (2011), a collection of essays originally written for the online edition of The New York Times, and A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald (2012), an investigation into a famed murder case involving a Green Beret who was found guilty of killing his family. The latter book was adapted into a documentary TV miniseries in 2020.