Documentarian races to capture Oscar nominees
Reuters - Feb 23, 04:14Errol Morris has a problem. It's Wednesday, and he has to complete a four-minute short film in time for it to air on Sunday's Oscar broadcast.
The Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker ("The Fog of War") has a rough cut about five minutes long, comprising 110 short clips of interviews he did around February 5 with this year's Oscar nominees.
His problem is, he conducted 20 more interviews Tuesday that he has to add to the film. "I talked to Martin Scorsese for 20 minutes," he says.
"Originally when Laura (Ziskin. the telecast's producer) suggested the whole project, we asked if it was even possible. The compression of time between the (January 23) announcement and the (February 25) awards makes it difficult," Morris says.
But if anyone can pull off this feat, it's Morris. A consummate interviewer and journalist, he also is a master of the shortest form there is, the 30-second commercial. (He has done tons of them, from beer and bacon to cars and Democratic campaign spots.) He knows how to work short.
And Morris, who looks and sounds like a rumpled professor from the college town where he lives, Cambridge, Mass., has done a similar Oscar film before. In 2002 he interviewed about 100 people, from folks on the street to Susan Sontag and William Wegman, for the charming "Academy Awards Movie," and collected about 24 hours of material. (The movie is viewable at http://www.errolmorris.com.) The Oscar night running time: four minutes and 15 seconds.
Ziskin tapped Morris for the 2002 project because she was impressed with his work on a post-September 11 commercial for United Airlines. This time, Ziskin asked all the nominees to fill out a questionnaire (which she will use on the show and make available at Oscars.com). But Morris didn't use them.
"I never prepare a list of questions, ever," he says. "I try not to think about it. I have been known occasionally to go to the movies. You could look at this as my own personal way to meet all the nominees. It was enjoyable, actually."
What was not enjoyable was trying to fit all 130 subjects into four minutes in a way that makes sense. (On the last film, Morris caught hell from some of the luminaries he left out, like U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky.) Morris says Ziskin gave him a much tougher task this go-round. She wanted him to try to interview as many of this year's nominees as he could.
Morris didn't know who his potential subjects were until nominations morning January 23. And because they were scattered all over the globe, he had to get to most of them around the time of the annual Academy Nominees luncheon February 5. More of them showed up for the first three sessions that week than anyone had expected, from Alfonso Cuaron and Penelope Cruz to Peter O'Toole and Abigail Breslin.
"One hundred and thirty nominees -- that in itself is a somewhat daunting task," Morris says. "It's the iron-man interview competition -- 130 in four days."
Morris had to wedge this little assignment in between shooting his full-length documentary on Baghdad's notorious Abu Ghraib prison. One day he interviewed Robert Richardson, maintenance officer for the 2nd Infantry Division, on one stage and ran back to the Fox lot to interview more Oscar nominees.
What made it even trickier to shape was Morris' demand that the movie have something significant to impart.
"It has to say something, be about something, and not be a jumble of images," he says. "Not everyone gets the same amount of time. I like to think I am giving the Academy a human face, who these people really are underneath all the glitz and glamour and marketing, that anyone can identify with and like. If I've done that, that's a job well done."
The first unifying principle for Morris, obviously, was that all his subjects are Oscar nominees. He also couldn't ignore their global diversity.
"A large number of films were made outside the studio system or made by foreign directors," he says. "It was unavoidable, how many Spanish-speaking films were nominated: directors, composers, actresses. And how many English writers and directors. You become aware, it's overwhelming, how many categories there are for sound. But I know that location recording, mixing and sound effects are important in movies."
He also gets into issues of thanking people in a painfully short amount of time. "Nominees are always wanting to thank people, and feeling guilt about not thanking people," he says. "That's part of what the Oscars are about."
O'Toole, who frames the short, "has a fabulous story to tell," Morris says. When he asked the veteran actor how many times he had been nominated, O'Toole replied, eight.
"Why didn't you win for 'Lawrence of Arabia'?"
"Because someone else did," O'Toole answers.
Reuters/Hollywood Reporter
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