John le Carré’s spy novels traffic in the philosophical, emotional and practical ambiguities complicating concepts like truth, deceit and self-awareness. Which makes their author, who died in 2020 at 89 and whose real name was David Cornwell, an ideal foil for the legendary documentary director Errol Morris, himself an artist compelled toward questions about those same topics. (Though it might be more accurate to say that Morris’s work is often about the impossibility of answering any such questions.) “The Pigeon Tunnel,” Morris’s new film, which is arriving in select theaters and on AppleTV+ on Oct. 20, is based on le Carré’s 2016 memoir of the same name. The movie was built largely on conversations between the director, an acknowledged master and philosopher of the interview, and his interviewee, himself a former British intelligence agent with a well-known aversion to public self-revelation and an admitted propensity for falsehoods. So the novelist made for a tricky subject, even if Morris and I could never quite agree on why. “The reason that I made ‘The Pigeon Tunnel,’” he said about le Carré, “is that he is interested in philosophical questions. His work is riddled with philosophical questions. So there you go!”
Explain what the pigeon tunnel is, for people who don’t know. You know.
Errol Morris (standing, left) with John le Carré (seated) and the cinematographer Igor Martinovic on the set of “The Pigeon Tunnel.”
Apple TV+
I’m going to try to wrench things back toward the question — Let me go on for a moment. Early on in my interview, le Carré asked me this bizarre question: “Who are you?” I tell him, I’m not sure who I am. We started this strange discussion of the difference between interrogations and interviews. Let me turn the tables: As a person who does interviews — in fact, correct me if I’m wrong, you’re doing an interview as we speak — what do you think the difference is?
Isn’t the difference that an interrogation has the goal of trying to elicit a particular answer and an interview doesn’t? That would be my answer. My own feeling about interviews is I never know where they’re going. I don’t want to know. I just want to be there and involved in some kind of discussion. I say to le Carré that for him the world divides into two groups: string-pullers and dupes. He says, I wanted to be a string-puller; manipulate other people, bend them to my will.
But to go back to my question, which is, did you have any concerns or skepticism about why it was that John le Carré thought you were the guy to tell this story? The whole premise of what you’re saying is utterly ridiculous.
Why? You set up this situation: You tell me this is a guy who is an admitted liar, why would you want to talk to him? I wanted to talk to him because I had read a lot of his novels. I read “The Pigeon Tunnel,” and he is a smart and interesting person.
These are your words in the film — Uh-oh.
“I keep hearing again and again and again that I have not pressed you hard enough about betrayal. I have failed in my interviewer’s or interrogator’s job.” What is that if not some implicit acceptance of the notion that there exists information that you wanted, and different information that le Carré wanted to convey? I have a different interpretation. If you would give me a moment please.
You were being prompted to go deeper. But your question that set up this interview is a kind of, “When did you stop beating your wife?” question.
Right: a safe that British intelligence had hidden away; after years, they were able to open it. It was empty. They looked behind the safe and found? Rudolf Hess’s pants. There was a note pinned to them saying they should investigate the material in the pants because it might give information to the state of the German textile industry in the early ’40s. So what starts off as a historical investigation becomes a grim joke about the nature of history, maybe about the unknowability of history, about the chaos of history.
Wait, why did it take so long for the movie to come out? Oh, you won’t respond to anything I say. Only that? I don’t know why!
I got nothing about the unknowability of history. Do you? I think about it all the time. You’re going to stop me. I know it.
Morris with Robert McNamara on the set of “The Fog of War” (2003).
Sony Pictures Classics, via Everett Collection
Let it rip. Thank you so much. I hope I’m not giving you a bad interview here. David Cornwell has a remarkable passage in the movie. He tells you that people see events in different ways. Maybe they can’t even agree on what they’ve seen. Maybe there’s no common ground. But he says, unequivocally, that there is such a thing as truth. Maybe you never know what it is, but it’s out there. I love the opportunity of being able to talk to David Cornwell about these things. The fact that everybody is a liar, the fact that people are hopelessly self-deceived about their own actions and intentions doesn’t mean that there isn’t truth. Just makes it more difficult to ascertain.
Can you share a self-deception about yourself? That I’m a nice person.
You’ve alluded in this conversation to the idea of the “interview” and what it is meant to accomplish. What do you think we’re doing here? If I’m to be honest, I’m promoting my film. I was also told that I would enjoy speaking to you, which I am, even though the frame of “When did you stop beating your wife” —
Geez Louise! Geez Louise? You can’t say to somebody: This guy is a known liar, dissembler, spy. Why are you interested in talking to him? You did better when you said, Who wouldn’t want to talk to this man?
You said that for the most part you don’t care whether people are telling you the truth. Maybe I do.
Yeah. I’m still amazed that it was invited to the Whitney Biennial, without my submitting it; that it was considered art of some kind. I’d like to get back to that underlying idea.
Your job involves asking questions much more than answering questions. Do you find that being the interviewee is an uncertain role for you? You know, you tell yourself stories about what it is that you do, which could be entirely inaccurate. I have done so many interviews as a subject. Literally hundreds. So I don’t think it’s an issue of interviewee versus interviewer. I’m always surprised by what is considered to be a good interview. I suppose it’s a good interview if someone’s willing to sit down and talk to you. Am I not again answering your question?
Not quite. Give me the question again. Let me try to do a better job.
When you’re making your films and conducting the interviews, ultimately you’re in charge. You get to edit them. You can supplement the interviews with the right images, the right sound. In this format, you don’t have control. Does that feel trickier? Well, it’s certainly different. In this instance, I don’t know who the interviewer really is.
Who I am, you mean? Who you are.
Who do you think I am? Oh, please. An agent of Satan.
Morris (right) during filming of “The Thin Blue Line” (1988).
Mark Lipson, via Fourth Floor Productions
What does John le Carré say about your position as an interviewer at the beginning of the film? Sometimes you’re God. . . . Sometimes you’re a friend? There is a model for interviewing: adversarial model; the question that unmasks the interviewee for who he really is. But I never think of them that way. Maybe I’m wrong. “When did you stop beating your wife?” — where a conclusion is stated, and the interviewee is asked to respond. I know I got my back up. That’s some kind of tell. Properly considered, no one should ever under any circumstances talk to anybody else.
Sometimes I feel the same way. I have a question about — Now I’m going to play you! When do you feel the same way? This is the kind of question I would never ask. But I just did.
I’m going to avoid it. I want to ask my questions. No, you can’t! You can’t avoid it.
I’m running the show. I have a question about this idea that le Carré has: that the world divides into string-pullers and dupes. Do you think that division applies in the interview context? I don’t, actually. Sometimes you’re searching for truth, like how many people were at Barack Obama’s first inauguration versus Trump’s inauguration — that kind of fact-based truth. Sometimes you’re just trying to learn something about another person. Going back over le Carré’s stories: He’s observing people, he’s interacting with people and he’s transforming those interactions into literature. Was I interested in getting him to confess about his sex life? I wasn’t! Is that an abnegation of interviewer responsibility? I don’t know!
But the idea that in talking to someone, there’s a truth we can understand about them — this is connected to the question that got your back up, that you interpreted as my suggesting that you shouldn’t have done the film. That wasn’t misinterpretation.
I don’t want to relitigate that. You started it. Let me ask you a question.
No. Can I please finish the question? You don’t want to be interviewed, I can tell. You must be deathly afraid of it.
Let me finish my question. That disagreement we had, which seemed to be rooted in an idea about whether or not you should have done the film — It is not. But if you want to persist with that, please be my guest.
You said, “Am I doing paint-by-numbers?” You brought up “Gates of Heaven” and “Fast, Cheap & Out of Control” and said those movies had a quality that you want to get back to. Maybe, subconsciously, the reason you got your back up was that the questions I was asking connected with insecurity about the work that you’ve been doing lately. I think that is correct. I would agree with that.
Do you feel like you’ve been getting less of those moments? I don’t know.
Dig deeper. You said that you’re feeling some insecurity about the work. I don’t like trading off David Cornwell’s celebrity. That makes me nervous. I enjoyed talking to him, and I liked the philosophical underpinnings of a lot of his work and what he says about truths. A filmmaker wrote me and said it was interesting how he embraced subjectivity of truth. I thought, My God, did you even watch the film? What do people even see when they watch a film? Maybe I’m too coy. Maybe I’m hiding in the wings of my own interviews. I thought that making movies was a kind of Rorschach test, a way of teasing out ideas about the world. Maybe it’s a hopeless desire to understand the world.
When people see your films, do they see the truth? What did Godard say? That cinema is the truth, 24 frames a second. It’s lies at 24 frames a second. We live in a world of lies. When you asked me, if I may return to the bugaboo question, does it bother me that David [Cornwell] is a known liar, prevaricator, dissembler? The answer is, How does it make him different from anybody else? It doesn’t! I don’t go into an interview expecting someone to tell me the truth and then register disappointment: “Oh, I’m so sad you didn’t tell me the whole truth.” Ugh.
You know, Errol, the truth is we’re all living in our own pigeon tunnels. I promised myself I would never agree with you, but this time, you got me.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity from two conversations.
David Marchese is a staff writer for the magazine and the columnist for Talk. He recently interviewed Alok Vaid-Menon about transgender ordinariness, Joyce Carol Oates about immortality and Robert Downey Jr. about life after Marvel.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
