What Martin Scorsese is to narrative film, Errol Morris is to documentaries. That's not just opinion, it's fact. He has changed the form with masterpieces like The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War and those are just the top of the pile of an amazing career that also includes Mr. Death, Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control, and Gates of Heaven. If you've ever seen a documentary, you've seen the influence of Errol Morris. His latest is arguably his most controversial, Standard Operating Procedure, a film about what exactly happened outside the frame of those infamous photographs of torture from Abu Ghraib.

Errol Morris sat down with us in Chicago to talk about what inspired him to make his latest documentary and the controversial issues that still surround what went down at Abu Ghraib.

Errol Morris on if he thinks anyone would have acted the same as the soldiers at Abu Ghraib:

"I don't know, because those people are all different and they did different things. I don't think they were all involved in abuse in the same way. I'm endlessly fascinated by the fact that you're supposed to look at these people as if they are amoral, perhaps even automatons and in fact they're addressing all kinds of moral questions. I think that, in itself, is really interesting. But anyway, that's not so responsive. I think as a question, I don't know if it has a simple answer. I wonder what I would do under a similar set of circumstances absolutely. I don't know."

Morris on the similarities to Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up:

"You know, I watched Blow Up again recently. I hadn't seen it in I don't know how many years - many, many years. And I always hear Blow Up as that movie that mixes reality and illusion. I saw a different film when I watched it again. I don't think they're mixed up at all in Blow Up. There's a murder, there's a body. He sees it in the photographs the first time and then he goes back to the park and sees the body in the park. There's no doubt what has occurred in Blow Up. You know that someone has been killed. What's interesting is that people turn away from it. One of the photographs in S.O.P.. I have a series of essays on S.O.P. in the New York Times and I'm struggling with an essay that I may or may not put up Friday, but it's about this one photograph of Sabrina Harmon smiling, thumbs up with this corpse, this Iraqi prisoner Al Jamadi. It is a Blow Up story because the story in Blow Up is that we know that there's a real world out there in which things happen, that there was a murder, and that we turn away from it and we choose not to see it. The same could be said of this photograph. We see the smile and we don't see the murder, the fact that there is a body in the frame. Sabrina didn't kill him. Sabrina didn't try to cover up the murder. She took a picture of the corpse, in part because she wanted evidence that she had been lied to by her commanding officers who told her that this was a heart attack victim. That's pretty amazing. We see the picture one way and yet the picture shows us something really different."

On why we see something different:

"I think there are all kinds of reasons. I mean, you look at a photograph and you make all kinds of assumptions because things are juxtaposed in a photograph. You see a body and a person with a completely inappropriate facial expression, smiling, thumbs up. I suppose the natural inclination is to think, particularly if you pile that photograph in with a lot of other abuse photographs, it's not such a stretch to think that the photograph really is a photograph showing her complicity in a crime. And in fact it shows no such thing. The reality of what we are looking at has to be investigated. It's simply not obvious in the frame."

On the fact that cover-ups persist in several arenas of life:

"I'm not gonna solve all the problems of the world by making a couple of movies. I think it's part of who we are. We're easily deceived by ourselves not just people in power. That would be much too simple [and] much too easy. I think it's all of us. I think we haven't really tried to understand this war and I think that's unfortunate. And I think that people keep talking about smoking guns. There's been an enormous amount of evidenced amassed about this current administration. The question is not whether there's a smoking gun. The question is why so many smoking guns everywhere are ignored. That is a really strange question in and of itself. I don't have any real answer."

Morris on his fascination with investigation:

"I actually think that investigation, for me at least, is therapy, because - and maybe this goes back to your question - the photographs came out, and someone who came to interview me today left me this paper. They were giving the responses of the American public in the weeks following the release of the photographs. It really fascinates me. Here's a theory I have: Photographs come out and everyone is shocked. I'm shocked. America is embarrassed, administration is embarrassed, military is embarrassed - embarrassed, embarrassed, embarrassed. I don't know how fast it occurs but I think it happens almost instantly - it's politicized. So then you have the left saying such and such is a lie and the right saying no, no, no and then it's back and forth. I have a friend who often says that if an argument goes back and forth three times, you're supposed to say stalemate. And that's what happens here. No one investigates, or bothers to actually answer these questions. And it is a real question.

"When I'm looking at a photograph from Abu Ghraib am I looking at policy, just the actions of a few rogue soldiers? To me it's really powerful when one of the major government witnesses tells you that the iconic image of torture and abuse of the Iraqi war is S.O.P. It's not a political blog or the conjecture of someone who is charged with telling you what S.O.P. is. It's something very different, something very shocking. I like Britt Pack, I feel guilty every time I say this, like I snuck one past him or something, but he really does believe this. He's a straight guy. He clearly has his opinions about it. I know a lot about Abu Ghraib. I don't think all of this was just policy. The place was just too f**ked up. It was bedlam half the time. You're looking at a war that's being prosecuted by an under-trained, under-equipped, under-staffed military. You're looking at the prescription for a nightmare. And then you throw in various kinds of interrogation policies, throw in the desperation to find Saddam, you mix it all up as my interrogator Ken Dugan would say, with a big stick and this is what you see - colossal mess."

On how he got the soldiers in S.O.P. to open up on camera:

"It's very hard to fully get the trust of any of these people and I don't know if I did fully get their trust. These people have been really f**ked over. They've been incarcerated. They've been disgraced. In some instances, they've been blamed for the entire war. I don't look at them as lily-white but I do look at them as scapegoats. Lynndie England, the day that we interviewed her, was a person we'd heard described as hillbilly, mentally deficient, she comes into the studio and we have no idea what to expect, and she turns out to be perfectly articulate. I think I can say with no 'ifs,' 'ands,' or 'buts' that we were all shocked. You know the photographs get politicized and everybody dumps on the bad apples. As far as anyone is concerned they are evil, evil, evil, evil - end of discussion. To the left they're evil because of Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush and to the right they're evil because they're evil, rogue soldiers, bad apples - blah, blah. You need to do more than simply posture, you need to go into the story! That's the thing about the photographs is that they lead to a kind of weird dogmatism. Everybody thinks, 'Oh, I know what's in that photograph. I understand that photograph. F**k you! It means this! F**k you, it means that!' Investigation is therapy. You have to make an effort, to the best of your ability, to go deeper than that, to find out, not once and for all, but what's going on here.

"And then Bush, I believe, actually won the 2004 election because of these photographs and the fact that all this was going on. He had someone to blame for the stupid war. 'The war is a mess? Blame them. The insurgency is growing? Blame them. Arab world hates us? Blame them. I went into this with the purest of intentions, blah, blah, blah. If things didn't work out so well it's because of these photographs, these damn photographs, that pissed everybody off.'"

The Standards of Filmmaking with Errol Morris Page 2