Or a left hook.
Morris, the Oscar-winning director ofThe Fog of War, struggled to formulate a response.
Maybe, he felt, at some philosophical level it was a question he truly couldnt answer.
Errol Morris, left, on set.Apple TV+
ERROL MORRIS: When someone looks at you and says, Who are you?
Not because I dont want to, but maybe I dont know who I am.
MORRIS: Such a strange way to begin an interview.
Author David Cornwell (AKA John le Carré) with director Errol Morris.Apple TV+
He starts examining, unpacking, if you will, the difference between interrogations and interviews.
Is there any difference?
Well, Im not sure.
I remember being shocked during the interview and I have thought about it a great deal ever since.
What exactly is the difference between an interrogation and an interview?
Even le Carre himself wants to define the process as some kind of interrogation.
Its not an interrogation.
Honest to God, Im not a cop.
OK, Ill get it out of you, come clean!
Its a completely different process.
Can you say what you were communicating by that?
His world is a fractured world.
Im always looking for new ways of doing things.
One always hopes that what ones doing makes sense ultimately, at least for some people.
DEADLINE: In the film, Cornwell suggests theres an unknowability about every individual.
His answer in the end is that he can identify himself as an artist.
MORRIS: I agree.
David gives us fractured pieces of his autobiography, a lot about his father, less about his mother.
He makes connections between his biography and the books that he produced.
But there is an inherent mystery about us as people.
He couldnt create his espionage novels.
I found this a fascinating gesture, gentle yet slightly guarded, self-protective.
MORRIS: I agree.
I remember when he was doing that during the filming, he was driving me crazy.
I thought, Take your hands off your face, OK?
DEADLINE: The title of the film comes from Cornwells memoir,The Pigeon Tunnel.
It relates to a memory of his childhood, when he would accompany his father to Monte Carlo.
His dad and these other men would fire on pigeons that were released from cages on the casinos roof.
The birds would scoot through a tunnel before being shot at.
As a metaphor, what do you think the pigeon tunnel means?
MORRIS: Its more than a metaphor.
It is a metaphor for something, but a metaphor for what?
You could call it a metaphor for life, endlessly doing the same things until we drop dead…
Sometimes even shot out of the sky.
DEADLINE: In some ways, the film is about conviction.
Yet, he becomes very disillusioned about whats going on in Germany.
So, he has this dual role.
Hes this ostensible civil servant, but hes also working as a spy.
But there are all these people who had positions in the Third Reich.
And he says to himself, Didnt we fight a war about this?
Wasnt there this so-called World War II?
And now the guy who was part of defining the Holocaust is second-in-command in the new German Republic.
What is that about?
History is about forgetting, and sometimes to use his language, enforced forgetting.
He wrote down names, identified them as Communist sympathizers.
And I ask him in the film, Do you regret doing that?
Do you regret, I suppose on some level, betraying your fellow students?
And he says, No.
Basically, theyre on the wrong side of history.
Theyre committed to Stalin, and for David, theyre committed to evil.
Theres right and wrong in history, whos good and evil in history.
He was a person of really strong convictions.
He actually believed in queen and country.
Id often say to myself, heres a man far less cynical than I am.
DEADLINE: There is perhaps some overlap between you and Cornwell in your absurdist view of history.
Maybe it was just some absurd accidental detail in history.
I mean, in principle, all mysteries should be solvable if we work hard enough.
But there are often pieces missing or they have been adulterated in some unspeakable way.
Its the spy version of history.
There are people who either are tricking people or are tricked by people.
And by the end of the movie, its something much closer to my way of seeing the world.
I have this very simple argument against conspiracies: just look at the people around.
Its hard enough to agree with a group of people on where to have lunch.
And if anything, history is a madhouse.
Look at whats going on in the world today.
I dont see conspiracies.
I see just garden variety, human insanity.
