The truth is in there

When we realize everyone might be lying, most of us just give up. For Errol Morris, that’s just the beginning.

June 12, 2011|By Leon Neyfakh

IT USED TO BE that Errol Morris would come into his office in Inman Square every morning knowing more or less what he and his staff were going to do that day. The scheme back then was simple: Morris’s job was to make documentary films, and he worked on them one at a time.

Things have been different at the office lately. At the age of 63, and with an Academy Award in his pocket for “The Fog of War,” America’s most obsessive nonfiction filmmaker could be forgiven for slowing down and enjoying something that approaches fame. Instead, he has found himself at a peak of activity, with a new documentary coming out next month, a feature film in the works, and a TV series in mind. And most notably — after 40 long years of writer’s block — Morris has suddenly become a prolific writer, with no fewer than three books under contract with publishers and a series of long investigative essays that appear regularly on the website of The New York Times.

“I’m having this Indian summer thing,” the longtime Cambridge resident said recently, sitting in his office after an intense editing session with two of his researchers, while his two French bulldogs snorted around at his feet. “I’m suddenly really productive, in a different way than before.”

Over the past three decades, Morris has established himself as a master of the ironic documentary: He will train his camera on someone strange, like an eccentric turkey hunter from Florida, or someone important, like former defense secretary Robert S. McNamara, and get them to talk until they reveal not only who they are, but also the upside-down way in which they see their place in the world. Often the results are funny, so much so that Morris occasionally gets compared to “Waiting For Guffman” director Christopher Guest. Though in the case of his breakout film, “The Thin Blue Line,” Morris’s work also led to the exoneration of an innocent man on death row who’d been wrongly convicted of murder.

In his writing, a seemingly different side of Morris is now on display. Since 2007, he has been writing a blog for The New York Times, but to call

it a blog doesn’t quite capture what he’s doing: Each essay takes the form of a multipart investigation, extensively footnoted and painstakingly researched. In one, he tries to answer the question of whether Walker Evans manipulated a photograph he took during the Great Depression; in another, scheduled to go up next week, he explores the possibility that his late brother, Noel, invented e-mail while working at MIT in the 1960s.