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Errol Morris's mad, mad, mad, mad world >> The director on Fast, Cheap & Out of Control by MATTHEW HAYS
Now Morris has created what is perhaps his most cryptic and unusual film to date, Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. The movie features interviews with four obsessed men: a lion tamer, a topiary gardener, an MIT scientist who designs intricate robots and a man fascinated with hairless mole rats. "Maybe it's a bad idea to listen to yourself too much about what kind of projects you should be making," says the affable Morris. "I made these two high-concept films in a row: The Thin Blue Line and A Brief History of Time. By high concept, I mean in the traditional Hollywood sense, meaning it could be described in a phrase, whether it's innocent man on death row or crippled scientist on death row confronting the universe. Here I had four completely different characters, four characters that have nothing to do with each other, who don't know each other and are obsessed in very different ways. The idea was to take this material and weave it into a crazy tapestry, with unexpected themes and connections emerging. If you go into the movie thinking it's pure chaos, you come out of the movie seeing a rhyme and reason." Though Morris began Fast, Cheap in 1992, he left it for several years to pursue other projects. The film began to take on new meaning when both his mother and stepfather died within a year of each other. An existential dimension was added to the mix: what had been interviews with four very offbeat men soon had questions like 'why are we here?' and 'what does it all mean?' hanging over them. "The central question is: why do we persist in what we do, when it might all be for naught? There is a futile element in all of our lives. But the fact that it might be for naught, that none of this might mean anything, doesn't mean that it isn't valueless, that there isn't something less than noble in persisting." For all the lyrical grief in Fast, Cheap, there is also much eye candy. Cinematographer Robert Richardson (Casino, an Oscar-winner for Natural Born Killers) used a broad range of stocks and brands; Super-8, 16, super-16, 35, Hi-8, black-and-white and colour, as well as nostalgic file footage, all congeal at key points in the film to create an expressionistic dreamscape, reflecting the obsessions of Morris's chosen four subjects. Since The Thin Blue Line, Morris's work has been so steeped in expressionism that he has been heralded as a documentary visionary. But Morris has trouble with the title of documentary filmmaker. "I've had this problem from the very beginning of my career--I tend to think of my films as anti-documentaries. Traditional documentaries try to capture a news story. There is no news story in Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. I don't recommend people go and see it if they want to find out more about topiary gardening or mole rats. It's an excursion into a dreamscape. I like to think that if I'm really lucky and the film is really working, their dreams will become much like our own. They start off as being eccentric and weird, but in the end these coalescing dreams become something of a statement of Everyman. Of our need to project ourselves onto the world, to create a world that has meaning for us where in fact it may have no meaning. "Documentary films have a truly tangled history. They started off as art films. If you think of films like Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera, which was a documentary but very expressionistic in character, one feels the filmmaker very much as a part of the film. Over time this changed, and the idea took over that somehow documentaries were a form of journalism--they should be objective, they should be removed. People have a need to put documentaries in a box and that's created great difficulty. I like to think of Fast, Cheap & Out of Control as a nonfiction movie rather than a documentary. If documentary carries the idea that this is some kind of journalism, than let's get rid of the name altogether." Opens Friday, Nov. 7 at the Cinéma du Parc. See repertory listings for showtimes
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Director Errol Morris has always created movies out of what he calls "highly improbable material." His first documentary, Gates of Heaven (1978), focussed on two pet cemeteries, the people who ran them and the folks whose pets were buried there. This debut drew well-deserved raves; Morris managed to cull fascinating, quirky interviews from unlikely subjects and develop them into a bizarre, highly entertaining whole. In 1988 Morris released his most celebrated film to date, The Thin Blue Line, about a murder case in which the wrong man had been convicted and sat on death row for the crime. Through Morris's investigative filmmaking, he managed to solve the case; TTBL became the first film in history to set a man free and see the real murderer convicted. Morris followed up with A Brief History of Time, about the life and work of genius scientist Stephen Hawking.