by MATTHEW HAYS

Errol Morris clearly likes being in Canada. He said as much last September, when his latest film, The Fog of War, had its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. "It's great to be in a country that isn't at war," he told a packed house, to thunderous applause.

He was referring, of course, to U.S. President George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, a war that some have lauded as a "liberation" but others have suggested could plunge Iraq into a lengthy and bloody civil war. What's not so surprising is that Morris doesn't particularly like Bush. What is surprising is The Fog of War, a film based on a lengthy interview with Robert McNamara, a man who played a crucial role as a military advisor in both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. As such, McNamara had a ringside seat during some of the stormiest moments in 20th-century history, including the Cuban Missile Crisis and the beginnings of America's involvement in Vietnam. What's shockingly surreal about the film is that it doesn't feel even slightly dated; in fact, it's an incredibly germane film, given the current state of world affairs.

The Fog of War is another great achievement for Morris, who has built up a stunning oeuvre of surprising and intriguing nonfiction films, most of which can be seen at the Cinéma du Parc, which is currently screening a retrospective of his work. Morris sat down at the Toronto Festival to talk about The Fog of War, which two weeks ago won the Oscar for Best Documentary.

Mirror: When you opened the film last night, you said how great it was to be in a country that's not at war. Obviously, as I watched it I couldn't help but think of the current administration running the White House.

Errol Morris: It wasn't the plan originally. I made the film because I wanted to talk to Robert McNamara. But as it turned out, it became more and more and more relevant as we went on. It's impossible not to think about what's happening now, while the film is ostensibly about events that happened 40, 50, 60 years ago. This is one of the depressing things about the movie: it could be about what's happening now. It's endlessly relevant. Many people who have seen the movie during the editing process said, "Why isn't this movie out now?" They felt it was so important that it be seen right away, what with the impending war in Iraq.

Rethinking McNamara

M: How was working with someone like McNamara during the filmmaking process?

EM: I've had this ongoing discussion with Robert McNamara about the lessons I outline in the film. And he says, "Well, they're not my lessons." And I argue back, "Well, they are extracted from what you said, it's not like I made them up out of whole cloth." And he said, "Well, if I were to choose the 11 lessons it wouldn't be those 11 lessons exactly." Fair enough. I've made it clearer since that they weren't McNamara's lessons specifically, but rather gleaned from his work. A key difference between him and me is that he's far more of an optimist than I am. He still believes that war can be stopped or at very least contained. He believes the 21st century doesn't have to be a repeat of the 20th.

M: And you're not so optimistic?

EM: I would say we're not off to a great start. In fact, we're off to a really bad start. This whole human need to endlessly see things between black and white, good and evil, friend and foe. We seem to have slipped back into McNamara's first memory. World War I, the conflict Woodrow Wilson called the War to End All Wars. That's what he called it, that's what he used to sell the war to the American people. Far from it being a preventative war, and that's the way they sold it, it inaugurated a century of the most unspeakable violence in human history. It reminds me that there's no such thing as preventative war. War doesn't prevent war, it creates it. We're doing the same damn thing all over again. Go figure.

M: You are always drawn to these ambiguous characters. Where would you place McNamara, when you look back at the historical record?

EM: I would definitely see him as a good man. Here's a quintessential American, so much a part of this American meritocracy. There was this belief that the best and the brightest could come together to make the world a better place. And yet he failed. His ideals were compromised. He himself was compromised, in ways that are really sad and interesting. I sometimes ask people the question: what do you do when you serve a bellicose president who wants to go to war? What do you do? The version of McNamara that people are familiar with is McNamara the number cruncher who was the chief architect of the conflict in Vietnam. A hawk, in other words, who changed his tune when it was too late and became a dove. Well, that's not the story that emerges from those White House tapes. It may be an even worse story, but it's not the same one. It's a story about a man who believed that we should not be in Vietnam, a man who advised Kennedy to remove our advisors from Vietnam. Kennedy was assassinated, of course, and there he is listening to Johnson chastise him on the phone.

Frankenheimer's foul-up

EM: Recently, HBO did this movie Path to War, Frankenheimer's last film. McNamara's played by Alec Baldwin. It's the same thing, with McNamara played as a hawk, while Johnson is confused and vacillatory and indecisive. That's not the story that comes from the tapes. The tapes indicate that McNamara was someone who realized the conflict should be contained, not escalated, and a very gung-ho Johnson, who says to McNamara, explicitly, "I sat and listened silently as you and JFK discussed removing the advisors from Vietnam. I did not agree. How the hell are we to win a war by pulling advisors out?" This is not an indecisive president. This was clearly a president who wanted war - he may not want it, but he sees no way out. McNamara had to change his views to accommodate the president he serves. Which is another story with its own set of problems - but a very interesting one.

M: Another filmmaker who's done a lot for the genre of nonfiction filmmaking is Michael Moore, whose Bowling for Columbine has raked in millions and won an Oscar. What do you think of his approach?

EM: People ask me about documentary, and I always like to point out that documentary is so heterogeneous, it's so diverse in character, there's almost as many documentary filmmakers as there are documentaries. Bowling for Columbine, oddly enough, I did not see until this year. There were a lot of interesting things in it. There were also a lot of things I saw that annoyed me, but that's true of almost everything I see. There were many things I thought were interesting, in particular the section of the movie where they talk about the nature of the news media in the U.S. and the creation of a climate of fear. I thought that was very, very interesting.

M: And the annoying parts?

EM: Are you going to print this? I don't want to use The Fog of War as an occasion to discuss various documentary filmmakers.

M: I think it's fair to ask you these questions. Your film and Michael's film both question war. You're two of the most prominent American documentary filmmakers working today.

EM: When he's in his holier-than-thou mode, I find it insufferable.

The Errol Morris Retrospective continues at the Cinéma du Parc, where The Fog of War opens Friday, March 26

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