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Exclusively from Chicagofilm.com, watch the University of Chicago lecture by Errol Morris.
Errol Morris Lecture
Recorded: December 3, 2003
Best viewed with Quicktime
6.1+.
(Quicktime Progressive Download)
Running Time is 36:00 Minutes
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(Continued from Page Two)
Are there any commercials you wouldn't do?
I suppose if I thought that the company was bad enough I wouldn’t do it. I remember I was offered – I ended up not doing it and I’m not sure why – but we talked about doing some commercials for the military. And I asked myself is my problem with the military or is my problem with the commander in chief, with how the military is being used? Do I think it's a terrible thing that we have an Army or a Navy or a Marine Corps? I don't. But I would like the president to be replaced with someone I like a little more.
Who’s that?
I don’t care, just as long as he beats Bush.
You mentioned in your lecture last night at the University of Chicago that you had actually been an anti-war activist in your days at Madison. Is “Fog of War” a form of activism?
I think it is. I don’t think it was intended as such, but anything that I can do to help assure that Bush is not re-elected will make me very happy.
You used HD to film “Fog of War” – what did you think of the format?
I like HD. Particularly in combination with 35, I think it’s interesting. But everything is changing so rapidly. I shoot almost entirely in 35 on my commercials. My cameraman Peter Donahue and I figured out that we had shot something like a million feet of 35 last year and probably some significant fraction of a million feet this year. So I’m still a film guy, but for interviews, I kept toying with different ways of doing it.
There's a camera that has really almost passed out of existence, a format if you like, called Techniscope, which was used for "American Graffiti.” When you shoot a half frame of 35 it has a ratio of its length to its height of 2.66 to 1 -- much closer to scope. One thing I noticed about it is that of course since it's only half a frame in height, a thousand feet of 35 film, which lasts eleven minutes under normal circumstances, would last 22 minutes in Techniscope and I'd be left with a scope frame and I thought, this would be worth trying. It allows me to have longer takes.
My big complaint with video used to be that it was running at 30 and they needed to find something running at 24. They dealt with that with 24 frame high-def. and the next problem is the size of the chip, because the chip is usually about the size of somewhere between a Super 8 and a sixteen millimeter frame of film.
And one thing you know about photography is that with a pinhole camera you have an infinite depth of field. As the image gets bigger and bigger, the depth of field starts to drop. And there was a time in Hollywood where people were interested in enormous depth of field. Everything would be held in focus – “Citizen Kane” is often given as that example. Gregg Toland in Citizen Kane.
I like all of the above. I like the situations where you can control the depth of field and if you want, you can have less depth of field.
When you’re doing a portrait, for example, it’s very very beautiful when the eyes are in focus and the tip of the nose is out of focus, the ears are out of focus, it’s a very thin plain of focus. There’s a whole school of photography based on shooting with ultra-fast lenses wide-open with very, very little depth of field, which can be really extraordinarily beautiful.
Not to say that it has to be a. or b., but in 35 one has the option of controlling those kinds of things and there are many many ways to control it. In Hi-Def, with video, there’s really not the same way to control it, because the chip size is too small. So once they start building a 24 frame camera that has a chip the size of a 35 frame, then….
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001: Errol Morris
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