Errol Morris is not one for adversarial interviews. Whether he’s talking to alleged murderers or mourning pet owners, defense secretaries or political svengalis — the documentarian has no interest in moving deftly through a list of questions until he gets to some satisfying gotcha. He’d rather just talk it out, see where things go.
That’s not to say he isn’t up for some sparring, at least when he’s the one being interviewed. When we meet in a New York City hotel room-turned-press junket base camp earlier this month he’s avuncular and thoughtful, if not occasionally brusque as we discuss The Pigeon Tunnel, his new film about the acclaimed spy novelist John le Carré (loosely based on le Carré’s 2016 memoir of the same name). In several instances, Morris seemed to do what he always likes his own interview subjects to do — drive the conversation where he wanted. At one point, unprompted, he brought up the very negative reaction to his 2018 doc with Steve Bannon, American Dharma (“I still think it’s one of my very best films”). At another point, Morris ignored a question about possible connections between his work as a private detective and the work of spies to air some grievances about adversarial interviews, including one he’d just had with a certain paper of record. But to take the Morris-ian view, maybe the discursions are the most revealing.
As for The Pigeon Tunnel, it contains one of the last interviews le Carré conducted before his death in 2020, and, in that way, carries the air of a confessional — kinda. Le Carré speaks frankly about his troubled childhood, relationship with his conman father, Ronnie, and the void left by his absent mother, Olive. The theme of betrayal takes root there, and le Carré follows it to the infamous Russian mole in British intelligence, Kim Philby, as well as the spying le Carré did on his own communist classmates at Oxford. But le Carré stops far short of broaching the subject of his numerous extramarital affairs. Morris, for his part, isn’t totally convinced they’re relevant, and he plausibly insists he wasn’t aware of them at the time anyway (indeed, most details have emerged posthumously, with le Carré’s biographer publishing a new book next week containing all he couldn’t spill in the first 2015 tome).
Morris came away from The Pigeon Tunnel most interested in the questions le Carré raises about history — who makes it and how is it made? The filmmaker seems to agree with le Carré’s theory that it’s largely ad hoc, made day-to-day, if not hour-to-hour, with no great plan or plot in mind. This question of history-as-chaos versus history-as-conspiracy, manifests in two stories le Carré includes in The Pigeon Tunnel, and which Morris dramatizes in his film. The first involves the titular pigeon tunnel — a memory le Carré shares of an old casino where pigeons were kept on a roof, collected, and released into a tunnel to emerge as firing practice targets on the other side (the survivors returned to the roof, where they would eventually be rounded up again). The second parable is about breaking open the most protected safe in British intelligence headquarters, where all the biggest secrets are supposedly kept, only to find a pair of pants that belonged to Rudolf Hess, the Nazi leader who flew to Scotland in 1941 thinking he could convince the British to exit World War II (he was immediately arrested upon landing).
John le Carré and Errol Morris of ‘The Pigeon Tunnel.’
Des Willie/Apple TV+
“I love the pigeon tunnel because that’s more like spies — string-pullers, dupes. Are we the pigeons?” Morris says. “Are we all involved in some kind of inexorable Sisyphean dance? Or, the final scene with Hess: At the bottom of every historical inquiry, are we left with just a muddle, an absurdity?”
To you, is he John le Carré or David Cornwell?
David Cornwell.
Why is that?
One of the questions I could have asked, and didn’t — I always feel I could have done more — is apropos: Why the need for a pseudonym? Why did you feel you had to disguise yourself, change your name? Even though, over the years, it became fairly well known that John le Carré was David Cornwell? It’s interesting.
Do you think he saw a distinction between the two?
This is something I can’t answer. He would have to answer. But I think all of us see ourselves as multiple personalities. Who we are, what we do is almost always contextual to the people we’re around and what we’re doing. And certainly, he’s not the only person who’s changed his name and embarked on a writing career.
You’ve said your theory of art is to set up arbitrary rules and stick to them. What were they for The Pigeon Tunnel?
One arbitrary rule — and I don’t know how much longer I want to continue doing this — when I made Fog of War, the traditional way you would make a movie like that is to interview 10 people about Robert S. McNamara and put them all in the movie. But there’s a big difference between a profile about how someone sees themselves and how others see them. It’s a really different universe, a different cosmology, different metaphysics. And with Robert McNamara, I decided, one man, one movie, and I did not interview anybody else. Nor did I want to. So that’s a rule. And I followed it through with other films about Donald Rumsfeld, about Steven Bannon — which I still think is one of my very best films and which fell into the rut of cancel culture as if somehow I had befriended him which is ridiculous.
When that movie came out, do you think there was a lack of interest in letting someone like him essentially hang himself?
Not even hang himself, but reveal something about… This question of history-as-chaos versus history-as-conspiracy, and how people with very strong fascist impulses — we can include fascists themselves — see history as a kind of machine. And one of the strongest things in The Pigeon Tunnel, for me, are my discussions with David about history, [and] when we come to this agreement that history is chaos. It isn’t string-pullers and dupes. It’s happenstance.
But you’ve also interviewed figures who would be considered string-pullers, like McNamara, Bannon, and Rumsfeld. What makes you give more credence to history-as-chaos, rather than something made by people in a room?
It’s probably a mix of both, but I actually do believe in history-as-chaos. It may not have rhyme or reason. It may not even rhyme, according to the misattributed quote to Mark Twain. I often used to say I don’t believe in conspiracy theories, because people are at such cross-purposes with each other — how could they ever effectively conspire to do anything? Just take the common experience we all have today, where the whole world is besieged by endless conspiracy theories about everything. And yet, we see the news on a day-to-day level, and it’s totally insane, random, chaotic. The fact that there wasn’t a government shutdown could have gone some other way very easily.
The Pigeon Tunnel opens with le Carré asking you who you are, and you replying that you’re not sure you have an answer. Did you by the end of the film?
No! No, I don’t! I don’t know who I am.
Do you think he had an idea of who you were?
You’d have to ask him and you can’t. People ask me, “What is he thinking?” Well, I don’t really know what he’s thinking. I did the movie to explore with him some of his ideas and beliefs. But it’s an insane question to ask anybody. And I like it because it’s insane. “Who are you?” What do you mean, “Who am I?” I don’t know who I am! Who are you?
I’m curious about your work as a private detective: It’s not one-to-one, but there are some similarities between detectives and spies. When you spoke with le Carré about his own intelligence work, did anything resonate with your time as a detective?
Well, I got really annoyed at the person interviewing me for The New York Times, because they insisted on seeing this interview [with le Carré] as adversarial. And I never saw it as adversarial. I never see any interview as adversarial. I don’t even believe in adversarial interviews. I’ve certainly heard enough of them over the years, but I don’t believe it’s a way of learning anything. It’s a way of showing how smart you are.
I feel like that was a problem with the Steve Bannon movie — people wanted an adversarial interview.
They did. Of course they did. People want adversarial interviews — too bad, go elsewhere. My whole shtick, such as it is, from the very beginning has been the shut-the-fuck-up school: to listen, let other people talk, draw out an interview. The Thin Blue Line wasn’t cracked by adversarial interviews. It was cracked by a lot of very hard research and interviews where I allowed people to reveal much about themselves. Emily Miller, when she comes in and says, “Everywhere I go there are murderers” — there’s not a question you ask for that. You don’t ask someone, “Are there murders everywhere you go?” No! You shut the fuck up and listen! And eventually she revealed crucial pieces of information that led to overturning Randall Adams’ conviction for capital murder. Not adversarial.
I love The Pigeon Tunnel. I loved talking to David. David had a lot to say about a lot of things. Did I ask him about his betraying his Oxford classmates who were members of the Communist Party? No, that was volunteered, and some of the most interesting material in the film was volunteered. Another strange thing that’s happened — and it’s all context — in the years following David’s death, various people have published books about David Cornwall and his mistresses. Was I interested in that? No. Have I read any of the books? No. Do I want to read them? Not really. You can’t be interested in everything. I’m not Masters and Johnson… Do I believe that David was withholding stuff? Of course he was. He’d be an idiot if he wasn’t.
As much as I hate Trump, as repulsive as I find Trump, as much as I believe that he’s created impossible damage in our country, he didn’t take us into a war that was totally unnecessary, which killed God knows how many hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people.
I did want to ask you about his affairs. Were you aware of them at the time you were interviewing him?
Tell me, why should I be interested in his affairs?
Well, there are echoes with how he saw his father behaving and all his concerns about betrayal. He made his most famous character George Smiley a cuckold, which feels extremely telling. And he apparently wrote the women he was having affairs with into his books.
These are all fair and good points. I didn’t do it.
Did you know?
I didn’t know. I wasn’t thinking in those terms. You could say that’s a failure on my part. Maybe it is. I can’t tell you… He does have that line where he says he’s not going to talk about his sex life. But again, it’s based on a faulty premise, I believe. Maybe I’m just being defensive, you can tell me. The faulty premise that my job is just excavating a street. The things I think about are his views of history, truth, how he saw himself. I tried to keep it as close to The Pigeon Tunnel [the book], that was the bedrock of making the movie. Is there anything about his affairs — not that this is a good excuse, I don’t want it to seem as an excuse — but there is really nothing about his affairs in that book. There’s a lot of stuff about [his parents] Ronnie and Olive. But you could’ve made 10 movies from that book and still not even come close to the issues of marital infidelity. But what you’re saying is interesting — it’s legitimate grist for the biographical mill. I just went in a different direction. I didn’t ask [Stephen] Hawking about his infidelities [for A Brief History of Time]. The correct answer to that isn’t even, “You can’t do everything.” Of course you can’t. But I’m interested in certain things. I never asked [suspected serial killer] Ed Gein if he had sex with people from the grave — the ultimate infidelity. [Ed. note: Morris interviewed Gein, but never completed his film about him.]
One great thing about le Carré’s work is the way he gets at the moral and political futility of the Cold War, which is why I was struck by these moments where he expresses his disdain for Kim Philby and defends spying on his communist classmates. There’s a patriotism underpinning it that I don’t really associate with him. What’d you make of that?
One thing was absolutely clear — and a surprise, in a way — that there isn’t a nihilism [with le Carré]. There’s an element of chaos, an element of despair. But David believes in objective truth. David believes in right and wrong, in good and evil. And I asked him: Didn’t you feel bad about betraying these people? “No! They were in love with Stalin, how could that be? You can’t like someone that repulsive, that evil.” Or his invitation in Moscow to meet Philby: “No! I won’t have dinner with the Queen’s representative one night, and the Queen’s traitor the next.” That’s very powerful stuff. He’s Kantian, ultimately.
John le Carré in ‘The Pigeon Tunnel.’
Des Willie/Apple TV+
And yet he was aware of all the terrible things his own country and government were up to during the same time. I’m not sure what to make of it. I guess he loved his institutions to an extent, or he wanted to believe in them.
I think that comes closer to the truth. People want to believe in something. Even me. Although I look at the mess this country is in at the moment, I’m not sure what any of it means. Do I still believe in America? I kind of do, because I’m not sure what the alternatives are. But it’s chaos out there. I was coming back from the Telluride Film Festival and the guy sitting in front of me turned around and said how much he liked The Pigeon Tunnel. So we were talking, and he asked me, “Who do you think was the worst president? Trump or George W. Bush?” I said, “Well, give me a second” — but it really didn’t take more than a second. I said George W. Bush. As much as I hate Trump, as repulsive as I find Trump, as much as I believe that he’s created impossible damage in our country, he didn’t take us into a war that was totally unnecessary, which killed God knows how many hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people. If I liked Robert McNamara, I did not care for Donald Rumsfeld.
I wanted to end on this idea of the “inmost room.”
It’s the one idea not from The Pigeon Tunnel. It comes from a different novel, The Secret Pilgrim, and I love that scene.
Le Carré says his own inmost room is bare after you tell him you read that passage in an existential way. I’m curious what you make of that assessment, especially considering he was keeping stuff from you?
I’m not sure. Is it a flip answer on his part? The example I always give is the end of Peer Gynt, where Peer Gynt is peeling an onion and he’s trying to answer the question, “What is man? Who is man?” And he peels away a layer of the onion and he says, “Well, he’s like this.” And then he peels away another layer, “No, he’s like that.” And at the end, there are just piles of onion shards at his feet and he’s left with really basically nothing. Maybe it’s a 20th century trope of some kind — there is nothing there. And like almost all parables, or the Kafka-like parables that open and close The Pigeon Tunnel, what do they mean? Well, they mean a lot of stuff and it’s endlessly suggestive and ambiguous and perverse. You’re left with a feeling of overwhelming perversity, of a kind of meretricious, insane God out there playing games.
Looking at the inmost room in a political or historical context, there are echoes of the Wormwood finale with the “vault within a vault within a vault.” Like, we all kind of know what happened to Frank Olson, even if we technically don’t. It does feel like it’s just a pair of pants. Does it really matter?
It certainly matters to Eric Olson — and it still matters! I still have calls from him. But things don’t always have to neatly resolve for me. Wormwood doesn’t neatly resolve — there’s a kind of feeling of hopelessness and despair at the end. I wondered about the end of The Pigeon Tunnel. Maybe it’s pretty clear that I’m inclined to despair. Instead of ending with Hess, I end with this speech about being an artist. And in the dailies, [le Carré] asks me whether I think he’s an artist. I took that out. Because I say, “Yes, you’re an artist.” I felt embarrassed. I mean, who the fuck am I to say, “Yes, David, you’re an artist. You’re a great writer.” Whatever you’re supposed to say in an instance like that, I wanted him to say it. I felt that it was powerful. And because I actually think at the heart of it all, it is how he sees himself. If this is an exploration of how he sees himself, he sees himself as a person who writes books and is completely committed to that. Committed to his art, his artistry. So it is a very powerful ending to, “Who are you?”