In his new film The Pigeon Tunnel (in cinemas and on Apple TV globally from October 20th), renowned documentary maker Errol Morris explores the life and work of writer John Le Carré, author of such classic espionage novels as The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People.
The film is based around lengthy and revealing interviews conducted by Morris with Le Carré (whose real name was David Cornwell) in the autumn of 2019. It is also partially inspired by Le Carré’s autobiography The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life. The author died in December 2020.
Morris’s documentary opens with footage of pigeons in a tunnel being released for wealthy guests at a shooting range in a sporting club in Monte Carlo to shoot at. Le Carré was obsessed by this image which came from his teenage years when his ne’er do well father Ronnie took him on a gambling trip to the Riviera.
“I compare a lot of David’s parables to Kafka. What does The Penal Colony mean or A Hunger Artist or Before The Law?” Morris asks, citing works by the early 20th Century Czech writer. “They [Le Carré’s stories] are perverse, they’re funny, they are extremely dark…and it is not altogether clear what they mean,” Morris says of the writer (whom he calls ‘David’ rather than ‘John’) and his enigmatic references to birds. “Who are the pigeons? Are the pigeons us? Who are the shooters?”
Nonetheless, what is clear is that the pigeons are caught in repetitive, unending activity. They fly out from their coops. They’re shot at. If they’re not killed or winged, they end up back in the same coops and the process begins all over again.
By coincidence, Morris’s film is coming out shortly after the publication of Adam Sisman’s new book, The Secret Life Of John Carré, which reveals that the author was a relentless womaniser with an extremely complicated and secretive love life. Morris doesn’t want to get into such matters. “I am not Masters and Johnson,” he protests angrily at the idea that he should delve into his subject’s sexual career as well his espionage novels.
The main focus of the film is, instead, on Le Carré’s fraught relationship with his father Ronnie, who was a bit of a lovable rogue, even if he did sponge relentlessly off his son.
“Of course, I know him second, third-hand from David’s books, both fiction and non-fiction. There is one thing that does puzzle me which is his outrage when Ronnie wanted money from him near the end of Ronnie’s life. I never had a father. My father died when I was two years old. I have no memory of him. I wish I did but I don’t. I thought David was a little harsh. So Ronnie wanted money. Give him money! You have tons and tons and tons of money. Why not give him something? Obviously, David felt keenly abused by him, manipulated, tricked by him. What went on in David’s childhood between Ronnie and himself, I can only surmise.”
It’s now four years since Morris sat down with Le Carré. “This took quite a long time, too long in my estimation. No-one could agree on what the project was,” the director recalls of the length of time it has taken to complete what started as a five-part series before mutating into a film. Covid interrupted progress as did Le Carré’s unexpected death. “He fell in the bathroom, hit his head, got a mild concussion, went to the hospital, caught pneumonia and was dead in a couple of days,” Morris remembers the sequence of events. “It was very sad. I fully expected I would have the opportunity to interview him again but of course I didn’t.”
Morris adds that he “could have gone on forever with this guy.”
That said, there were tensions behind the scenes. By his own admission, the director “gets his back up pretty easily.” He doesn’t like being told what questions to ask or brook interference from his patrons. There was also debate over his use of dramatic re-enactments. As in The Thin Blue Line, he felt these were crucial and fought to persuade his backers to let him do them.
Asked to divulge the secret of his interviewing technique, Morris’s response is blunt. “Shut the fuck up!” he says. Over the last 50 years, he has come face to face with a huge range of subjects, everybody from serial killer Ed Gein to Donald Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon; from Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defence during the Vietnam War, to wrongfully convicted murder suspect Randall Dale Adams. Morris has the knack of getting them to talk very, very frankly, often about subject matter which they normally try to keep private.
“Years ago, before I became a filmmaker, actually it was when I started interviewing people in connection with Ed Gein in Wisconsin in the 70s, I would knock on doors and come into people’s houses,” Morris remembers. He had a Sony cassette recorder. He would go in with the tape recorder already running and put it down on the table so there was no hint of subterfuge. His goal was to record the whole side of a cassette without his voice intruding at all. “I called it the ‘shut the fuck up school of interviewing.’” He was there as the listener. He wasn’t interested in his own voice but wanted his subject to do all the talking.
Morris’s plans for a documentary about Gein never came off but he is now planning a dramatic feature, Digging Up The Past, based on the memories of the killer. “I just finished my script and I think I have the financing…”
When Morris started making documentaries, he carried on in similar vein. He was shooting early works like Gates Of Heaven (1978), Vernon Florida (1981) and his early classic The Thin Blue Line (1988) on film. “I used to call myself the 11-minute psychiatrist because whether it was 16mm or 35mm, on one mag, you had 11 minutes and four or five seconds…and then you had to change mags, reload. Whatever you were going to get, you were going to get it in these 11-minute chunks.”
Morris still believes in the same style of long, unobtrusive interviewing. “I used to say that if you shut up and saying nothing, within two three minutes people will show you how crazy they really are.”
In the case of Ed Gein, who was a mass murderer, the craziness was already established. Gein was in a hospital for the insane when Morris met him. “I liked him,” Morris remembers of Gein. “I didn’t say he wasn’t crazy! He was as crazy as a loon.”
The Thin Blue Line is reckoned by many critics to be a masterpiece (as are many of the director’s other features), but it was one of the punishing ironies of the film that Morris ended up being sued by Randall Dale Adams, the man he rescued from a life sentence in prison for murder. He investigated the case for close to three years, turning up new evidence which got Adams off, but fell out with one of Adams’s lawyers.
“It was one of the most surreal, horrible things in my life. I don’t even know how to talk about it,” Morris says of the legal controversy surrounding one of his greatest films. “I don’t have that thick a skin. It was hurtful and depressing. I had to jump through hoops, hire attorneys, defend myself against this lawsuit.”
Ask Morris, however, about which of his works he values most highly and he speaks with as much enthusiasm about his commercials, for beer and computer brands, as about the documentaries. Levi’s, Apple and Miller Brewing are among the clients he was worked for.
“I did over 1000 commercials. Some I was a hired hand, some I had enormous creative input and control [over],” the director reflects on a major part of his career which still sits below the radar. “I kept getting re-hired to do more and more stuff…”
Morris adds that his Miller High Life commercials are “some of the best stuff I’ll ever do.” Press him as to why they’re so special and he roars back: “you have to watch them!”
