Morris is widely regarded as one of the foremost contemporary documentary filmmakers, best known for his work, "The Thin Blue Line" (1988). Morris's signature style is one of creating a cinematic collage; weaving interviews with stock footage, cartoons, or old film clips, using diverse film formats and both color and black-and white images together in such a way that the viewer is able to make a number of connections between them. Morris uses devices of his own creation, first the Interrotron, and most recently, the Megatron, cameras that allow multiple images of one subject to be taken at one time, capturing different angles at once.
Graduated from the Putney School in Vermont.
Name of his production company is Globe Department Store.
Thinks of himself as a "detective director", and he did, indeed, work as a private eye in the early 1980s.
Attended the University of Wisconsin, graduating with a B.A. in history .
Werner Herzog promised that he would eat his shoe if Morris ever completed Gates of Heaven , which he actually did at the movies premiere. Les Blank s short documentary Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe shows the whole story.
In the 2002 Sight & Sound poll, he listed his ten favorite films as: Detour , Theres Always Tomorrow , Make Way for Tomorrow , Un condamn mort sest chapp ou Le vent souffle o il veut ("A Man Escaped), Le crime de Monsieur Lange , Nora inu , La prise de pouvoir par Louis XIV , Human Desire , Ace in the Hole , and Psycho .
Morris has interviewed two former United States Secretaries of Defense for two of his movies: Donald Rumsfeld and Robert McNamara.
When he was growing up.in Long Island, he never cared much for movies and was into "maps, stamp collecting, and trilobites.".
Morris interest in films began at Berkeley when he found himself programming film retrospectives at the Pacific Film Archives. Douglas Sirk became a favorite.
I directed one dramatic feature under really unfortunate circumstances.
[Rumsfeld has an] absolute inability to appreciate irony on any level.
Over the years, I have been put in this very defensive position, as if I,have to really defend many of the techniques that were used in,The Thin Blue Line (1988) . reenactments being one of them.
But one of the amazing things about documentary is that you can remake it every time you make one. There is no rule about how a documentary film has to be made. .
