Errol Morris

Errol Mark Morris, born February 5, 1948, in Hewlett, New York, is an American film director who earned a BA in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is known for documentaries that examine the epistemology of their subjects, combining narrative filmmaking techniques with documentary work to probe both factual events and the reliability of representing truth. His most celebrated film, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, released in 2003, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. His 1988 film The Thin Blue Line ranked fifth on a Sight and Sound poll of the greatest documentaries ever made and helped exonerate a wrongly convicted man, and his 1997 film Fast, Cheap and Out of Control wove together the stories of an animal trainer, topiary gardener, robot scientist, and naked mole-rat specialist. Morris invented the Interrotron, a camera device allowing an interview subject to maintain eye contact with the interviewer while looking directly at the camera lens. He has been active in filmmaking since 1978 and received MacArthur and Guggenheim Fellowships in 1989.