Errol Morris on Gates of Heaven and Nonfiction Filmmaking

A master of using the camera to draw truth from interview subjects, Errol Morris was unsurprisingly a candid and fascinating interview subject himself in new supplements we made for the Criterion releases of Gates of Heaven/Vernon, Florida and The Thin Blue Line. In this excerpt from a conversation about Gates of Heaven, Morris begins by discussing how he came to make a film about pet cemeteries, before getting deeper into his ideas about documentary aesthetics and his rejection of the notion that there is “a correct way to tell a story” in a nonfiction film.