On October 31, 2005, Errol Morris, Academy Award–winning director of The Fog of War, interviewed Adam Curtis, director of The Power of Nightmares, the documentary film which asks the question “Did Johnny Mercer bring down the World Trade Center?” Originally broadcast on the BBC, a film version was shown at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, where it was widely praised. Drawing extensively on archival footage from the BBC Library, the film has encountered difficulties in finding distribution in the U.S.

Morris and Curtis discuss conspiracy theories, unintended consequences, and notional moles.

I. ONE MAINE

ERROL MORRIS: The Power of Nightmares uses a substantial quantity of archival material and stock footage. I call it reprocessed media. Perhaps a better expression would be repurposed media. It’s different from the traditional use of found footage in news documentaries. Here stock footage becomes expressionistic, never literal—an excursion into a dream—or, if you prefer, nightmare. I tried at various times in the last six months to find out why The Power of Nightmares is not being shown in the United States. The archival material from the BBC library has been cleared for use in the U.K. but not worldwide.

ADAM CURTIS: It’s not physical censorship, although none of the TV networks want to show it. Something I always wanted to ask you, was [Robert] McNamara happy with the way you cut him [in The Fog of War]?

EM: No, he was not happy. But I’m not sure that anything would’ve made him happy. He never said this to me directly, but he did tell Craig, his son, that he liked the movie.

AC: I thought you treated him just fine. You were ambiguous. It was difficult to know what you thought about him.

EM: I still don’t know what I think. The New York Times, today on the front page, had an article about new evidence concerning incidents in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964.The incidents, which are discussed in The Fog of War, have been disputed for over forty years. There are those that believe that they were part of a conspiracy to escalate the Vietnam War. Here’s a question: are they right? And, in an even more general sense, is history primarily a history of conspiracy? Or is it just a series of blunders, one after the other? Confusions, self-deceptions, idiocies of one kind or another?

AC: It’s the latter. Where people do set out to have conspiracies, they don’t ever end up like they’re supposed to. History is a series of unintended consequences resulting from confused actions, some of which are committed by people who may think...