Werner Herzog (real name: Werner H. Stipetic) was born in Munich on September 5, 1942. He grew up in a remote mountain village in Bavaria and never saw any films, television, or telephones as a child. He started traveling on foot from the age of fourteen. He made his first phone call at the age of seventeen. During high school he worked the night shift as a welder in a steel factory to produce his first films, and made his first film in 1961 at the age of nineteen. Since then he has produced, written, and directed more than forty films, published more than a dozen books of prose, and directed as many operas.

Since the premiere of Errol Morris’s groundbreaking 1978 film, Gates of Heaven, Morris has indelibly altered our perception of the nonfiction film, presenting to audiences the mundane, bizarre, and historic with his own distinctive élan. His films include Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (1999), Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997), The Thin Blue Line (1988), and Vernon, Florida (1981). Standard Operating Procedure (2008) is Morris’s eighth feature-length documentary film. His preceding film, The Fog of War, received the 2003 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. In addition to his current feature documentary, Errol Morris has coauthored, with Philip Gourevitch, a book on Abu Ghraib, also titled Standard Operating Procedure. Penguin Press will publish that book in April 2008.

This conversation took place at Brandeis University in the fall of 2007, and was moderated by Alice Arshalooys Kelikian.

I. VERITÉ

WERNER HERZOG: Walking out of one of your films, I always had the feeling—the sense that I’ve seen a movie, that I’ve seen something equivalent to a feature film. That’s very much the feeling of the feature film Vernon, Florida or even the film with McNamara—The Fog of War. Even there I have the feeling I’ve seen a feature, a narrative feature film with an inventive narrative structure and with a sort of ambience created that you only normally create in a feature film, in an inventive, fictionalized film.

The new film that I saw, Standard Operating Procedure, feels as if you had completely invented characters, and yet they are not. We know the photos, and we know the events and we know the dramas behind it. And yet I always walk out feeling that I have seen a feature film, a fiction film.

ERROL MORRIS: Yeah. The intention is to put the audience in some kind of odd reality. [To moderator] Werner certainly shares this....