Errol Morris has just sat down with a reporter when his wife calls.
“I’m being deposed,” Morris says, smiling, into his phone. “I hope that it’s going to turn into a criminal investigation, but I believe it’s just an interview.”
Morris, the veteran documentarian of “The Thin Blue Line,”“The Fog of War” and “The Unknown Known,” knows a thing or two about interviews. He famously invented a contraption called “The Interrotron” to capture face-to-face eye contact on camera.
In his latest film, “The Pigeon Tunnel,” Morris sits down with the celebrated spy novelist John le Carré, the enigmatic author of “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” and “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.” The interviews were conducted shortly before the author’s death in 2020 at the age of 89.
Their exchange probes the life and work of le Carré, whose real name was David Cornwell, and who as a former British intelligent agent was, himself, expert in conducting interrogations. The film, which opens Friday in select theaters and on Apple TV+, is based on le Carré’s 2016 memoir of the same name. It’s also an investigation into the murky depths of human nature and of history, where fact and fiction often blur.
The conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
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AP: Some of the first interviews you ever conducted were with the serial killer Ed Gein, whose murders inspired Robert Bloch’s novel “Psycho” and Alfred Hitchcock’s film. I don’t know if you consider that the beginning…
