Errol Morris Is Fascinated by and Terrified of Steve Bannon: The decorated filmmaker didn't expect the dramatic reaction to his 'toxic' documentary about Trump's former aide-de-camp.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick

ROGER EBERT ONCE called documentary director Errol Morris "as great a filmmaker as Hitchcock or Fellini."

In keeping with that assessment, Morris received an ovation when he debuted American Dharma, his documentary about former Trump adviser Stephen Bannon, at the Venice Film Festival in 2018. But after early reviewers accused the Oscar-winning director of going too easy on the onetime head of the alt-light website Breitbart, Morris--a self-described liberal who says he was shocked to discover people thought he was promoting rather than exposing Bannon's views--found it impossible to get a distribution deal in the United States. It was the first time in decades that the acclaimed director of The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War couldn't get a film into theaters.

In February 2019, Morris tweeted, "Fuck 'em. I will distribute the movie myself." By the end of the year, American Dharma made it to the multiplex.

In November, Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with the 71-year-old filmmaker for a conversation about the censorious early reactions to his new film, why he thinks we're in a golden age of documentary filmmaking, and what he learned--and didn't learn--about Steve Bannon's philosophy.

Reason: Let's start with the title, American Dharma. Steve Bannon comes back to the idea of "dharma" as central to his worldview. What is it and why is it so important to him?

Morris: It's hard for me to talk about Bannon's philosophy, because Bannon's philosophy is a hodgepodge of Catholicism, Hindu philosophy, pop psychology. It's almost like a vomit pad of various unsorted and undifferentiated ideas. I'd made a career of chronicling various kinds of self-deception, of people who imagine themselves one way, but in fact they are wrong.

Here, I have a guy who sees himself in Napoleonic terms. He imagines himself as this world-historical individual who's changing the political landscape and ushering in a new age for the working class under the banner of Trumpism. But underneath all of it is nonsense talk. The populist who goes to Harvard Business School, works for Goldman Sachs, takes money from billionaires, starts [arguing against] pluralism. What is this? To me, as often as not, it comes very close to--what's the technical term?--bullshit.

At a certain point in the movie, Steve Bannon lays out three big things that he says are Bannonism: stopping mass illegal immigration, bringing manufacturing jobs back from Asia, and ending pointless foreign wars. Is that his program, or is Bannonism that plus a million other things?

I suppose you could say that's his program. Does the program really make any sense? Say you want to protect manufacturing jobs for the American working class. Do I think that's a bad thing? No. I think that's a good thing. But do I think that the right way to do it is to build a wall? No. I think that's cretinous. I think that it's intellectually dishonest. I don't think it helps anybody or anything. It's violent. It's mean-spirited. It's angry. It's looking for scapegoats to blame.

At one point, Bannon says something like, "We all know what the problems are. It's just a matter of: Do you have the guts to do what it takes to fix them?" You're essentially saying that he's tapped into a real problem--this idea that the middle class isn't getting a fair shake, that the system is rigged, that large forces are screwing people over. But you disagree about what caused that problem and how to fix it.

Here's how I'm susceptible to these arguments, and I quite honestly am susceptible. I grew up in the '50s. My father died when I was 2 years old. My mother was extremely well-educated, a graduate of Juilliard, getting a doctorate in French literature at Columbia. She had to teach elementary school in order to support a family, which she did. Could you do that today? Could she do it today? The answer is probably not.

Is there greater income inequality now as opposed to then?

Yes.

But are standards of living lower?

Not for me. But for the masses, I don't know. For someone who was in my mother's situation, living today vs. living then, her standard of living would have been much lower. Am I wrong?

Yeah, actually. What is the typical American experience now? Do people have opportunity? Do people...