Errol Morris Is Fascinated by and Terrified of Steve Bannon
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
