“It fascinates me,” Morris said. “I think that Marc did a great job, has made me–if I wasn’t already interested in the story–it’s made me interested all over again.”
Smerling said he first crossed paths with Morris at the Oscars in 2003. “You won the Academy Award and I was nominated,” he told Morris in his adjoining box of a Zoom press call. Morris won for “The Fog of War”; Smerling was nominated for “Capturing the Friedmans” and went on to co-write “The Jinx” for HBO.
As a filmmaker, Smerling says “ I’m doing what I’m doing because of Errol Morris,” whose work he first encountered by mistake as a high school student.
“It was either ‘Halloween,’ or it was something like that that was sold out,” Smerling said. “And I went to the next multiplex store and I saw ‘Thin Blue Line’ and it just kind of set me on this course. It blew me away how amazing the cinematography was, the visual storytelling, the sort of courage it took to make something that incredible. I just thought it changed documentaries.”
“It’s interesting how both ‘A Wilderness of Error’ and ‘The Thin Blue Line’ involve murder,” Morris said. In that 1988 classic, he said, “as I proceeded deeper and deeper into the case, I became more and more convinced of Randall Adams’ innocence and David Harris’s guilt. You don’t know who these characters are, but take my word for it. It was the other way around. Adams was sentenced to death. Harris was exonerated.
“This case is different,” he said. “I’m not left with a feeling of certainty about anything with this case. It’s very interesting, the experience. I assume that Marc has had similar experiences. The experience of working on it, that suddenly you think, ‘Oh, I get it. It was that.’ And then somehow, ‘Wait a second. No, maybe it wasn’t that. Maybe it was this.’
“And there’s a feeling of going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth without any real closure. It’s one of the most disturbing things about this story. Because we all know in our heart of hearts that real cases should have answers. We think hard enough, if we investigate long enough, we should be able to come to some definitive conclusion. And this case maybe hasn’t taught me that there is no conclusion to be arrived at, but it certainly has taught me how difficult it can be to arrive at a conclusion.”