[For the AppleTV+ production “The Pigeon Tunnel,” documentary
filmmaker Errol Morris again captured elusive quarry by recording four
days of interviews with John le Carré (neé David Cornwell) in fall
2019; they proved to be the acclaimed author’s last]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

ERROL MORRIS TELLS US ABOUT FINDING AN ‘EXQUISITE POET OF SELF
LOATHING’ IN JOHN LE CARRÉ  
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Anne Thompson

IndieWire
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_ For the AppleTV+ production “The Pigeon Tunnel,” documentary
filmmaker Errol Morris again captured elusive quarry by recording four
days of interviews with John le Carré (neé David Cornwell) in fall
2019; they proved to be the acclaimed author’s last _

John le Carre in Errol Morris' "The Pigeon Tunnel", Apple TV

 

Errol Morris [[link removed]] has a thing
for facing down squirmy subjects.
[[link removed]] For
the 2003 Oscar-winning “The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life
of Robert S. McNamara,” he cold-called the former U.S. Defense
Secretary for an interview. A decade later, the filmmaker trained his
Interrotron on another former Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, for
“The Unknown Known.”

For the AppleTV+ production “The Pigeon Tunnel
[[link removed]],” Morris again
captured elusive quarry by recording four days of interviews
[[link removed]] with John le Carré (neé
David Cornwell) in fall 2019; they proved to be the acclaimed
author’s last. The film [[link removed]] serves
as a kind of adaptation of le Carré’s own autobiography, which he
wrote after biographer Adam Sisman published “John le Carré: The
Biography” in 2015.

“It’s not surprising to me that David took a competitive attitude
towards it,” said Morris in a phone interview. “In the most direct
way imaginable, he decided, ‘Hey, this guy’s writing a biography
of me. I’ll write one too.’ And better or worse, it’s entirely
different. It’s episodic, it’s picaresque. It doesn’t do what we
expect biography or even a memoir to do. It does something different.
It seizes on moments, often unrelated moments, that add up to
something really powerful and interesting.”

The former MI5 and MI6 UK intelligence officer wrote 26 novels — 16
of which have been adapted into movies and/or television including
“The Spy Who Came In From the Cold,” “The Constant Gardener,”
“Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” and “The Russia House.” However,
Morris isn’t much interested in the Hollywood interpretations
[[link removed]].

“Oddly enough, David Cornwell is a kind of documentarian,” Morris
said. “Many, many of the books are based on elaborate research that
he did. He would actually go to places that he was writing about, meet
people who are either the people he was writing about or analog for
those people. And every single book that he wrote was immersive in
research, exploration, and vertical observation. There is a
documentary element in all of it.

Cornwell who died in December 2020, had many strong ideas about
history. “He told me, ‘History is chaos,'” said Morris.
“History isn’t a concatenation of conspiracies of people behind
the scenes pulling strings and manipulating this that and the other
thing. History is happenstance, confusion, error, and that fits in
remarkably with the central metaphor of his book. And the central
metaphor of the movie is the pigeon tunnel itself.”

This helps explain how Morris’ film — a mix of articulate,
philosophical interviews with vivid reenactments and rich archive
footage — lays out the six decades of Cornwell’s life in bits and
pieces, with images of the pigeon tunnel at its center. During a
childhood visit to a Monte Carlo casino, Cornwell saw pigeons that
were kept in cages and thrown into a series of dark tunnels and pushed
into the sky to meet almost certain death, he wrote, “as targets for
well-lunched sporting gentlemen who were standing or lying in wait
with their shotguns.” The pigeons who escaped destruction returned
to their roost, only to be sent out again.

“It means that similar to ‘history is chaos,’ who lives and who
dies is a matter of chance,” Morris said. “Although we know that
we’re all living in a kind of environment that is ultimately
murderous. There are the pigeons, oblivious to everything, really.
We’re just heading out blindly into death. They’re all being
orchestrated by these casino operators, that is, a meretricious
version of man. But it’s not as though they’re being killed
directly. They’re just being sent to their possible death. Good
metaphor. Thank you, David.”

Morris does not see his conversations with Cornwell, who was fighting
prostate cancer, as adversarial or competitive. Nor was he seeking to
unmask the writer.

“I enjoyed talking to him,” he said. “We discussed a lot of
things that were of enormous interest to me. And I found him, if
anything, to be a kindred spirit. I liked him. I liked him a lot.
I’m sorry he’s no longer with us. He was remarkably forthcoming.
One of the things that we started to talk about was interrogations and
interviews: Are they the same thing? Are they different? In what
respect are they different? Trying to engage another person, trying to
learn something about that other person. Maybe we’re also trying to
impress that person. It’s complicated.”Cornwell did show emotion
over the course of the interview, especially when talking about his
con-man father Ronnie. “The relationship with his father is
central,” said Morris, “and central to the book itself, ‘The
Pigeon Tunnel,’ but there’s so many themes: the nature of history,
truth, his relationship with his wives. It’s a complex story.”

Cromwell  did show emotion over the course of the interview,
especially when talking about his con-man father Ronnie. “The
relationship with his father is central,” said Morris, “and
central to the book itself, ‘The Pigeon Tunnel,’ but there’s so
many themes: the nature of history, truth, his relationship with his
wives. It’s a complex story.”

Morris didn’t get hung up on whether his subject was telling him the
truth. “This is a portrait of David Cornwell and how he sees
himself,” he said. “You come right down to it, the whole thing is
about lying. Being a novelist, creating this skein of stories, is
creating an elaborate cosmology — an elaborate fiction. And what’s
the point? By making something like ‘The Thin Blue Line,’ when
someone has been falsely accused of murder? There is a point: of
saying this man has been falsely accused. And I believe I know who did
it and I can prove it. Reality becomes a central feature of what
you’re doing. What really did transpire? That’s not a central
feature of ‘The Pigeon Tunnel.’ It’s a set of metaphors.”

Morris said he and Cornwell see truth in a similar way. “He has this
Pascalian view that truth may not be knowable, but that there is a
truth… I was moved by David. As cynical as you might imagine him to
be, at his core, there’s a true belief in right and wrong, good and
evil, that I found compelling. He tells the story about being invited
to the Soviet Union, and asked his willingness to have dinner with
[MI6 double agent] Kim Philby. And he refuses. He says, I couldn’t
see myself as having dinner with the Queen’s representative on one
evening, and with the Queen’s traitor, on another.”

Cornwall was a man who turned down awards offered to him by the
British government, while accepting recognition from other
governments. He was disappointed and “deeply unhappy,” said
Morris, with his own country. “I would call it the Kantian element
in David. There’s a belief that there is a right and wrong in
everything. He has this extraordinarily fine-tuned ear for language
both spoken and written that is quite unlike anything else I’ve ever
seen. Fast, smart, articulate, shrewd, interesting, and
self-hating.”

That’s where Morris identifies with Cornwell the most: “He’s an
exquisite poet of self-loathing. And he agrees with me: I sometimes
think that the whole enterprise of trying to create anything is
ultimately linked with self-hatred.”

Does Morris beat himself up while making these movies, torture himself
about how good they are? “Of course I do.”

_An Apple TV+ production, “The Pigeon Tunnel” will premiere on the
fall festival circuit before streaming on Apple TV+ starting on
Friday, October 20._

 

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* Film
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* Film Review
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* Documentary Film
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* Errol Morris
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* John le Cerre
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* The Pigeon Tunnel
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* David Cornwell
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