Errol Morris on his film-making ideal: ‘I call it the shut-the-f**k-up school of just sitting and listening’

John le Carré died an Irish man. Shortly before his death, in 2020, the great espionage writer, always a proud European, took out the harped passport in protest at Brexit. “He was so angry at his own country,” says Errol Morris. “Yes. Infuriated. He thought of it as – I don’t think incorrectly – the height of stupidity. But the world is an irrational place. A confused place. As he says, history has no rhyme or reason. History is chaos.”

Morris can claim some insight into le Carré’s thinking. Among the greatest documentarians of his era, Morris achieved fame with the eviscerating true-crime story The Thin Blue Line in 1988, consolidated with such films as A Brief History of Time and Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, and won an Oscar for The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S McNamara in 2003. Now he moves on to a study of le Carré, pen name of the former intelligence officer David Cornwell, in the gripping, twisty The Pigeon Tunnel. Taking its title from le Carré’s 2016 memoir, the film allows fans – this journalist included – one last, in-depth trawl through a fascinating life.

“I wasn’t privy to all of the machinations involved in getting him to do this movie,” says Morris. “I’m friendly with [the journalist] Seymour Hersh, who was a friend of le Carré. I think he put in a good word on my behalf.”

Le Carré begins by drawing a playful comparison with interrogations he might have carried out when working for the intelligence services. There was something of that in Morris’s probing of Robert McNamara, the former US secretary of defence, in The Fog of War, but this feels like a less adversarial piece. The two josh their way to something like the truth.

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“There is a difference between an interrogation and an interview,” says Morris. “My own way of looking at these things, for what it’s worth, is that an interview should not have a fixed agenda. Not like: ‘I’m going to try to get you to admit that you’re a liar; I will force you to ’fess up; you’re withholding information!’ I don’t see it that way.”

Inevitably, a large part of the conversation concerns the most significant financially unreliable dad in English literary history since John Dickens. That 19th-century rogue was immortalised as Mr Micawber. The often-bankrupt Ronnie Cornwell – jailed for insurance fraud, occasional pal of the Kray twins – cast a huge shadow over le Carré’s life and career. A Perfect Spy, his 1986 novel, brilliantly fictionalises the relationship between father and son. Ray McAnally received a Bafta nomination for playing the pseudo-Ronnie in the BBC’s 1987 television adaptation.

“I find his obsession with Ronnie fascinating,” says Morris. “Do I know who Ronnie really was? Maybe not. But I certainly know a lot about David’s assessment of him. He tells us his father may be inherently responsible for everything he ever achieved. It’s interesting, because his father led him to an examination of the whole idea of truth. We all grew up in a world of untruth. Untruth is ubiquitous.”

It is certainly ubiquitous in the half-world le Carré investigated in spy novels such as Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Smiley’s People and – his indestructible breakthrough, from 1963 – The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Critics often suggest that le Carré saw the cold war as a meaningless game between two equally immoral combatants. I’m not sure that’s right. Nor is Morris. He mentions le Carré spying on Stanley Mitchell, a left-inclining friend at Oxford.

“He is far less cynical than I am. He does live in a universe of right and wrong,” says Morris. “When he was working for MI5 he penetrated that communist organisation at the university and betrayed those people. He gave those names to MI5, probably in the process destroyed lives. I asked him in the film, ‘Do you feel that was the right thing to do?’ And he says, ‘Unequivocally, yes. These people had pledged themselves to Stalin. Stalin was bad. Stalin was evil.’”

It’s true Werner Herzog ate his shoe because he wanted to eat it. Not because I made him eat it by making a movie

More than a few of Morris’s trademarks are on display in The Pigeon Tunnel. There is that intense one-on-one interview. His frequent collaborator Philip Glass can again be heard on the soundtrack. And there are dramatisations of events described. Not every documentary purist approves. This may explain why The Thin Blue Line, his study of the wrongful conviction of Randall Dale Adams for a 1976 murder, somehow failed to secure an Oscar nomination. The film was a hit and helped pave the way for a later documentary boom.

“At the time the film came out it was heretical,” says Morris in his genial manner. “There is a story – and I believe it’s true – that it was shown to the Oscar-nominating committee. They turned it off after five minutes, because they were appalled that I actually had shot dramatic material. This was a no-no. It was not done.”

He goes on to note that it was then almost impossible to get people to watch documentaries in cinemas.

“Then all that changed. Possibly because of streaming. Partly because of Netflix. Netflix started making a lot of documentaries. And, instead of them being seen by a few hundred people, they were seen by a few million people.”

Stories follow the director around. If you know anything about his early history you will know that Werner Herzog, the great German director, allegedly declared he would eat his own shoe if Morris finished his (ultimately excellent) film Gates of Heaven. Les Blank, after the movie emerged in 1978, filmed Herzog doing just that for a short entitled Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.

“I don’t remember him ever making this agreement,” Morris says with a grin. “It’s true Werner ate his shoe because he wanted to eat it. Not because I made him eat it by making a movie.”

[ Fintan O’Toole: John le Carré ‘died an Irish man’ after gaining citizenship ]

Anyway, everything worked out. Morris went on to have a fecund career, and he now gets to release a documentary on John le Carré into cinemas and on to Apple TV+. Again, he’d like to press that it’s not an interrogation.

“In my ideal interview you wouldn’t hear my voice,” he says. “I call it the shut-the-f**k-up school of just sitting and listening.”

The Pigeon Tunnel is in select cinemas and on Apple TV+ from Friday, October 20th