Errol Morris on Donald Rumsfeld and The Unknown Known

Oscar-winning filmmaker Errol Morris’ new documentary The
Unknown Known, which is a portrait of former Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld, was released nationwide on Friday, and so
far the film has received generally
positive reviews. The New York Times‘ A.O. Scott

calls the movie “a probing and unsettling inquiry into the
recent political and military history of the United States,” adding
that “it is also a bracing and invigorating philosophical
skirmish.”

On Thursday, Reason TV released Nick Gillespie’s extended
conversation with Morris about the new film. Click above to watch
the
interview. Here’s the original text:

Donald Rumsfeld’s “war crime,” says Oscar-winning filmmaker
Errol Morris, is “the gobbledygook, the blizzard of words, the
misdirections, the evasions…and ultimately at the heart of it
all…the disregard and devaluation of evidence.”

The former secretary of defense’s complicated relationship with
the truth is the subject of Morris’ new documentary, The Unknown
Known, which opens in theaters nationwide on Friday,
April 4. The Unknown Known is an extended conversation
with Rumsfeld, tracing his long career through the Nixon, Ford,
Reagan, and Bush administrations, and focusing on his role in
leading U.S. military forces into Iraq to fight a bloody and
senseless war.

In the film, Morris engages in a verbal sparring session with
Rumsfeld in an effort to break through the linguistic “evasions”
and “gobbledygook” for which he’s known.

The title of the film comes from Rumsfeld’s response to a
question by NBC reporter Jim Miklaszewski at a Pentagon news
conference on February 12, 2002. When Miklaszewski asked Rumsfeld
if there was any evidence that Iraq was supplying terrorists with
weapons, Rumsfeld replied:

Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always
interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns;
there are things we know we know. We also know there are known
unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not
know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know
we don’t know.

In
a four-part series in The New York Times titled “The
Certainty of Donald Rumsfeld,” Morris wrote: “Many people believe
Rumsfeld’s reply was brilliant. I think otherwise.”

The Unknown Known is Errol Morris’ 10th documentary
feature. He’s also the author of two best-selling books and the director of over 1,000
TV commercials. Much of Morris’ work explores, as he puts it, “how
people prefer untruth to truth” and how they’re “blinded by their
own spurious convictions.”

Reason TV‘s Nick Gillespie sat down for an extended
chat with Morris about The Unknown Known. They discussed,
among other things, the difference between Rumsfeld and Secretary
of Defense Robert McNamara, whose complicated relationship with his
own mistakes is the subject of Morris’ Oscar-winning film,
The Fog of
War; Morris’ take on the Jeffrey MacDonald murder case,
which was the subject of his book,
A Wilderness of Error; how Obama compares to Bush; his
friendships with Roger Ebert and Werner Herzog; and why “we’re all
morons.”

Gillespie conducted the interview using an “interrotron,”
a device Morris invented, which projects an interviewer’s face over
the camera lens. It creates the impression that the subject is
looking directly into the eyes of the viewer.

About 41 minutes.

Shot and edited by Jim Epstein.

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