Podcast: Interview with Documentary Filmmaker Errol Morris (1988)

A scene from Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line (1988).

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to writers and artists from all fields. In 1985, I sat down with documentary filmmaker Errol Morris.

At the time of our conversation, his groundbreaking and award-winning film The Thin Blue Line had just been released. Depicting the story of a man falsely convicted of a crime he did not commit, The Thin Blue Line eventually led to the man's release a year later. It was Morris's third feature documentary. He has since directed more than dozen features, including A Brief History of Time (1991), Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997) and the Academy award-winning The Fog of War (2003).

– Kevin Courrier

Note: Apologies for the intermittent audio issues with the segment. They were the result of technological issues at the time of the original interview. 

Here is the full interview with Errol Morris as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1988.

Kevin Courrier is a freelance writer/broadcaster, film critic and author (Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive World of Zappa, Randy Newman's American Dreams, 33 1/3 Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica, Artificial Paradise: The Dark Side of The Beatles Utopian Dream). Courrier teaches part-time film courses to seniors through the LIFE Institute at Ryerson University in Toronto and other venues. His forthcoming book is Talking Out of Turn: A Collection of Reviews, Interviews and Remembrances currently being assembled on Blogger. 

Tom Fulton was the host and producer of On the Arts for CJRT-FM in Toronto for 23 years, beginning in 1975.