Errol Morris vs. fake news

In 1975, this story caused a sensation: Frank Olson, a CIA scientist, had not committed suicide on Nov. 28, 1953, as his family had thought. Instead, he was crazed from the effects of a secret dose of LSD that a fellow CIA agent had slipped into his drink nine days before his death. He hadn't meant to kill himself. He was an unfortunate victim of a covert U.S. government program called MKUltra, which identified and developed drugs and procedures to force confessions.

That's the beginning of director Errol Morris's new six-part Netflix documentary series Wormwood (it drops Dec. 15). But it's far from the whole story. Together with Frank Olson's son Eric, who has spent five decades unearthing the truth of his father's death (literally: Eric had Frank's body exhumed in 1994), Morris unpeels layer after layer of facts, deceptions, misdirections and revelations. Along the way, Frank's death morphs from suicide to drug accident to homicide to execution, and an allegation is made that the U.S. government used biological weapons in the Korean War.

The series is also frighteningly timely, given the assault of lies, alternative facts and fake news that is the Trump presidency. "We know America went crazy in the fifties," Morris told me in a phone interview on Tuesday. "China and Russia got the bomb, a Cold War ensued. The question is, are we still in that Cold War, where paranoia and lying become central strictures of the government?" Or, as Eric Olson puts it, "How long can a government perpetuate lies and misrepresentations and still call itself a democracy?"

Intelligent and dogged, Morris, 69, speaks in long, fluid sentences, in a husky voice that frequently turns gleeful, with the cadences of a natural pitchman (You like that? Then you're gonna love this!). With his 1988 film The Thin Blue Line, he arguably became the father of the modern dramatic documentary. Those multi-episode, true-crime docs now filling your Netflix menu owe him a debt, so he and the streaming service are a natural fit.

"Who else would have given me the money to work on such a broad canvas?" Morris acknowledges. "If this is a story about an obsessive investigation – and it certainly is for me and for Eric – you want the ability to play that obsessiveness out. You want to show people what that obsessiveness has amounted to. It's not just a whodunit where you calculate the number of minutes you need until you reveal the culprit. It's a story of how we learn about history itself."

Some people assume that Morris's films are about the unknowable nature of truth, but the opposite is true. "My premise is, always, the truth is knowable, unless proven otherwise," he says. "But the truth is hard. It's hard to figure out what is true and what is false. In my experience, it involves an extensive investigation. So my films are about how difficult it is to know something."

Morris pitched Wormwood as "an everything bagel" – dramatic enactments; interviews with multiple subjects, using multiple cameras; home movies and photographs; documents and archival footage. "And then throw in some Hamlet," he adds. Some critics have accused him of too much layering, too much repetition. "To them, I offer to kill myself," he says, only half-joking. But to me, seeing the same thing in multiple versions, from multiple angles, is precisely the story he's telling.

His directorial trademark – long interviews overlaid with an hypnotic score – remains, but he's introduced new tricks, too. Gone is the interrotron, a device that allowed subjects of previous films to see Morris in the camera lens. In Wormwood, he appears in two-shots with his subjects, which makes him a part of the story rather than a dispassionate observer. He and his subjects are in it together.

"The interrotron works well for first-person storytelling, when I had one subject like Robert McNamara [The Fog of War] or Donald Rumsfeld [The Unknown Known]," Morris says. "Here, it's the idea of investigation as collage. Sifting through scraps of evidence, trying to assemble a picture of the whole. So the multiple cameras seem part of the metaphor of collage." (Eric Olson himself studied collage as a tool of psychotherapy.)

Wormwood's re-enactments are snazzier, too, with grade-A actors and production values: Peter Sarsgaard, master of soul-sickness, plays Frank; Molly Parker is his wife; Tim Blake Nelson and Bob Balaban play CIA spooks. "Peter is the perfect Frank," Morris says. "He has a natural reserve. He's his strongest and best when he's saying nothing. Frank was a person trapped – he wasn't allowed to interact. He was surrounded, boxed in. Peter did a splendid job conveying that."

Morris isn't sure why true-crime docs are all the rage, or why people are suddenly obsessed with their own personal histories, via sites like ancestry.com and 23andMe. "But I have a thought, and my thought is probably as good as anybody's," he says. "When you're living in a time where people are challenging the existence of the real world around us – fake facts, alternate histories, virtual reality – it's good to be reminded that there's a world out there in which things actually happened, and we can learn and know about them. We want to figure things out. We want to be reminded that, in the spirit of Orwell's 1984, though some people say that two plus two equals five, we know better."

Morris wants to keep making everything bagels; and though he currently has no deal, he wants to keep working with Netflix. He's also not finished with Frank Olson. "There's more to the story, I can assure you of that," he says. "We had another 40 pages of script, which we never got to shoot. I'd like to see more of the story come out. I'd like the government to give us a more full account of what happened."

I remind him that people in this story were dropped from windows and disappeared from canoes – what if he gets too close to a truth that power doesn't want revealed? "If you see the CIA coming after me, will you warn me, please?" he says, laughing. "Just give me a heads up: 'Errol, look behind you!'"

So he doesn't worry? His laughter stops. "Eh," he says. "I worry about everything.