A Focus on Eccentricity : Director Errol Morris Likes ‘Out of Control’ Mental Landscapes

“I’ve always been a person who thinks about stuff,” says director Errol Morris. “I think that’s probably the best way to describe me.”

It’s a good thing that Morris is describing himself because no one else can. What sets Morris apart is not that he thinks about stuff--although that in itself is a rarity--but the stuff he thinks about: serial killers, pet cemeteries, the murder trial of a show dog, the electrocution of an elephant, the musings of an incapacitated cosmologist, the denizens of a Florida town who lop off their limbs for profit--these and many more true stories, some of which have made it to film, some still whirling around in his fevered brain.

The latest to come out of Morris’ laboratory is “Fast, Cheap & Out of Control,” about a lion trainer, a man obsessed with hairless mole rats, a topiary gardener and a scientist who builds robots. It opens today for a weeklong run at the Port Theatre in Corona del Mar.

“Part of the whole shtick of the movie is what does topiary have to do with us, what do mole rats have to do with us, what do robots have to do with us,” says Morris. “If these are mental landscapes, if I’m really documenting not just a news story but the state of people’s brains or the state of these four brains, part of it is a collage taking you into their world.”

This seems clear enough. In his two previous acclaimed documentaries, “The Thin Blue Line” (1988) and “A Brief History of Time” (1992), Morris used old movie footage, stills, reenactments, found objects and traditional interviews to illustrate mental landscapes. It’s what he does. It’s also what distinguishes him from the sort of people who traffic in kitsch for its own sake. People in his movies are weird, but he never condescends to them.

“If they’re off the wall, then we’re off the wall,” he says of the four subjects of “Fast, Cheap & Out of Control.”

“The eccentric becomes commonplace,” he says. “The eccentric becomes an everyman’s story.”

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The question then is not so much what these people have to do with us as what they have to do with one another. Certainly obsolescence is an issue.

The survival of mankind is another. Sometimes the connections are not so clear. In one instance, the mole-rat expert talks while we view audiences watching the lion tamer.

“Bring an analgesic,” Morris advises when apprised of how disorienting this is. “Someone wrote recently [about the movie], ‘Not for the faint of brain.’ ”

Such a description could probably describe all of Morris’ work, although “Fast, Cheap & Out of Control” is the most extreme example. At 49, Morris has been making documentaries, albeit slowly, for the last 20 years. It’s a career he sort of stumbled on while pursuing the stuff that interests him. Born on Long Island, he studied the cello, took up rock climbing, worked as a private investigator and tried the academic world (he majored in history at the University of Wisconsin and did graduate work in the history of science at Princeton and in philosophy at Berkeley).

Frustrated with academia, Morris turned to other pursuits, indulging in his fascination with serial killers by interviewing, among others, the notorious Ed Gein, the model for Norman Bates in “Psycho.” These interviewing skills stood him in good stead when, after adding filmmaking to the stuff that interests him, he decided to make a documentary inspired by the headline “450 Dead Pets Going to Napa Valley.” The result, “Gates of Heaven” (1978), was hailed by critic Roger Ebert as one of the 10 best films of all time. In it Morris displayed his gift for coaxing people into revealing their mental landscapes--and letting the camera run on and on as they do so.

“I think that one of my virtues is taking the inconsequential and finding something consequential in it,” Morris says.

(The release of the film also prompted an incredulous friend, director Werner Herzog, to eat his shoe, a feat memorialized in a 20-minute documentary by Les Blank called “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.”)

Morris followed up “Gates” with “Vernon, Florida” (1981), which featured the citizens of a swamp town discussing such topics as turkey hunting and worm farming. Easily Morris’ most celebrated work, however, was his next film, “The Thin Blue Line,” in which he uncovered evidence that a drifter named Randall Adams, convicted of murdering a Dallas police officer, did not commit the crime and that a teenager named David Harris, who gave him a lift, probably did. In large part because of the film, Adams was set free.

For Morris, the victory was bittersweet. Inexplicably, the film was overlooked at Oscar time. Asked if that bothered him, he gets testy: “It’s like asking you, ‘When that bus hit you, were you bothered by that fact?’

“Yes, I was somewhat disheartened. But I think that they have the right to nominate whoever they want. One nice thing is that several academy members said they wanted me to be a member. They felt that it was such an oversight that they wanted me to be in the academy anyway.”

No such vindication occurred with Adams, whom one might assume would be eternally grateful to Morris. Instead, he sued the director for a piece of the action.

“The lawsuit really took the bloom off the rose,” Morris says. “I found it uncalled-for and crazy. I sort of understand intellectually why it happened. The horrible tension between me and his defense attorney, the craziness of getting out of prison, the publicity that the movie was receiving that gave people the impression, albeit a mistaken impression, that there were huge amounts of money being made from its distribution.”

Money has always been a problem for Morris. Some of his projects drag on for years, in part because he has trouble drumming up completion funding.

“The worst nightmare is these things that never get done,” he says. “In our house, we have a stuffed albatross. It’s quite a beauty. But I like having the stuffed albatross as a piece of furniture rather than some figurative thing hanging around my neck.”

This reminds Morris--who tends to digress as much as his subjects do--of Stephen Hawking, the cosmologist whose life and theories about black holes he weaved together in “A Brief History of Time,” another remarkable piece of mental landscape painting. Hawking has Lou Gehrig’s disease and speaks through a voice synthesizer. On one occasion, Morris literally carried him into his house.

“It’s a real weird feeling carrying Stephen Hawking because [without his wheelchair] it’s like he’s molting,” Morris says. “I brought him into the house, and I put him in his chair. And the first thing he said, looking at the albatross: ‘They’re very faithful.’ ”

Morris laughs. “Funny guy.”

Morris hopes to complete his next documentary soon. It’s about an electric chair repairman and death machine designer and will feature turn-of-the-century footage of an elephant being electrocuted at Coney Island for killing a man who put out his cigar on the elephant’s trunk. Morris tries to look at it from the elephant’s point of view.

“I read somewhere that the tip of an elephant’s trunk is more sensitive than his penis,” he says. “Now, how someone would know this is not clear to me. It had to be based on some kind of research, but what kind of research could it be?”

Should this get done, Morris has got a feature film set up at Zoetrope called “Sea of Crystal,” written by Paul Schrader. It wouldn’t be his first stab at directing fiction. He directed a film called “The Dark Wind” (1994) with Lou Diamond Phillips, based on a Tony Hillerman novel, but it was taken away in the editing room and given a perfunctory release.

“I have often described my role on that movie as the first below-the-line director,” he says. “My role was closer to crafts services than to what we normally take to be the role of a director in a major motion picture.”

Morris has a number of other pet projects. There’s the murder trial of King Boots, America’s winningest show dog. He would also like to see his idea for a nonfiction “Twilight Zone”-type series resurrected at Fox. Several episodes have been filmed, but the project is on hold. (He says one executive told him they were “too new.”) And he’s been drawn, much against his will, into another “miscarriage of justice story,” this time the famed Jeffrey MacDonald murder case, which he considers the “first true postmodern murder story.”

Murder seems to be a subject Morris continually returns to. And despite that, or because of it, he is opposed to the death penalty.

“I’d lose some of my closest friends,” he says. “I still stay in touch with David Harris. The guy I got out of prison, we don’t talk, but the killer, we remain friends. Isn’t that the way of the world?”