
Morris at Monday's screening.Photo: Getty Images
Ever since his groundbreaking 1988 documentary The Thin Blue Line, Morris has taken heat for relying on dramatic reenactments. Standard Operating Procedure is full of them, from a snarling attack dog to an Iraqi detainee having his eyebrows shaved off, nearly all of them filmed in extreme close-up. (He discusses the use of reenactments at great length in a recent entry on his New York Times blog, Zoom.) On Monday night, Morris insisted they're necessary. "It's a movie taking you into a series of photographs. How do you take someone into the moment that a photograph is taken? How do you create a context around it? I did it in this movie with retrospective accounts, first-person accounts of the people who were there when the pictures were taken, and things that bring you into that moment. No reenactments, no movie." —Darrell Hartman
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