Michael Moore has to stretch pretty far to surprise people these days, but he pulled it off after the Oscars last week when he announced his intention of forming a new distribution consortium with the stated aim of getting more documentary films into more theatres. Speaking at an event sponsored by the International Documentary Association, Moore pushed the idea of moving away from a model where one documentary tends to dominate the market, and noted that the only way his plan would be appealing to studios and movie theatres is if he is "going to go and ask, not for charity, but to show them a way where they can make more money than what they are making on that 15th screen or on that shitty night of the week when nobody's in there". The plan also involves creating a cultural shift with filmgoers towards what he calls "Doc Night in America".
Meanwhile, Errol Morris, one of the few documentarians along with Moore who doesn't have much trouble securing distributions for his films, has been working on Standard Operating Procedure, his new film about the abuses at Abu Ghraib, and after its premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival, he sat down with Germany's Der Spiegel for a lengthy interview about how and why he made it. Although he admits that "there's a lot of people in the administration I'd like to see indicted", he notes that the movie isn't about them but rather what the incidents at the notorious Iraqi prison tell us about ourselves. He also talks about the difficult, sometime days-long interviews with his subjects (he managed to secure interviews with almost all the participants in the abuses, including Lynndie England and Charles Graner), and his views on the nature of the documentary: "I think there's this crazy idea, which is simply wrong, that you can only talk about the real world in one way, that journalism has to be conducted according to a certain set of styles," he says. "There's only one style here, and that is the pursuit of truth, the underlying reality of what happened, and anything which is in service of that is fair game."