Errol Mark Morris (born February 5, 1948) is an American film director known for documentaries that interrogate the epistemology of their subjects, and the invention of the Interrotron.

In 2003, his The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

[1] His film The Thin Blue Line placed fifth on a Sight & Sound poll of the greatest documentaries ever made.

[2] Morris is known for making films about unusual subjects; Fast, Cheap & Out of Control interweaves the stories of an animal trainer, a topiary gardener, a robot scientist, and a naked mole-rat specialist.

He began playing the cello, spending a summer in France studying music under the acclaimed Nadia Boulanger, who also taught Morris's future collaborator Philip Glass.

Describing Morris as a teenager, Mark Singer wrote that he "read with a passion the 14-odd Oz books, watched a lot of television, and on a regular basis went with a doting but not quite right maiden aunt ('I guess you'd have to say that Aunt Roz was somewhat demented') to Saturday matinées, where he saw such films as This Island Earth and Creature from the Black Lagoon—horror movies that, viewed again 30 years later, still seem scary to him.

"[8] Inspired by Hitchcock's Psycho, Morris visited Plainfield, Wisconsin in 1975, where he conducted multiple interviews with Ed Gein, the infamous body snatcher who resided at Mendota State Hospital in Madison.

In an October 2023 interview with Letterboxd, Morris mentioned that he has since returned to the project, saying "I started rewatching Psycho, because I’m making a movie about Ed Gein.

After a few unproductive months, he happened upon a headline in the San Francisco Chronicle that read, "450 Dead Pets Going to Napa Valley."

"[8] Morris wanted Tom Waits and Mickey Rourke to play the brothers, and he wrote the script, but the project eventually failed.

In 1984, Morris married Julia Sheehan, whom he had met in Wisconsin while researching Ed Gein and other serial killers.

He would later recall an early conversation with Julia: "I was talking to a mass murderer but I was thinking of you," he said, and instantly regretted it, afraid that it might not have sounded as affectionate as he had wished.

Grigson had spent 15 years testifying for such cases, and he almost invariably gave the same damning testimony, often saying that it is "one hundred per cent certain" that the defendant would kill again.

Adams told Morris that he had been framed, and that David Harris, who was present at the time of the murder and was the principal witness for the prosecution, had in fact killed Wood.

Unedited interviews in which the prosecution's witnesses systematically contradicted themselves were used as testimony in Adams's 1986 habeas corpus hearing to determine if he would receive a new trial.

Although Adams was finally found innocent after years of being processed by the legal system, the judge in the habeas corpus hearing officially stated that, "much could be said about those videotape interviews, but nothing that would have any bearing on the matter before this court."

Regardless, The Thin Blue Line, as Morris's film would be called, was popularly accepted as the main force behind getting its subject, Randall Adams, out of prison.

Gordon Freeman had acquired the rights to Stephen Hawking's bestseller A Brief History of Time and Steven Spielberg suggested Morris direct it.

After reading Hawking's book, Morris agreed to direct a documentary adaptation of it, having studied the philosophy of science at Princeton.

It combines interviews with Hawking, his colleagues and his family with computer animations and clips from movies like Disney's The Black Hole.

"[16] Morris's Fast, Cheap & Out of Control interweaves interviews with a wild animal trainer, a topiary gardener, a robot scientist and a naked mole rat specialist with stock footage, cartoons and clips from film serials.

He considered editing this footage into a feature-length film, focusing[19] on Donald Trump discussing Citizen Kane (this segment was later released on the second issue of Wholphin).

[21] The film, Tabloid,[22] features interviews with Joyce McKinney, a former Miss Wyoming, who was convicted in absentia for the kidnap and indecent assault of a Mormon missionary in England during 1977.

Subsequently, Morris has made documentaries such as The Unknown Known (2013), American Dharma (2018), and The Pigeon Tunnel (2023), revolving around interviews conducted with Donald Rumsfeld, Steve Bannon, and John le Carré, respectively.

One commercial in the series, starring Ellen Feiss, a high-schooler friend of his son Hamilton Morris, became an Internet meme.

Morris has directed hundreds of commercials for various companies and products, including Adidas, AIG, Cisco Systems, Citibank, Kimberly-Clark's Depend brand, Levi's, Miller High Life, Nike, PBS, The Quaker Oats Company, Southern Comfort, EA Sports, Toyota and Volkswagen.

The commercials enigmatically depicted various scenes from what appeared to be a short narrative that climaxed with a car crashing into a swimming pool.

[25] Morris directed a series of commercials for Reebok that featured six prominent National Football League (NFL) players.

In November 2011, Morris premiered a documentary short titled "The Umbrella Man"—featuring Josiah "Tink" Thompson—about the Kennedy assassination on The New York Times website.

Morris uses his films not only to portray social issues and non-fiction events but also to comment on the reliability of documentary making itself.