Errol Morris makes documentary films that are so marvelously strange, and so strangely alluring, they hardly deserve the D-word tag, with its faint-praise whiff of well-intentioned public television and the Discovery Channel. Morris interviews people, plain and simple; he trains his camera on his subjects and lets them talk. And oh, do they talk—candidly, and at length, about whatever. Often what they reveal are not just the answers to the questions they are asked, but the workings of the mind—idiosyncratic personal philosophies, irrational rationalizations, private obsessions—as if some kind of cinematic truth serum were at work. Morris pairs this talk with the kinds of images we are not accustomed to seeing in “nonfiction” film: reenactments, visual puns, objects floating in space. What emerges is almost always addictively compelling, and surprising, and odd.

Morris has made seven films over the past quarter century, starting in 1978 with Gates of Heaven, a hilarious look at two dueling pet cemeteries and their eccentric proprietors, and including Vernon, Florida (1981), The Thin Blue Line (1988), A Brief History of Time (1992), Fast, Cheap and Out of Control (1997), Mr. Death (1999), and most recently, the Oscar-winning The Fog of War (2003). He is perhaps best-known for The Thin Blue Line, his investigation into the fatal shooting of a Dallas police officer. Apart from being a subtle, beautiful, and wholly original work, the film was responsible for renewed attention to the murder case, and to the Texas justice, ahem, system in general. Morris’s insistent probing showed how the original investigation and trial were deeply flawed, and ultimately led to the exculpation of Randall Adams, the man originally convicted of the murder. It was not the shabbiest of results for a documentary film with a limited theatrical release.

The Guardian (UK) recently ranked Errol Morris the seventh-best filmmaker in the world. Perhaps he should have placed higher, but evening wear has never been his thing, and probably he lost valuable points in the swimsuit competition. Rest assured, his personal statement must have been strong; as I recently learned, for a man who does a lot of listening, he is a powerful talker.

One more thing: Morris and I exchanged some emails, prior to our meeting, about the Polish foreign correspondent Ryszard Kapuscinski, best-known for his lyrical reflections on war, the Third World, and war in the Third World, in books like The Emperor and The Soccer War. I took the opportunity of my talk with Morris to discuss The Emperor, Kapuscinski’s history...