Errol Morris’ latest documentary, Tabloid, was supposed to be a return to the humane quirk of his early work, like pet-cemetery laugher Gates of Heaven, which infamously made auteur Werner Herzog eat his shoe. But then Rupert Murdoch’s toxic News of the World scandal exploded, reminding everyone on Earth that tabloid journalists are mere steps above cockroaches on the evolutionary chain. It also made Morris’ film about the tabloid-ready exploits of a ’70s beauty queen exceedingly timely.

“What seems somewhat horrifying — and I’ll even take out the ’somewhat’ — about News of the World is that this is not just a story about exaggeration, hyperbole and excess,” Morris told Wired.com by phone.

“It’s a story about lying and criminality, where it’s not just the truth that is no longer important,” he said. “It’s an anything-goes kind of journalism where truth is just one casualty among many. It’s almost taken for granted that truth is no longer even a concern. You manufacture stories out of whole cloth if necessary. You hack into phones, you trick people, you lie, you cheat. It’s an amoral world without any ethical boundaries whatsoever.”

Unlike Morris’ grim previous films, including the Abu Ghraib-centric Standard Operating Procedure and the Oscar-winning The Fog of War, Tabloid is a slightly perverse romp. Spearheaded by an ebulliently frank Joyce McKinney — the former beauty queen who allegedly kidnapped, bound and raped her estranged Mormon virgin lover Kirk Anderson, in a turbulent cross-continental chase that captivated the British tabloid press in the ’70s — the film is a delightful inversion of the tired narrative of the chaste princess and the shining knight.

According to Morris, who has been syndicating essays from his forthcoming nonfiction book Believing Is Seeing at The New York Times, Tabloid is also an approachable exploration of “how stories are told and how they are sold.” But the story of McKinney’s journey from beauty queen to tabloid phenomenon to dog cloner remains remarkable in its own right, he said.

Unlike Morris’ brilliant past work, Tabloid, which opens Friday, dispenses with slow-motion re-enactments. Instead, Morris utilizes the found-footage technique that makes the stellar documentaries of his British peer Adam Curtis so disorienting and addictive. We chatted with Morris about why the term re-enactment might haunt him forever, why he’s a huge Curtis fan, why Murdoch’s tabloid evil is a slippery slope and more in the interview below.

Wired.com: I read that you wanted to get back to the hilarious with Tabloid, after the grim subject matter of your last two films. But Tabloid is a bit grim, too. At the end, I felt like I was being thrown off-balance on purpose.

Errol Morris: Why on purpose? The story probably threw you off-balance. But the story is not something I created out of whole cloth.

Wired.com: It seemed like the film started out aligning itself with Joyce McKinney’s version of events, but that started to unravel towards the end. I was wondering if that was a conscious decision on your part, not to question her version of events early on but to save it for later.

Morris: I’m not sure it was saved for later. Part of telling the story is commenting on it on the same time. Someone asked me if documentaries have changed, because there are documentaries now that seem to call the stories that they are telling into question, such as Catfish and Exit Through the Gift Shop, and I would have to say yes. Part of Tabloid is a story about how stories are constructed.

‘It’s not just a story about perversity, but a perverse story.’

Wired.com: What’s interesting about her is that she’s an inversion of the princess narrative. In her version of events, she ended up being the shining knight and the object of her affection is a virginal princess.

Morris: Is that quite right? I’m not sure. In her version of the fairy tale, which she narrates in an old film from the early ’80s, she is the princess who is abandoned and still in love, and that became a self-fulfilling prophecy. That’s certainly part of the story, a strange fairy tale of her own devising that came true. For me, I think it was a very funny movie, and it was intended to be a very funny movie. But it has a lot of things: There’s certainly an element of tragedy and perversity. It’s not just a story about perversity, but a perverse story.

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