Friday I asked about the last interview with David Harris, the one that was pretty much a confession that freed Randall Adams. I think it interesting that Morris didn’t intend to record this conversation in this manner – it just happened. I don’t think it takes away from the film at all, as Casey said, she thinks just the image of the tape recorder really sets the mood, and I agree. What I think is interesting about this is that we naturally assume this was Morris’s intention, a choice he made. It reminded me of a story Dr. Kennedy told me last semester when we were studying Milton’s Lycidas. One of the Romantic poets, I forget which one, actually got to see Milton’s drafts of the poem and was incensed. “Milton shouldn’t have had to revise!” he cried. We tend to think of literary geniuses as able to write their most famous, epic works in one draft, which isn’t really the case. They are, like us, only human. I think the same idea carries over to directors on a much wider basis. We always think everything in a movie is the director’s choice, which, I suppose, is natural as the director is usually the one editing the film. DVD’s of “Director’s Cuts” add to this mystic, as it purports that somehow the studio is limiting the creative vision of this director. Anyway, its nice to know the director doesn’t always makes these decisions, sometimes pure gold is handed to them, and then, the mark of a great director becomes the ability to recognize something other than their original intention worked much better.