At Venice Film Festival, Errol Morris Asks, ‘Who Is Donald Rumsfeld?’

Alessandro Bianchi/Reuters Errol Morris in Venice on Wednesday.

VENICE â€" “I’ve made a whole number of movies over the years about characters that seem to be completely unaware of themselves. I suppose in English the word that we often use is clueless,” Errol Morris said at a news conference here on Wednesday to promote “The Unknown Known,” his new film-length interview with Donald Rumsfeld, the former secretary of defense. “That’s the central feeling I’m left with at the end of making this movie.”

“What is he thinking?” Mr. Morris continued about Mr. Rumsfeld. “Is this a performance? Is he acting? Does he believe in what he is saying? I would say it’s the central mystery of this movie: Who is Donald Rumsfeld?”

“The Unknown Known” is one of two documentaries in competition at the Venice Film Festival, which ends this Saturday. It is the first year that documentaries have been included in the running.

In making the film, Mr. Morris said he was fascinated by how Mr. Rumsfeld repeatedly contradicted himself when pressed on questions about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Mr. Morris’s treatment, the former defense secretary comes across as mischievous, Machiavellian and self-satisfied â€" “I was the youngest secretary of defense in history,” he says of his time in the administration of President Gerald Ford.

He also appears to be far less tormented about his place in history than Robert S. McNamara, the Vietnam-era secretary of defense from 1961-1968 whom the director interviewed in the 2003 documentary “The Fog of War.” Mr. Morris said his wife had compared the two men: Mr. McNamara was “the flying Dutchman, the man traveling the world searching for redemption and never finding it,” he said, while Mr. Rumsfeld is “the Cheshire Cat from ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and ‘Through the Looking Glass,’ the cat who at the very end vanishes and is left with just a smile.”

Mr. Morris said he had the idea for the film after reading Mr. Rumsfeld’s autobiography, “Known and Unknown.” Mr. Morris sent him a copy of “The Fog of War” and Mr. Rumsfeld responded within a week, eventually agreeing to sit for more than 30 hours of interviews in four sessions at Mr. Morris’s home in Boston.

As for Mr. Rumsfeld’s recent comments that he is opposed to military intervention in Syria, Mr. Morris, who is a frequent contributor to the New York Times opinion section, had a follow-up question: “Why now?” he asked at the news conference. “And not 10 years ago when presented with a similar question about Iraq and Afghanistan?”