Since releasing his first movie, “Gates of Heaven,” in 1978, about two pet cemeteries in California, Errol Morris has directed eleven feature-length documentaries, one unhappy collaboration with Robert Redford called “The Dark Wind,” and several short films and TV series, including the recent Netflix show “Wormwood,” a hybrid of documentary and fiction, about the suspicious death of a C.I.A. scientist. He has also directed more than a thousand commercials. “The Thin Blue Line,” his investigation into the killing of a Texas police officer, which was released in 1988, led to the release from prison of a man named Randall Adams, who had been wrongly convicted of the crime.

This week, theatres will start showing “American Dharma,” Morris’s movie about Steve Bannon, the former political strategist for Donald Trump. It premièred at festivals more than a year ago and quickly became the subject of contentious debate. “When the Bannon film first came out, I thought that was going to be the end of me, that this was my swan song,” Morris told me. Several of his recent films—including “The Fog of War” and “The Unknown Known,” which are about the former Defense Secretaries Robert McNamara and Donald Rumsfeld, respectively—are based on long interviews with a single subject. “American Dharma” draws on around sixteen hours of interviews with Bannon, and dramatizes his rise and his world view with footage from his favorite movies, including the war film “Twelve O’Clock High” and “Chimes at Midnight,” the Orson Welles movie adapted from several of Shakespeare’s plays, which centers on the character of Falstaff.

I recently spoke with Morris for several hours in his office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he lives with his wife, Julia Sheehan, and their French bulldog, Ivan. He is at work on a project with his son, Hamilton Morris, about Timothy Leary, and on a docuseries about a well-known British writer whom he asked me not to name. His office was full of books and assorted knickknacks; I sat near a taxidermied penguin, a gift to Morris from Sheehan (“Say it with taxidermy, not with flowers,” Morris quipped), and the head of a chimpanzee, which I recognized as Morris’s avatar on Twitter. Morris tweets often but doesn’t follow anyone on the platform. “Why would I want to do that?” he said.

A few days after the interview, I followed up with him, more briefly, on the phone. Our conversations have been edited and condensed.

Your company is called Fourth Floor Productions, but we’re on the second floor.

I used to have an office in midtown Manhattan. Fifty-third Street and Broadway, in the Ed Sullivan Theatre building, which was really, for all intents and purposes, an abandoned building. Occasionally, they would rent it out to second- and third-rate telethons.

So you had the fourth floor?

No. I had the third floor. Maybe everything that I do is based on misdirection. And maybe some level of irony, hopefully.

This is going to run online, with a short introduction, followed by an edited transcript—questions, answers, questions.

The whole question-and-answer format, to me, really misrepresents what’s going on. First of all, I think all questions are more or less rhetorical questions. No one wants their questions answered. They just want to state their question. And, in answering the question, the person never wants to answer the question. They just want to talk.

I used to work, years ago, as a private detective. My boss, who has become one of the most successful detectives in the world, Jimmy Mintz, once defined for me a perfect interview. For him, in the perfect interview, you learn everything about the person you’re talking to and they learn nothing about you.

I got a lot of this with “American Dharma.” “You”—this was the accusation, you being me—“didn’t ask the difficult questions. You were a candy ass. You let him off the hook. You gave him a pass. Not only weren’t you tough enough, you were a patsy.”

Do you think that criticism had something to do with the expectations that people have for interviews?

Yes, I do. There is one model—I suppose it’s the pugilistic model, for want of a better description. You’re involved in some kind of a boxing match. How many punches did you land? How many punches did you take? When you took a punch, did you come right back with another punch? It’s about the interview as a form of theatrics.

You didn’t ask me, so I’ll ask myself: What is your favorite moment in any interview that you’ve done? And I have a clear favorite. It would be my interview with Emily Miller, in “The Thin Blue Line.” If I had to point to any one piece of information that led to Randall Adams’s release from prison, it would be information collected in that interview. But the most powerful and revealing things that Miller said to me didn’t come in response to any question, because I didn’t know enough to even frame those questions.

I would say it comes down to creating a situation where people want to talk to you. It has nothing to do with strategy, calculation. I’d say it has more to do with a kind of openness, a willingness to listen, which I have a hard time doing. I sometimes think that I have interviewed people simply because I have such a hard time listening to anybody, and this is a way of enforced, regimented listening.

Emily Miller was a witness for the prosecution in the Adams case. The moment that you’re talking about—is that when she talks about murders happening wherever she goes?

“Everywhere I go, there’s murders. Even around my house.” Which is a really great line. It’s really absurd. Presumably false. Everywhere I go, there’s no murders. There are certainly no murders in my house. You’re being given a glimpse inside of a personality that tells you something unexpected.

But the real moment was—I had gotten access to a lot of the district attorney’s files on the Randall Adams case. And there were documents missing. At some point, I think I remember correctly, Emily Miller started making excuses for why she had failed to pick out Randall Adams in the lineup. It was obviously something that had been bothering her. She was defensive about it. I didn’t say, “Why did you fail to pick out Randall Adams in a lineup?” She volunteered the reasons for why she had failed to pick him out. Having forgotten, because so much time had elapsed since the trial, that she had testified to the exact opposite.

And I asked her, perhaps innocuously, “How do you know you failed to pick him out?” And she said, “I know. I know because the policeman I was sitting next to told me I picked out the wrong person, and then pointed out the right person, so I would not make that mistake ever again.”

It didn’t come out of some real or imagined interrogation. It came out of happenstance, or because I was there and I was a sympathetic interlocutor. I was a sympathetic person willing to listen to her story.

There’s a character that’s always fascinated me, Hanns Scharff. Scharff was the greatest of the Nazi interrogators. So you think, Aha! Nazi interrogator? Horribly brutal, no doubt. No: Mr. Nice Guy. He bonded with the people that he was interrogating. In fact, he immigrated to the United States and became a maker of mosaics at Disney World, in Florida. The world is, of course, insane.