Errol Morris, director of The Fog of War, Thin Blue Line, those Apple commercials, etc, really is a great interview. In this one, he talks about interviewing Ed Gein, the years he worked as a private eye, “a male stripper with a genius IQ who became a disgruntled contestant on ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’,” and the roots of his underground classic, Vernon, Florida. At first, the film was called Nub City:

… the true story of a town where more than twenty people cut off their arms and legs after taking out insurance policies on themselves. Nub City was always a bad idea for a documentary. I realized this within a couple days. I got beaten severely by the son-in-law of a nubbie in Quincy, Florida. It was the only time anyone has ever beaten me up, thankfully. It became obvious that I was never going to be able to knock on the door of someone who’s committed some massive insurance fraud and stick a camera in their face and get them to talk. It’s never going to happen. The best you can expect is getting the shit kicked out of you. That project quickly morphed into Vernon, Florida, which is a movie I very much like, but has nothing to do with the Nub Club or with the nubbies or insurance fraud.

SS: Was there a preferred method people used to hack off their limbs?

EM: No, it was freestyle. [Laughs] For example, there was one African-American guy who cut his arm off with a band saw, but neglected to read his policy, which didn’t take effect until the following day.

Read the whole interview here. Watch clips from his films here and his commercials here.