People like Errol Morris

Errol Mark Morris (born February 5, 1948) is an American film director known for documentaries. In 2003, his documentary film The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.

Morris was born on February 5, 1948, and raised in a Jewish family in Hewlett, New York. He had one older brother, Noel, who was a computer programmer. After being treated for strabismus in childhood, he refused to wear an eye patch. As a consequence, he has limited sight in one eye and lacks normal stereoscopic vision.

In the 10th grade, Morris attended The Putney School, a boarding school in Vermont. He began playing the cello, spending a summer in France studying music under the acclaimed Nadia Boulanger, who also taught Morris's future collaborator Philip Glass. Describing Morris as a teenager, Mark Singer wrote that he "read with a passion the fourteen-odd Oz books, watched a lot of television, and on a regular basis went with a doting but not quite right maiden aunt ('I guess you'd have to say that Aunt Roz was somewhat demented') to Saturday matinées, where he saw such films as This Island Earth and Creature from the Black Lagoon — horror movies that, viewed again 30 years later, still seem scary to him."