‘The Umbrella Man’

For years, I’ve wanted to make a movie about the John F. Kennedy assassination. Not because I thought I could prove that it was a conspiracy, or that I could prove it was a lone gunman, but because I believe that by looking at the assassination, we can learn a lot about the nature of investigation and evidence. Why, after 48 years, are people still quarreling and quibbling about this case? What is it about this case that has led not to a solution, but to the endless proliferation of possible solutions?

Years ago, Josiah Thompson, known as Tink, a young, Yale-educated Kierkegaard scholar, quit his day job as a professor of philosophy at Haverford College to write the definitive book on the Zapruder film — “Six Seconds in Dallas.” Tink became a private detective, and came to work with many of the same private investigators I had also worked with in the 1980s. We had so much in common — philosophy, P.I. work and an obsessive interest in the complexities of reality. But we had never met.

Last year, I finally got to meet and interview Tink Thompson. I hope his interview can become the first part of an extended series on the Kennedy assassination. This film is but a small segment of my six-hour interview with Tink.

Errol Morris is an Academy Award-winning filmmaker (“The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara”) and a recent New York Times best-selling author (“Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography”). His first film, “Gates of Heaven,” is on Roger Ebert’s list of the 10 best movies ever made, and his latest, “Tabloid,” has just been released on DVD. Mr. Morris has received five fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur fellowship. In 2007, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He lives in Cambridge, Mass., with his wife and two French bulldogs.(NYTimes.com).