FOR EVIDENCE

In another example of how the film looks past the borders of the photos, Morris uses an interview with Sabrina Harman to prove that the infamous photo of her grinning over the corpse of suspected terrorist Manadel al-Jamati was taken as evidence.

'You look at the photograph, and you see her and the thumb and the dead body and you think `Monster. This is monstrous. This person is beyond the pale,' '' Morris says. ``What you don't know is she wrote a letter to her girlfriend shortly after saying she took these pictures in order to expose the military. Her commanding officer had lied to her and said the man had died of a heart attack. She took all these pictures of the corpse -- literally over a dozen pictures detailing the injuries he had received -- to make it absolutely clear he had not died of a heart attack and provide evidence of what the Army was trying to cover up, which was a CIA murder.''

Morris shot 20 interviews in total for the movie, with about half of them ending up in the finished film. Some, like his sit-down with Janis Karpinski, the brigadier general in charge of the prisons at the time, stretched on for 17 hours over two days. The sheer amount of information gleaned from the interviews -- the longest he has conducted for any film -- was at times overwhelming.

But the director says he kept the film accessible to even the most casual viewer by sticking to a simple tenet: ``Just the photographs, ma'am.''

``You could make a hundred different movies out of this material, but I kept going back to the initial impulse, which was the photographs. They are in part a metaphor, yes, for how elusive the world really is -- how hard it is to grab a hold of and understand. They provided my way into the story.

''But the movie is ultimately about people as much as it is about images,'' Morris adds. 'I was having dinner with a friend of mine who was writing a piece about all this, and he kept coming back to the question of `Did they have any choice? Did they have any free will at all in this?' It's a question that makes you wonder what you would do. I'm so anti-authoritarian that I could never be in the military, because they would throw me out. But what do you do when all your superior officers are in the game, and they're telling you to shut up and do what you're supposed to do?''

HUMAN ELEMENT

It is that human element that Morris hopes will help Standard Operating Procedure stand out from the recent batch of Iraq war documentaries and feature films, none of which has managed to attract a sizable audience, despite often-strong reviews.

``I suppose Standard Operating Procedure is an Iraq movie -- how can you say it isn't? -- but I think it's also a movie that will be around for a long time, because it's about people and how we frame our conceptions of them.''

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