Chris Morris on His New Film “The Day Shall Come”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Tell me what inspired you and why you keep probing essentially Islamic terrorism.

CHRIS MORRIS, WRITER AND DIRECTOR, “THE DAY SHALL COME”: Well, this isn’t about Islamic terrorism, this is about a government, a paranoid government reacting to what it thinks might be Islamic terrorism. So the story that struck me is a news story about 10 years ago on British TV news, there was a report that the FBI had arrested an army planning a full-scale ground war against the United States. And I thought that’s a striking thing, a full-scale ground war. I, by chance, bumped into someone three years later who was involved in that trial. He said, remember that full-scale ground war, you know what it was? It was seven construction workers planning to ride into Chicago on horses. And I said come on. What are you talking about? He said, yes, basically these builders, these bankrupt builders bumped into an FBI informant who offered them $50,000 to come up with a plan against the government. Plan number one, they asked for overalls, working boots, and all the things they need to do their jobs, plus and resources to lead a parade against the governor’s house in order to protest conditions in the projects. The informant said, you know, you’re not going get the money for that, you got to think bigger, and basically provoked them into coming up with a crockpot scheme to knock over the Sears Tower.

AMANPOUR: To knock over the Sears Tower?

MORRIS: Yes. Yes. Because he said we need something that’s explosive, we need something that’s big against the government. Don’t just talk about protests. So they rifted this idea. They were not going to do it, I mean —

AMANPOUR: These are Americans — where does this army base?

MORRIS: So they were in Miami, in Liberty City in Miami. And it’s very neglected and it’s basically the sort of — it is the paradigm kind of fishing ground for these FBI operations. Now, you know, it could be any poor part of any city.

AMANPOUR: But why were the FBI trying to provoke, entrap, create an army? Why?

MORRIS: Well, because they’ve — within the confines of the bureaucratic system driven themselves slightly mad, and they’ve done it by a long step process. They reacted badly to 9/11 because they had certain shortcomings that they have to cover up so they talked up the threat immediately given the impression that there was a sleeper cell in every city. This is a long time ago but remember, this in the context of an us and them dynamic that was coming out of the government, the FBI sort of accidentally discovered that it’s harder to catch a real terrorist than it is to make up your own. And this is demonstrated no more clearly than in Boston where they spent a year winding up a schizophrenic to come up with a crazy plan to fly model airplanes into the dome of the Capitol while missing the two guys who were planning to blow up the marathon. Because if you find somebody in a marginalized community who is making themselves conspicuous one way or another and surround them with full trends and the promise of money, then you can get them to do something.