'The Unknown Known' Trailer: "Everything Seems Amazing In Retrospect"

We probably shouldn't have anticipated that Donald Rumsfeld would open up to documentarian Errol Morris in the same way that former defense secretary Robert McNamara did for the film The Fog of War. But that doesn't make the Morris conversations with Rumsfeld — presented in the new film The Unknown Known — any less fascinating. While reviews out of festivals talked about how little Rumsfeld deviates from prior statements about intelligence and the latter Bush administration, significant aspects of his personality and mindset are still revealed in the interviews.

Check out a full-length trailer for the doc, below.

The Unknown Known opens on April 2.

In THE UNKNOWN KNOWN, Academy Award-winning director Errol Morris (THE FOG OF WAR) offers a mesmerizing portrait of Donald Rumsfeld, one of the key architects of the Iraq War, and a larger-than-life character who provoked equal levels of fury and adulation from the American public. Rather than conducting a conventional interview, Morris has Rumsfeld perform and expound on his "snowflakes," tens of thousands of memos (many never previously published) he composed as a congressman and as an advisor to four different presidents, twice as Secretary of Defense. These memos provide a window onto history—not history as it actually happened, but history as Rumsfeld wants us to see it. Morris makes plain that Rumsfeld's "snowflakes"—whether intended to elucidate, rationalize, obfuscate, or control history—are contradicted by the facts.