Following Los Angeles, Morris embarked on more intimate portrait films, such as Robert Towne (2005) and 1972 (2008), which shift the viewpoint from the panorama of a city to an individual portrait of one of its protagonists, as a way of examining it from the inside out.Following these works, Morris made Beijing (2008), a film about one of the most intricate and ambiguous international
broadcasted events of past years — the 2008 Olympic Games.