Budding genius

A talk with Errol Morris

It's never just one subject with Errol Morris. Within minutes his focus shifts from the proposed logo for his new TV series (a severed chicken foot clutching at a light bulb) to the new rules for selecting the best documentary nominees for the Academy Awards (never nominated before, he's in this year's final cut) to the aesthetics of TV commercials (he's especially proud of one he made for Miller High Life that features a "beeramid"). At last he lights on the subject at hand, his new Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.

"I first heard about him in 1990," he remembers. "A couple of years after The Thin Blue Line, and not terribly interested in doing yet another capital-punishment story. Been there, done that. But I was interested in the story. We were using this device, the Interrortron, for the first time, and I wanted to test the device before shooting the four characters for Fast, Cheap & Out of Control.

"So we brought in Fred, and I don't remember when I became aware of all the Holocaust-denial stuff, but I was certainly aware of it before I brought him into the interview. That was, if you like, what put the story over the top, the fact that there were these two elements, the Holocaust element and the capital-punishment element. But I was not at all prepared for what happened in that first interview. I still think it is one of the best interviews I have ever done, and having heard the interview, I wanted to make a film out of it. It was just so strange, it was so absurd, it was so funny . . . deeply surreal."

Not everyone found it funny, however. Some took it too seriously, at least in the wrong way.

"I showed it [a cut of the film] to an audience in Harvard, actually Mark Singer in the New Yorker wrote this piece about it. This is part of my standard operating procedure. Because it [the movie] can in fact become lost in the editing room. And so it's a way of finding out whether you are living in some kind of fantasy world. To me it was obvious that Fred was absurd and wrong; to others looking at the movie, not so. And so that meant that it would be just deeply irresponsible to release the movie in that form. If someone makes a factual claim in error, you just can't say, well, fine, we'll just let it go. And the fact that he is wrong, of course, is important to the story. People don't get it, in and of themselves, and they need a crutch. I like the movie in its current form, I was able to have my cake and eat it too, I was able to make a portrait principally of Fred."

Who, in fact, is Fred? An anti-Semite? A persecuted truthseeker? A nut?

Morris sees him as a human being. "What's so interesting about this story is how Fred can see himself as a good guy throughout and attach to himself a whole catalogue of virtues. Whether it's his Florence Nightingale role on death row, or his championing the underdog [neo-Nazi Ernst Zünder], as he sees it, on trial in Canada, or defending the right to free expression, seeing himself as some kind of crusading scientist, a Galileo figure . . . It goes on and on. I guess the central question for me is what does Fred think he's doing? Is this just shtick? Is he a victim or a victimizer, or both? How does he justify this to himself? Is he just clueless?

"I don't look at it as a banality-of-evil story. I think it's an absurd story, a story about vanity, among other things. A story about an absurd quest for supposed truth that ends up in nightmare. Rather than finding out anything about the world, Fred is lost in a labyrinth. And is not aware of it. Because we are all lost in a labyrinth, we're just aware of it."

-- P.K.

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