Gregarious director explores his film, humanity

By Aaron Rich

Daily Arts Writer

Errol Morris is an extremely busy man, currently working on a television series and several commercial spots for corporations, not to mention all the press he's doing for his latest film, "Mr. Death - The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.," and work for whatever his next film will be. He is especially hard to track down for an interview.

After canceling plans to fly to Detroit to speak with press about his new film because he couldn't leave his directing work in Boston, his office pushed our rescheduled interview back several times because he was in the middle of meetings surrounding his new television series, "First Person," for Bravo. Once on the phone, though, Morris demonstrated why his schedule is so hectic: He talks a lot and he's a really good talker.

"Mr. Death" tells the story of Fred Leuchter, a man who made a name for himself in the state execution world in the mid 1980s by fine tuning electric chairs, lethal injection machines, gallows and gas chambers for several states who needed their death devices fixed or rebuilt.

His name appeared again in the late '80s when he was called as an expert witness in a case in Canada involving Ernst Zundel, a man who claimed the Holocaust was a myth. Leuchter was employed as an expert on gas chambers (because he had had limited design work on them in the U.S.) to go to Auschwitz- Birkenau, the Nazi concentration camp in Poland, to determine the exact nature of what are commonly known as gas chambers used for executions. Leuchter concluded that these were not gas chambers, partly due bad scientific work and partly due to questionable reasoning.

Morris first read about Leuchter in the news regarding his domestic work on capitol execution devices. He considered Leuchter as a subject in a film, but concluded that there was "not enough story there." When the Zundel story came out a few years later, he had a realization.

"These two stories of Holocaust denial and execution devices connected in one man. To not tell both stories together would be to miss the point," Morris said.

After working on and finishing another film, "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control" (1997), he began searching for somebody to put up the money to make a film about Leuchter.

"People just did not want to pay to make this movie. They were just afraid of it. They did not know what would result from it and they were afraid of that fact," Morris said.

"I tried to point out to one man who was talking to me as if I was a Holocaust denier that there's a big difference between making a movie about a Holocaust denier and being one. I am a Jew. I'm not a Holocaust denier. I've never doubted that the Holocaust happened - not even in my craziest moments. I did finally get the money about a year and a half ago, and I started work on the movie," Morris said.

For the interviews, which make up the majority of the 90-minute runtime, Morris used an invention of his own that he likes to call the "Interatron."

The machine works similarly to a teleprompter where the camera shoots the subject from behind a glass panel on which, instead of a script, they see a simultaneous camera image of Morris talking to them. Facing Morris is the same set up - a camera behind the picture of the subject that the other camera is shooting. This allows Morris' subjects to look directly into the lens and to look into his eyes at the same time, thus avoiding the subject's eyes looking to the side of the camera where the interviewer normally sits.

"I'm still sort of learning about the Interatron. I do see a difference between my interviews now and those I did before I began using it," Morris said. "The Interatron is something that no one else uses. It's so different and quite interesting."

In the film, Morris shows a small anecdote where Leuchter fixes up the electric chair for the state of Tennessee. Leuchter explains that the chair is haunted by the spirits of some of the men who were killed in it and proudly shows as proof a photograph he took of the chair in which ghostly forms seem to writhe in agony.

"The ghost becomes really interesting to me - that's why I included it. It becomes a metaphor for the whole problem of the film - or at least the central question of the film. Namely who is Fred?," said Morris

"I look at that photograph," Morris said, "and see this hand rising and this face contorted (maybe two faces are contorted - I see one; Fred sees many), and I look at the photograph and say, 'Ah, a doctored photograph, a double exposure of some kind.'

"But if that's the case, who produced the double exposure? Fred? Is he lying and just pretending that he doesn't know? Or did he do it himself and then somehow forget that he had done it - just wishful thinking that it might be real or he might be able to sell it. Or was it done by his associate, and he just wanted to buy into the bullshit? What's going on?

"It troubles me," Morris continued, "because it raises exactly the same questions that are raised about his holocaust denial. Does he know what he's doing? Is he doing it out of some sort of cynical desire to manipulate people? Is he's a real bad guy pulling the strings or is he some sort of innocent dupe, some fall guy, some moron or moral imbecile who stumbled into a Nazi camp and bought into the lying without thinking about what he was doing? That is the question. And that same question arises in that photograph," Morris said.

Working on the film has led Morris to rethink, at least figure out, some of his feelings on humanity in general. "I think the mind is a very mixed up place," he said. "We like to think it's in one state or another, like lying or telling the truth - well, lying and telling the truth are pretty clear notions. But whether you know that we're lying or telling the truth is much less clear."

"I imagine us - Leuchter and the rest of us - as being like a deck of cards with a lot of things going on at once. Layers. Part of us play acting, part of us sincere, part of us disingenuous, part of us for real, part of us involved knowingly in what we're doing, other parts being unwitting actors in some kind of dimly perceived play. I think it's a mess," said Morris.

"I think you can ask two kinds of questions," Morris continued, "Is what Fred has done, is it bad? Is it even pernicious? And the answer is, unequivocally, yes. This is bad stuff. Going to Auschwitz and desecrating the place illegally, chipping brick and mortar from the ruins of Birkenau, is this bad? Yes. Is appearing at holocaust revisionist conferences or at neo-Nazi rallies in Europe bad? Yes. Very, very, very bad.

"Then the next kind of question, is Fred a bad man? Is he evil? That's trickier. I would also say to that yes. But I would say also that he's a man not devoid of our sympathy. Perhaps not of our approval - and I would say definitely not of our approval because I disapprove of him.

"But there's something so sad, so deeply disturbing about the story. Do people knowingly commit evil or do they do really rotten things somehow thinking that they're heroes? This is a guy who, it's clear, wants to see himself as deeply heroic," sad Morris.

Morris clearly gets deeply involved in his work. He summed up "Mr. Death" in a few words: "The film 'Schindler's List' has the rather uninteresting thesis that anybody can be a hero. 'Mr. Death' has the thesis that anybody can think they're a hero, anybody can write their own story in their own mind to construe themselves as heroic."

Courtesy of Lion's Gate

Errol Morris' cameras shoot Fred Leuchter, the subject of the new film "Mr. Death."