8B - The Michigan Daily Graduation Edition - Thursday, April 13, 2000 THE FINAL WALK Director Morris discusses current, past projects' 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 televi- sion 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, gal- lows 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-Birke- nau, 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 to bad scientific work and part- ly due to questionable reasoning. Morris first read about Leuchter in the news regarding his domestic work on capitol execution devices. He con- sidered 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 fin- ishing 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 Holo- caust denier that there's a big difference between making a movie about a Holo- caust 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 cam- era 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' sub- jects 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 cam- era 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 interest- ing 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 holo- caust 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 disingenu- ous, 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 Birke- nau, 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 trick- ier. 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 defi- nitely not of our approval because I dis- approve 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 uninter- esting thesis that anybody can be a hero. 'Mr. Death' has the thesis that anybody can think they're a hero, any- body can write their own story in their own mind to construe themselves as heroic." $ $ Sticking Around this Su Make Easy Money FLEXIBLE HOUR j Michigan Telef Rt $7 per hour + bonu 611 Church, 4th flo 998-7420 Apply On-line! www.telefund.umich $ $ $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ $ $ $ $ $ immer? $ with $ S $ und) $ ses$ $ $ or $ i.edu $ Stuart dishes screenwriting dirt' By Erin Podoisky Daily Arts Writer Screenwriter Jeb Stuart, never one to lie but certainly not above putting a spin on something, finally came clean on the origin of the classic Bruce Willis line, "Yippee ki-yay, mother- fucker!" from "Die Hard." "I think a lot of people take credit for it and that's usually the way it goes in the movies. It was not origi- nally in the script, per se. I think Bruce added a little touch to it but there was something very similar to that in the script," Stuart, who wrote the film, said in a recent interview with the Michigan Daily. "That's the way it goes. What I will do is I always take credit for some- thing that turns out great and I dis- tance myself from it and blame it on the actor when it screws up," he said, chuckling. Primarily known for his work on action movies, Stuart had an interest- ing entry into Hollywood's ranks. "I went through a sort of academic course to get to screenwriting, which is kind of unusual. I did a masters at I Lste of Ckicoc, r i nhere in n Ar orn! Chapel Hill in communications, and off of that masters I was then accept- ed into a program at Stanford Univer- sity and did another masters in communication which focused only on screenwriting," Stuart said. He then did a year-long fellowship through Stanford, although the pro- gram is now administered through the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. "It allowed me to write a screenplay which I then sold to a stu- dio in Hollywood and got on the other side of the fence," he said. "It was kind of an unusual way to get into the business. Most people get in sort of non-academically." That first screenplay knocked around for 12 years before finally get- ting made and released in 1997 as "Switchback." "That was from what they call a 'calling card' script and it was optioned at Columbia Pictures. It was cast and all ready to go and then it never was made," Stuart said. "But on the strength of that script 1 was offered a five-script contract at Disney, which was just getting reor- ganized. This was 1985 and that's when Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg came in and took over the studio. They were sort of scouring film schools for talent and I was in the right place at the right time. "I never got a movie made at Dis- ney. In fact, I only wrote one script, but while I was in the down-time after I turned in a draft, I did a project over at Fox. It was an old novel that had bounced around from studio to studio called 'Nothing Lasts Forever.' Nobody had been able to crack it because it was about a 65-year-old man who, at the end of the movie, goes to Los Angeles to visit his daughter and the building is taken over by terrorists and at the end he's responsible for dropping his daughter off this 60-story building. "I kind of revamped that and made it more about a guy trying to get back in the good graces of his wife. That ,became 'Die Hard' and that was my ;second script. And then from 'Die Hard' on it was a little bit different. Again, it was kind of an unusual situ- ation in that it was really, seriously the second professional script [I wrote]," Stuart said. "I never wrote an action movie before 'Die Hard.' 'Switchback' really a suspense thriller. I like s pense an awful lot, I love Hitchcock, I love De Palma and people like that," Stuart said. His resume includes mostly suspense and action thrillers, making him a successful specialist in a tough genre. When asked if he felt his extensive action credits list limit- ed him, Stuart admitted that they did, somewhat -- and that isn't a problem for him. "I -do think I've been pigeonhole but it's one I kind of gladly go to. It s not to say I don't love screwball comedies. I'm not quite sure I would really be a good writer for that. "I don't really do as much action as I used to. Those movies are driven by forces that are greater than a great screenplay sometimes. It's a money game. You happen to get Tom Cruise or you happen to get Mel Gibson Bruce Willis for a picture and hop- fully you've got a script. And if you don't it can be a nightmare." Many of Stuart's screenplays have been used as vehicles for big-budget stars like Willis and Harrison Ford. Working with such demanding talent can constrain the development of a movie's story, Stuart explained. "That was the case on 'The Fugi- tive.' Hopefully, if you're lucky, you work with someone like Harris who has great feelings for charactt and for the story. Almost every great actor or big star has good feelings for the character. But you have to wear the other hat, which is make sure the story doesn't get completely lost." Stuart took on three roles for "Switchback," on which he was not only writer but producer and director as well. "I love wearing all the hats," he said. "It makes it easy in song respects and at the same time if you like working with other people you sometimes miss that great input of somebody from the outside that you really respect who wants to see it maybe in a different way." k i loom A ln DJeliverj [vencdli 10:30 cm until 4 in tkemor'ning1!!! www.pizzahouse.com ©2000 Pizza House Inc. it a. -J Better Scores Better Schools Better Career Congratulations Seniors! The Princeton Review, the nation's leader in test prep, wants to congratulate you. 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