Quotes about Mr. Death quotes

View Quote Fred Leuchter: "What is the film about to you?"

View Quote Errol Morris: "It's a good question. What it is about is my curiosity--how you got yourself into this fix."

View Quote The above brief exchange between Morris and Leuchter took place immediately after Leuchter saw Mr. Death for the first time.

View Quote Source: The Friendly Executioner by Mark Singer

View Quote "Isn't Fred a sweetie?"

View Quote Errol Morris

View Quote Source: The Friendly Executioner by Mark Singer

View Quote ""It seemed that that audience had no place to stand outside Fred. They became trapped in his ego. They took him quite literally. And when the film was over there were people in the room who wondered whether the Holocaust had really happened."

View Quote Errol Morris discussing reactions to the film after he screened it to a Harvard film class. Morris subsequently reworked the film, including new footage of Leuchter's critics.

View Quote Source: The Friendly Executioner by Mark Singer

View Quote "Fred's story raises lots of interesting questions, such as: What happens if you really need to be loved and the only people who will love you are Nazis? And his version of what he saw in Auschwitz and what happened to him afterward seems to come right out of Nabokov--the clueless narrator, the narrator so far out of touch with what he's saying that it's totally absurd. But how clueless could he possibly be? That's the central mystery. Do we all have these self-invented fables? There's a deep mystery about why Fred's doing what he's doing, and for me it connects with the mystery of the Holocaust: the mystery not of whether it happened but of how it could happen. Is it happenstance that Fred, a person obsessed with death-not unlike me-ended up at Auschwitz? Somehow, he was drawn there, pulled to the center of twentieth-century death. And maybe it's pulling me, too. It's one of my predilections that people do not do evil knowingly. Evil is always construed as some form of doing good. We are always in some kind of delusional state about what our actions mean. I hope this movie becomes more effective if Fred emerges as more a person like you and me. If it's a movie that creates one more Manichaean illustration of good and evil, it becomes less interesting. If he becomes a person who makes us think about how the Holocaust came about, then it's useful."

View Quote Errol Morris

View Quote Source: The Friendly Executioner by Mark Singer

View Quote "Fred hasn't questioned anything we've asked him to do over the last five days. I haven't lied about anything. I haven't had to; he's too honest and decent a man, I look over all this, and I think he's just misguided. He got mixed up with the wrong group of people. There are people who think he's evil, but he's not. The movie, I think, is becoming a kind of odd danse macabre, with Leuchter as my brand of existential hero, or, if you like, existential antihero: the completely benighted human being who still deserves our sympathy."

View Quote Errol Morris while shooting Mr. Death.

View Quote Source: The Friendly Executioner by Mark Singer

View Quote "Part of me has very little desire to get into a debate with Ernst Zündel, David Irving, or even Leuchter. I have read a number of reviewers who have taken me to task for not declaring whether I believe Leuchter is a good person or evil person, that somehow I've been remiss in this regard. I beg to differ. The movie is absolutely clear that his ideas are pernicious and false. That is not up for discussion. What is up for discussion is that I wish to put the viewer in the same position for what I find myself in. It's not to give you on a platter a received view but to force you into the mystery of what is in fact very disturbing and peculiar behavior."

View Quote Errol Morris

View Quote Source: Pitch Weekly

View Quote "Very near the end of my work editing the movie, before it was to be shown publicly for the first time, I invited Fred into my studio to look at what I had done, to give him the opportunity at least to see what was going to be put in front of the public and to comment on it. He told me he liked the movie. He felt that the movie had treated his story fairly and responsibly. And then I presented him with my list of reasons why he's wrong, many of which are in the movie itself. The do****ents, these powerful do****ents that are in the Auchwitz archive. German do****ents. Not allied do****ents, not Jewish do****ents, NAZI do****ents. Nazi do****ents that make specific reference to all of these things Fred said were not there and could not possibly have been there. Fred's answer: I dunno where these do****ents came from. I can't vouch for their authenticity. I'll just keep my original position."

View Quote Errol Morris

View Quote Source: An audio interview conducted in January, 2000 in which Errol Morris discusses Fred Leuchter and Mr. Death.