Andrew Jarecki

Andrew Jarecki

Andrew Jarecki was interviewed at the National Film Theatre on 23 March 2004 by Leslie Felperin.

Andrew Jarecki's acclaimed and controversial documentary Capturing the Friedmans charts the dramatic and painful events that overtook a seemingly happy, healthy, wealthy and perfectly ordinary American Jewish family, when allegations concerning pornography and paedophilia were made against father Arnold Friedman - a respected teacher - and one of his sons. Both a troubling, even tragic portrait of a family in crisis and an alarming study of a society suffering from paranoid hysteria, this affecting, intriguing film has a very special trump card: copious video footage of the family shot over the years by a home-movie obsessed son.

Read the Sight & Sound review

Following a screening of Capturing the Friedmans, the bfi was delighted to welcome director Andrew Jarecki to the NFT stage to discuss the genesis of the film, guilt versus innocence and the effects of memory and hysteria.

Interview © BFI 2004

Introduction

Leslie Felperin: Capturing the Friedmans [2003] is one of the finest documentaries I've ever seen. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last year, 2003, and then it went on to play at many, many festivals all round the world, winning scathes of awards and heaps of praise. A very interesting film and also a very controversial one, it's something that really gets you talking, so I imagine a lot of you will want to stay after the film, to ask some questions, because it's one of those movies that just really gets you stimulated, gets you thinking. It's appropriate that its tag-line in the US was 'Who do you believe?' So without much further ado, I'd just like to introduce the director of the movie, Mr Andrew Jarecki [applause].

Andrew Jarecki: Thank you. I'm so happy to have the film in London here finally. I think it's an important place to show this movie for a lot of reasons, but having talked to some members of the press in the last couple of days, it really is - and you may not feel this way, living inside this little cocoon that you have - but it is an intellectually free place, and it's a place where a film like this can find an audience. So I'm very happy to be here and to be in this National Film Theatre because we don't have one of those in America. We have movies, we have tons of movies, but there's no sanctioned place to see them where you actually have like a little area where you can discuss them afterwards. You generally get shooed out or they say 'come on, we gotta sell some more popcorn, you gotta get out of here...' so this is a place of film and I'm happy to be here to show the film. So I do hope you'll stay at the end and we can talk more about the film - you'll probably have some questions and I hope you enjoy it [applause].

[Screening: Capturing the Friedmans]

LF: Thanks very much for staying and thank you very much, Andrew, for the film. I think we'll start off - I'll ask a couple of questions and then we'll open it up wider to the audience, and when I recognise you and ask you to ask your question, if you could shout it quite loud, because the acoustics in here aren't as ideal as they could be...

The genesis of Capturing the Friedmans

LF:... I'm going to start off asking you, Andrew, first... there's a fascinating story about how you came to make this film. Do you want to explain that for us first?

AJ: Well I started out making a completely different film, so... that sometimes happens with a documentary, you know, you start out making a film about one thing and you wake up one day and it's something frighteningly different, which was the case here. So I started out making a film about professional children's birthday party clowns in New York City. That's really true, and so David Friedman was a natural subject of that film because he's the number one guy who does that for a living in New York and so I worked with him for a few months, and then, along the way I discovered that he had this secret story, and so next stop was Elaine, and it was really at Elaine's house that I discovered what essentially the story was - that's my wife's telephone, by the way, in case anyone was curious about who forgot to turn off their telephone, that was my wife...

Anyway, so I went to Elaine 's house... originally I wanted to meet Elaine, partly because, as you can see in the film, David is so incredibly angry at his mother and he says so many terrible things about her and so... I said to him at one point 'I should probably talk to your mother,' and he said 'why would you do that?' and I said 'because you say all these terrible things about her and if she's crazy then we should be able to decide that for ourselves, and it gives her a chance to say...' and he said 'oh, so if you interviewed my mother and she was in the film and then she would act real crazy, then everybody would know that I'm right, that my mother's crazy.' And I said 'well that's... you know that's one possible outcome,' and so he said 'well I don't know, I still don't want you to talk to my mother,' and then... I had found out that David had been on a television show in the States called Candid Camera which is totally ironic considering what the film ended up being.

He was about four years old when he was on this show and he said that he had never had a copy of it because it was in the days before videotape and so they didn't really have a way of giving him a copy of it. So he just had these photographs that had been taken by his father off the television screen, so just a series of still photographs of himself on Candid Camera. And so I had gotten a copy of it just because I wanted to see what it was like and I didn't even think to give it to him at the time, and then he called me up a couple of weeks later and he said, 'well you keep wanting to talk to my mother, and I want a copy of that Candid Camera episode so if you could use your film-maker tricks to get me a copy of that then I'll let you talk to my mother.'

So you could argue that this was all about David getting the story out, that he wanted to get it out, that he needed to get it out, but he needed to do it in this tortured, strange way. So then I went to visit Elaine, and I went into her house and we set up to interview her in this living room she has in this little tiny house in Long Island where she lives with her new husband Peter, who, by the way, is an incredible character himself, he's a veteran of every possible twelve-step programme you could ever be a part of, and he's perfect for her and you get the feeling like they met in the Catskills, at some party or something, or some divorcé's thing or... and that she said 'oh my god, I've got a story to tell,' and she told him and he was like 'oh yeah I got one of those, don't worry about it...'

Anyway I was in Elaine's house and I was in the front room and I was setting up to interview her there and it took about an hour and then she came back in and she sat down and I said 'well are you ready to go?' and she looked around and said 'well, maybe there'd be a better room, we can go into this other room...' So she took me further into the house and she said 'we'll set up in the dining room,' so we took everything down and we relit the shot in the dining room. She came back about an hour later and she looked around and she said 'maybe there's a better room where we could do this.' So we took everything down again.

We followed her to the back of the house where she had this little office, and in the office there was a desk, and I really got the feeling like she was leading me somewhere... we were talking, getting to know each other a little bit... and she hadn't had a lot of contact with the outside world and she was getting more comfortable with me, so she brought me into this private office of hers, where there was just this little desk, and all the papers on the desk were facing her chair and she put me at this other chair in front of a little writing tablet and she said 'why don't you sit here and set up and I'll come back in about 20 minutes?' On the writing tablet was this letter, maybe a letter to the editor of something... it was unclear. I thought it was a letter to me because it was the only thing that was facing me, and, because I'm curious, I read it, and it said 'a person of faith, a deeply religious person, I was always brought up in the Jewish faith, to believe that truth and justice were the most important things. Truth and justice were never a part of this case.'

And that was really the first time I ever knew that there was such a thing as a case. It was the single word that made me realise that I needed to look a lot deeper into this story, and so, in that same interview, that day... you see a piece of it in the film, the earlier interview with her... it's got a little different tone than the other one, and in it she says that phrase about... I say something about 'tell me about your family,' and she says 'well I can't say too much about it... we were a family...' and I just thought it was so sad to hear this woman who... she's in her 70s, she's obviously spent her whole life raising this family, and she's talking about the family in the past tense.

It made me want to find out what happened to the family, what went wrong, why were these people no longer a family. So I was driving back to New York and I called my office and I said 'go on Nexus and look up Friedmans, late 80s, case, legal case of some kind...' and so my assistant called me back about 20 minutes later and she said 'alright, you'd better pull over, because I've got to read you something...' So that was really the beginning of my introduction to the story of the Friedmans.

Ditching the clowns

LF: Amazing. And so once you realised that, how long did it take you before you decided to ditch the clown documentary, to do a film about the Friedmans themselves?

AJ: We realised our clown documentary was going horribly awry and the story was so fascinating and sad and engrossing and so we just kept listening to people, and met with a lot of people who knew something about the story. And then I had this flirtation with Elaine where I would call her and she would let me know that she knew that I knew something, and we sort of went back and forth, and eventually when I finally got back to David and I said 'well look I've discovered this story and I'd like to make a film about it and I think you should help me do it. I think it's a story that needs to be told,' he said 'I don't know how I feel about that,' and he was very emotional about it and then he said 'but I guess if you're even going to consider refocusing the film I should tell you that, in addition to the 25 hours of 8mm home movies of the family during happy times that my father took which he shared with me at the beginning, there's another box with another 25 hours of home videos that I started shooting after the police showed up.' So that was such a major revelation, and obviously I knew that would change the film in a lot of ways. That was the beginning of the next chapter.

LF: That's so much material, that's like 50 hours, and then you must have done probably the same again of interviews with all the different subjects involved, so how did you approach structuring the film in terms of making it a dramatic story and in terms of creating a balance?

AJ: Well, I think we had a basic sense that the film needed to be presented in some way that was similar to the way that I had discovered the story, in other words, when you start to follow somebody's version of the story, and you start to trust them, suddenly they turn some corner and tell you something that turns out not to be true, or something irrational happens and then you get to start at square one again. So that was... in a way the film becomes a series of unreliable narrators and that was certainly how I had experienced it as I was making it, so we kept trying to do that and, to give a balance to the film, by letting people from both sides of the argument, in a way participate. But, fundamentally, the film for me was always about the family and so we wanted to keep it focused on the family. There were versions of the film, for example, where the epilogue at the end had a bunch of other people in it, who were saying that the judge in the film is now retired and she teaches ballroom dancing on cruise ships in America, and so we thought 'well, you gotta put that in there, it's too interesting...' and so we had an epilogue and also talked about what other people were doing today. And in the end it was just too diffuse, really, it didn't zero in on what the story was, it just sort of was a series of interesting things, so we figured that was good enough for the... one day there would be a DVD with that on it, but in the meantime we kept the film as focused as possible.

LF: It is a story that's just run and run, as it were, I think perhaps because of the absence of an epilogue, people are really intrigued, really want to know what happened next, but since the film's come out, it's had a lot of attention...

First screenings

LF:... I remember, you told me before there were these two fascinating screenings, one in Tribeca and one in Great Neck, and where many of the participants attended the screening. Could you tell us about that?

AJ: We had invited various people who were in the film, to watch the film at various times and so the film was screening... I think this was the first movie - ever - that was released in two cities to begin with, and one was Manhattan and Great Neck, Long Island, and so we felt like, why not bring this film home, to its home town and see how people respond to it. And the film actually played there all summer and I found out at the end that the number of people who had seen the film in Great Neck at the Squire Theater was 10,000 and that the total adult population of Great Neck is 20,000. And so half of the people in Great Neck had seen the film in the end. And the reactions at this one screening we did... we got a phone call a few nights before the screening, which was on a Friday night, and it was Joe Onorato, the prosecutor that's in the film, the guy with the grey hair, and he said, 'well, I just want to RSVP for the screening on Friday night,' and so the person that was answering the phone said, 'OK, will that be you and Mrs Onorato?' and he said 'oh, no no no, we're all coming, me the judge, all the junior prosecutors, the detectives, Fran Galasso the chief detective, all the people that interviewed the kids, the lawyers who were involved in the case, the postal inspector John McDermott, he's going to be there....'

And so Jennifer was checking off names and she came into my office after and she said 'am I right that that's the night that the Friedmans are going to the screening?' [laughter] and I said 'yeah, that's right so... let's see what happens...' and so, of course, if you learn anything from the Friedmans you learn to keep the camera going and so of course we shot that whole evening [laughter] and it was just totally insane, it was just an altercation between these people, so it was these people expressing themselves very fully about their feelings about the case, and crazy stuff happened. At one point somebody says 'why did Jesse do this...' and David gets up and he says... 'oh, I know what happens...' Then the detective in the film, Lloyd Doppman, who's got a bit of a head of hair and he's sort of the smart detective who, I think, does a good job interviewing the kids and he talks about how dangerous it is to interview them wrong... he gets up and he says 'well that journalist who's in the film, she never reached out to us and she really did a terrible job and she didn't represent anything properly...' and he's standing there explaining this to the audience, and directly behind him, sitting in the chair directly behind him, is Debbie Nathan, the journalist in the film, who's only about this tall, and she pops up and she says 'well I'm right here, what's the problem?' [laughter] and he says 'oh! Oh it's you !' and he's totally shocked and then somebody else says something and she says 'well, it's obvious that the police did a bad job interviewing the kids...' the chief detective, of course, Fran Galasso, gets up and says 'let me tell you a few things about how we did our job...' and then at some point David, as well, said 'we got bad legal advice...' and of course Peter Panaro, Jesse's lawyer's sitting in the front row and he pops up and says 'hold on a second...' so it was really endlessly fascinating, it continues like that.

LF: The climax of the story was Jesse was in the back row...

AJ: Yeah well, sorry... then at the end somebody says 'well, I don't know, what would Jesse say...' or something... and you hear this little throat clear in the back and this little guy in a windbreaker in the top row gets up and people spin around like at the end of one of those courtroom movies, and suddenly it's Jesse Friedman in the seat. It's just totally surreal...

Jesse

LF: One of the obvious questions is what happened to Jesse. He has a website now and he's putting through an appeal. What's going on now? Bring us a little bit up to date, because the story keeps on going on in a way.

AJ: Jesse, he's a very interesting guy, he's a very bright guy, and he's one of the most unlikely types to be sitting in Attica [prison]. You just can't imagine this kid in Attica. He had a very tough time in prison and he is now out, he goes to college... he's still got a very tough time, because he's got this... for the first two years after you get out you have to wear this electronic monitoring device, then after that, forever, you're subject to Megan's Law, you can't live in most places, you can't live in a building where there are children, you can't work in most jobs, you can't... well there are a lot of restrictions, and you can always get sent back to jail very quickly, so he's always very concerned about that, and he's had a tough time with parole...

One of the things that he's done now, he's tried to do this thing called the 440 Motion, where you try to get your case re-examined, based on newly-discovered evidence. And he's used a bunch of material that was in the film for that, and of course the judge has now come out very aggressively against that and said there was never a doubt about this, it's very clear... Which is a little disturbing, given the fact - whatever you think about the Friedmans ' guilt or innocence - the judge doesn't know, the judge never was part of the investigation. The judge isn't even given any of that information until there's a trial. And so you have a judge who's out there on the warpath, saying she knew what happened and other than the fact that she's very close friends with the detective, she has no information about the investigation. She never spoke to any of the kids. So it's a tough road for him, I don't know what the outcome's going to be, but he's certainly fighting very hard to try to get his case re-heard in some way.

LF: With so much about the story, and so much at stake, there were certain things you made deliberate decisions not to cover. I'm thinking of the Ross Goldstein stuff... he was also charged...

AJ: Yeah, there's are any number of things that do or don't fit into the film, but there's a complicated story about another, not just one boy, but actually three other boys, who are arrested around the time that Jesse was arrested. The police at one point had said that there were at least five adults who were simultaneously engaging in these acts with ten children in this room, which was going to be a hard story to sell to a jury because the room was very, very small and Jesse had actually drawn a blueprint of the room, and so just the idea of putting 15 people in this room and having them all being naked - that was going to be a tough road, I think, for the prosecutor.

And so eventually they went to one boy and said 'we know you were there and we have students who say you were there, will you testify?' and there was one boy who lived on the same street as Jesse and eventually - they were threatening Jesse with a 50-year jail term - and then eventually they brought this other boy in, they said he did exactly the same crimes, but ultimately they said that they would give him six months and a clean criminal record if he just confessed to the same crimes that Jesse, basically to give a confession that would implicate Jesse. So then he agreed and the other two boys were immediately let go... It's very complicated, how these investigations happen. Certainly the police are enormously committed to what they're doing. Obviously they felt very strongly about this case. But there's a certain amount of machining that happens around trying to get convictions in these kinds of cases. So should we ask...?

Making documentaries

LF: Yes, let's go to 'audience questions'... Gentleman there...

Q: How did you end up becoming a documentary maker?

AJ: The question is how did I get into making documentaries... and I don't exactly necessarily think of myself as a documentarian... this just happened to be a really fascinating subject. I would make another documentary, if the subject was interesting... I've made short films that are fiction films before and directed plays... I just think this story happened to be just very compelling, and I guess my only advice would be to say you can buy a camera really cheaply now. You can make a really interesting film with it, and that's the one thing I would say, just don't be afraid to go out and film something. That's the best way to get started.

I had a very good experience with this amazing film-maker called Albert Maysles, who's one of the great documentarians. I just went in and met him, because I knew somebody who knew him, and I told him the story and he said 'well it sounds like a really interesting story - have you shot anything yet? About the clown movie?' and I said 'no' and he said 'well why don't we go out on Saturday?' I was like 'I'm going to go out with Albert Maysles and shoot on Saturday? This Saturday?' and he said 'yeah, yeah, I have time on Saturday.'

So I remember I was paralysed the first day because I didn't know what the film was going to be and I wasn't ready and I hadn't thought it through and all that bullshit that you tell yourself because you're afraid to do it the first day. I remember I picked him up outside his building - he lives at The Dakota, in this majestic old building, and this little white-haired guy comes out and he's got his black glasses on and his camera bag, and he's the guy that shot Gimme Shelter [David Maysles, 1970], he shot Grey Gardens [David Maysles, 1975], Salesman [Albert Maysles, 1969], these incredible films. He's was hanging out with Mick Jagger in the good old days. So I'm standing at my side of the car and I couldn't get in the car... he was on the other side getting ready to get in and he could tell I was nervous about going out on this day to shoot, and he walked all the way round to my side of the car - he comes up to about this high on me - and - he gets really close to you when he wants to say something, so he grabs my arm... he looks at me and he goes 'well, we're gonna get our feet wet' [laughter] and then he walked round the other side and he got in... and I was OK then, I could get in the car, and I felt totally good about it, so I would say my only advice is... get your feet wet.

LF: Was it expensive to make? How long did it take, from inception to getting it finished?

AJ: It took about three and a half years to make the film, most of which was investigating, thinking and trying to plough through it, and it wasn't a cheap film but we had a bunch of people that were willing to contribute, and we had some money to start with, and as a film gets more interesting, sometimes it's easier to get people to work on it. People want to work on something interesting. It's one of those things where if you're working on The Bad News Bears III, you've got to pay everybody the most money in the world to make such a crappy movie, and then, on the other hand, you know, you're working on something really interesting and people say 'oh, I've got time to do that,' because most people in the movie business aren't working most of the time, so if you can appeal to their better selves and get them onto something that's really interesting, everybody's willing to do that... I know it's really hot here, so I'll try to speak even more quickly than I usually do.

Guilt and innocence

LF: Lady with the blonde hair...

Inaudible question

AJ: So the question was how do I feel about the guilt or innocence question. Maybe before I answer that I'd be curious to say... just to put a fine point on this... how many people felt that the outcome of the case, this portion of the outcome, that Jesse Friedman, going to jail for 13 years, how many people felt that was justified, that that was a proper outcome?

LF: Raise your hands...

[almost no one raises their hands]

AJ: That's interesting... how many people feel like it was a travesty, it was really completely wrong? [a third of the audience raises their hands]... And then how many people feel like they're not sure?... [the other two thirds of the audience raises their hands] Yeah... well that's pretty rational... English crowd... that's good [laughter] ... It's not a bad response actually, different than the response in America I would say, you know in America you get a lot of people on one side or the other, and not a whole lot of people who admit to the obvious fact that we cannot know everything that happened 15 years ago, 16, 17, 18 years ago, when these crimes were alleged to have taken place.

I guess my take on it is that more than one thing can be true, and that's something that's hard for people to accept sometimes. It's possible that we know that Arnold Friedman was a paedophile, that's not debatable. We know that he was not only a paedophile in his mind, but also that he took action and had sexual contact with at least two boys that he admits to and there's his brother and then the pornography charges are added to that to complicate things, so maybe he would have needed to go to jail under all circumstances, that's possible, and certainly what Elaine says, that Arnold had a need to confess and he had a need to go to jail, and she says the sad thing is that he took his son with him.

But it's possible that Arnold Friedman was a paedophile and committed certain bad acts and yet the acts that he was being accused of might not have happened. I think it depends on your impression of him. If you feel like he's a guy who had the potential to be a violent guy, which probably would have been a first for him in his life; he certainly went through 55 years of being a pretty low-key guy, and now he's being accused of very unusual crimes that would be unusual for somebody to do for the first time at that point in his life, well that leads you down a whole other path, because if you don't see him as a violent guy or a guy who would have done something in a public setting, then the charges against Jesse start to get wobbly, because the whole idea was that Jesse was there and if these things were public and were visible to other people and were violent then he must have been a part of it - he couldn't have just been standing there - or even if he was just standing there, what was he doing?

So I guess my reason for making the film that way was to raise these issues and to say that there's room in this film for the audience. I don't like to be spoon-fed what the director thinks of a film, particularly when the director wasn't there. So I think there are certain things in the film that everybody sort of agrees on, like this is not the kind of police work you'd like to see performed if this were your son, and yet at the same time, clearly there were problems in the family, clearly Arnold Friedman had problems, so I think we know what we can know from this, the goal of the film is to try to raise these issues and, among other things, make us feel like the first version of the story that you hear is not always all that accurate. Sometimes the second or third or, as in this film, the tenth version is also a little hard to manage around.

Drawing conclusions

Inaudible question

AJ: The question is did some people react, particularly in George Bush's America - that could be a temporary situation, by the way - in that situation, was there any kind of negative reaction to the fact that there's a lot of ambiguity in the film... I think the audience breaks down along different lines there. There's certainly people who got to the end of the film and said 'thank God the film doesn't tell me what to think, because I'm smart enough to come to my own... I wouldn't say conclusions even, about it... I might be smart enough to home without conclusions, wouldn't that be fascinating, if people could do that? And, at the same time, there are people who got to the end of it and just said 'well what the hell... why don't you just tell me what happened? Obviously you did all this work, as if doing the work automatically means you can transport yourself back in time and suddenly I'm in a computer room on Piccadilly Road in Great Neck, Long Island with some nerdy computer teacher and his son. So there certainly is a lot of passion about it.

I would say the judge in the case is just furious, she says... that line that she says... there was never a doubt in my mind as to their guilt... she says that line was unfair and that we shouldn't have chosen that line; what she really meant to say was that after the date on which they both pled guilty, thereafter, no longer had the pre-existing doubt that had been in her mind prior to that, about whether they were guilty or not... you know, that's not what she says...

And Fran Galasso, the detective in the film, when I first met her - she's a brilliant communicator, I mean she's frighteningly good, you can see her standing in front of a large group of police officers and saying 'this is the job we've got to do,' and she's very persuasive, she's great with the press, she filled the press with all kinds of things that turned out later not to be true, I have to say. I mean whether you feel like the Friedmans are guilty or innocent, for sure, Fran Galasso tells a lot of lies. She was the person that planted with the press the idea that there had been a pornographic... child pornography, interspersed with computer books on the classroom shelves. That's false. That fact was not borne out by any of the materials - a search warrant details exactly where pornography was found - it was in Arnold Friedman's private office behind the piano. She says in the film there were foot-high stacks of pornography in plain view, literally all around the house.

That's a scary thing to see, somebody who's got so much power and is willing to say to a camera something that turns out later not to be true. But I would say, I think she thinks it's true. Even to this day, she was at that screening in New York City and she said... somebody asked her about it and she said 'well that's what I saw, that's what was there.' Well your detectives were the ones who took the photographs that show that that's not true, and they're the ones that wrote up the detailed search warrant inventory that identified everything and, God knows, they were looking for pornography. It's not like they forgot to write down some of the pornography [laughter] ... we've got a lot of titles on that page. So that's disturbing also. But is it more disturbing than David Friedman 's incredible denial about his father's paedophilia? I don't know, that's one sentence... what does that fucking sentence mean? Well, that's seeing what you want to see, it's such a big theme, this idea of memory, in the film.

LF: Girl at the back...

[Question about the false memory syndrome in children who accused the Friedmans of commiting abuse]

AJ: Well I don't know. That depends on what you believe. If you feel like there were... that, based on what you've seen here - there was a lot of violence, sexual abuse happening in the Friedman house, then maybe the parents were missing the point in some way, but if you feel, on the other hand, like maybe that wasn't the case, then maybe one of the reasons why there wasn't evidence of that kind of thing happening is because there wasn't that kind of thing happening.

Certainly, it's the Friedmans' main point in their defence and had they ever gotten to trial I think their main point would have been how could these things go on for five years with hundreds of victims, and yet the parents came to pick up the kids a few minutes after class, sometimes the parents came unannounced, and everything was fine and the kids were all fully clothed... I ask myself this... I put my two kids into the bath tub, and I can't figure out who's socks are who's at the end, how could you do that with ten kids that were all naked at the same time and have them all zipped up by the time the parents show up [laughter] , but that may not have been... it may be that the extent of the charges is outrageous. It may be if you pared back the charges you could find a greater level of truth or something like that...

The Friedmans' reactions

Q: How did the family react to the film?

AJ: How did the Friedmans react to the film? Well as you might not be surprised to learn that there wasn't one unified reaction [laughter] from the Friedman family. But they certainly... I think on balance they like the film. They knew that I wasn't going to make a propaganda piece for the family. I think if David made the film himself - he certainly told me this - he would have left out certain details like his father's confession to molesting a number of boys, that might have been something he might have left on the editing room floor. Or actual images of the child pornography that was found in the house, things like that, but I think that on balance the family was so horribly treated in the press - very often in a case like this, the culprits kind of get turned into monsters, that I think their feeling was that if the film just showed them as human beings, even with a lot of problems and even showed all their home movies in this very personal way, that the audience would have to see them as people, not see them as monsters, and would raise the possibility that maybe they were not treated fairly, so, in general, I think that's been pretty positive a development.

It's not good for David 's clown career, if anybody was going to ask that question. And it has not been a net positive for the clown business, but I think it's also been very good for David, because David has a lot of... issues, just in his life, trying to get a relationship going, or whatever, he's had a lot to overcome, because he can never be honest about who he is, or about his background. I spoke to a number of his old girlfriends who said, 'you know... I was totally in love with him, and I wanted to marry him... but I could never get to that next step with him, and I don't know what it was... there's something he wasn't sharing with me...' Those people have all seen the film now, so... that's the end of that [laughter] ...at the back, there's somebody that's asking a question...

Q: Why did Seth Friedman refuse to take part in the film?

AJ: You know, Seth, who's sort of the missing Friedman here, I pursued Seth a lot. I tried to get him to be in the film and he always took the view through David or through Jesse that he just didn't want to be in the film at all, he didn't understand why anyone would make a film about this. He felt like... he was the one Friedman who really felt like there was an organised conspiracy against the family, and he said he felt like the judge - it's true, the judge and the detective are very close friends, they came to see the film together, for the first time, they called each other. Once I'd interviewed the judge, she said 'you've gotta go see my friend Fran.

So Seth's view was that this was kind of a put-up job, from the beginning. Not that the police... felt... that they were unfairly prosecuting them, but that it was organised, that the police, the judge, the prosecutor had all sort of agreed to the game plan. And so he's kind of a real conspiracy theorist, and... he's got a family now, he said that he didn't want to have his family involved in this and he has a daughter, and he said he was afraid that his daughter would be taken away from him or something like that. But he's an angry guy too.

Q: Who wrote the epitaph on the tombstone?

AJ: Who wrote the description on the tombstone? That's the first time anyone has ever asked me that question. That's a good question. It was Jesse, who wrote it. Jesse's kind of a writer, so he wrote it.

Q: What is David's relationship with his mother?

AJ: How is David 's relationship with his mother? Unchanged. He just... He started to say... instead of saying 'well, I hate my mother and she's an idiot,' he now says 'I hate my mother and she's an idiot, but I realise that at some point I might have to reconsider that position. I'm just not ready to rethink my relationship with her...' I should say that Jesse, after writing that inscription on the tombstone, he went to the funeral and he was in manacles, he was in leg-irons and had handcuffs on. It was kind of a remarkable event, I think, that funeral. That was the only time that Jesse had been out of prison in the whole 13 years.

Inaudible question

AJ: Well it's interesting to make a documentary about a family that documented themselves so thoroughly. They... the question's whether they ever thought about being film-makers. I think they were real amateur film-makers at the time, you know, you saw a couple of moments in there where they do sort of clever things where they have, you know, a title... on a big card or something and they throw a basketball at it and kind of obliterate it... they thought creatively about the images that they were using. They did some incredible little films like one's called The Miracle of Flight and it's this kind of absurd thing where they do stop-motion and they go flying through the air and there's another thing called Professor Backward ... I mean they really did these very creative projects. So I think they hoped to be creative in that way.

Jesse was a very big fan of music, and he worked in a recording studio at the village school, where he went to school, and so I think he wanted to be a recording engineer, and kind of get to that part in his life, and certainly David was desperate to be on television, and he keeps saying to me like 'you know a lot of people in Hollywood, you gotta get me a show,' and I've said to him, 'so, you still want to do that same show, like you're the Captain Kangaroo, like children's entertainer guy?' and he's like 'yeah,' and I say 'well that's never ever going to happen, and what I recommend you do, since you're kind of sarcastic and funny, that that's your personality, why don't you do an animated show about an angry clown. Do something that's actually you ... I mean it totally seriously. I think that could work, you could get that on Comedy Central and people would say 'oh my god, you know what the story is behind this guy? This is the guy who's brother of the thing in the film...' but as far as he's concerned, it's sort of like he wants to be that thing that's going to be some other person's character, that's not who he's going to be. I'm curious to see where it comes out for them.

Hysteria

LF: One more question...

Q: How do you think hysteria played a part in events?

AJ: You know I think that... the question's about hysteria, and I think it dovetails with this question about memory, because there's a certain interaction between hysteria and memory, where people are thinking about things they may or may not remember, and then the group gets together and suddenly they remember more things, and memory is a complicated thing... I was just saying to a friend of mine, I was sitting at home and I was talking to somebody and I said 'well I had this interesting idea the other day...' my wife Nancy was sitting in the next room, and I start telling about my brilliant idea, and she said politely from the other room, 'that was my idea...' and I was thinking to myself 'how did I make that my idea, how did that happen in the space of a week, suddenly...?' Well it was a good idea, you know I had a reason why I wanted that to be my idea, and luckily she caught me early enough that I hadn't already developed all these theories about exactly where I was sitting when I remembered it because that's all stuff that you come up with later, and I think there's a certain sense of indignation, that somebody else would doubt your memory, you know Fran Galasso, to this day, is absolutely convinced that there were foot-high stacks of child pornography in plain view, literally, all round the Friedman house.

So when you put together all these... you know, your memory is not some locked-in... computer card, it's really just a series of little electro-chemical impulses in your brain, and if you have a reason to make them blip a certain way, suddenly they change, they morph, and certainly your memory evolves over time. We've all been in a situation where we go into some classroom that we were in when we were like 12 years old, and we say 'wait a second, didn't the window use to be over here, wasn't it much bigger, and wasn't there a desk over here?'... No, no that's just how you remember it, and so for me I think, this idea that groups of people remember things differently than individuals, contributes to this hysterical feeling. And I think it's justified, understandable, that people would be very emotional about these kinds of charges, I have two boys that are 7 and 11 - I take these kinds of things really seriously, and that's to some extent why I think it's so important to stick to the facts and try to see if the police can do a really good job analysing a situation like this, because if they can't then it kind of denigrates every other case like this, then kids are afraid...

People said - this is the last thing that I'll say about this - people said that... when the film came out there were a number of child advocates who said 'well this film is really unfair because it's going to... by showing that certain things about the investigation were flawed, or showing that maybe this case wasn't as properly prosecuted, or maybe these people weren't quite as guilty as they were said to have been, that's going to discourage victims in these kinds of cases from coming forward. It's going to silence the plaintive voices of children who are actually abused all over the country. And I take the opposite view. I think when you have a poorly prosecuted case it denigrates everybody, and it basically means the cases in the future are less likely to be brought because the people say 'well look everybody cries wolf on this subject, it turns out later on these cases are no good, so I wouldn't come forward and criticise somebody for this alleged abuse, because you'll never succeed in your case.' So that argument can be used on either side, but the hysteria doesn't help any, the media doesn't help any, this judge did a horrible, horrible disservice to the family, and to the community, when she allowed cameras in the courtroom for the first time in the history of Nassau County, on this case... is this the case you would test out that theory on? That's a little disturbing.

LF: I think on that note, we'll stop now, but I'd like everybody to clap once again and say thank you very much to Andrew for a great film. [applause]... oh... you can't go anywhere, stop right in your tracks, the movie opens on April the 9th in a cinema near you. Please tell all your friends if you enjoyed it to go see it. Thank you. [applause]