Capturing the Friedmans: father knows best—it's not

In an extraordinary new film punctuated with haunting home movies, a family--husband and wife Arnold and Elaine Friedman and their sons David, Seth, and Jesse--falls to pieces while truth and justice are anything but black and white. It is a painful story of sexual scandal, community hysteria, and the complexity of memory--the kind of tale that would have had Freud on the edge of his seat. In the good doctor's absence, Interview asked another kind of expert in human psychology, Sandra Bernhard, to speak with Andrew Jarecki, the film's director, from his home in Rome.

SANDRA BERNHARD: Hi, Andrew. How are you?

ANDREW JARECKI: Hi. Very well. Can you hear me okay? The Roman telephone system goes back to the days of Julius Caesar.

SB: I know. It's pretty rickety. So, my first question is: How did you get involved with the Friedmans?

AJ: You know the footage in the film of David in his clown gear?

SB: Yeah.

AJ: That was from an earlier project I had been working on--a look at professional children's birthday-party clowns--which led me to this film. I showed some of the footage to a friend who's a great editor, and when she saw David she said, "Every time you show me this guy, I ask myself, 'What makes him so angry?"' Which is exactly what I had been feeling.

SB: How did you find out about his, and his family's, story?

AJ: It actually came out while I was filming the clowns documentary--and you see the moment early on in Capturing the Friedmans. It's when I say to him, "Tell me about your father. Tell me about your brothers," and he responds, "Well, there are some things I don't want to talk about."

SB: Right! And all of a sudden, the beans were spilled. Now, from what you could gather from talking to the Friedmans, as well as from the neighborhood boys and their families who'd been involved in the case [in which Amie and Jesse were accused of and ultimately pleaded guilty to sex-abuse crimes], did you feel that Amie and Jesse really had sexually abused these boys (in Amie's alter-school computer classes], or that Amie had indeed abused his sons? Or did slander and mass hysteria on the part of the community play a role here?

AJ: I think it's important to let the audience decide for themselves. I see a risk in trying to act as if I'm a primary source. I wasn't there. For me [as a filmmaker] to give an opinion on a situation that involves crime is really dangerous.

SB: So it was right after filming that scene with David that you met the rest of the family?

AJ: Well, originally, David didn't want me to talk to his mother. He had said such awful things about her in our conversations: "My mother is an idiot. She is sexually immature, personally immature. She's insane!" So at a certain point, I said to him, "Well, I'd like to talk to her." And he said, "Will you show her as being insane?" and I was like, "I will show her as whatever she is." And he said, "Well, you can't speak to her, so it doesn't matter." Then I found out that when he was a kid, David had been on Candid Camera. It was probably a 30-second bite, but all his life he's been obsessed with being on television. The whole family is kind of obsessed about being on film. I knew that he really wanted that footage, and I had tracked it down. So one day he called me and said, "With your filmmaker magic, maybe you could find that Candid Camera episode in some archive and get a copy for me. If you do, I would let you talk to my mother." And, of course, I already had it! So he introduced me to his mother.

SB: Is she intimidated and frightened by her sons?

AJ: I don't think so. She's pretty tough.

SB: You can tell. In a few of the film's clips, she really gave it to them. But they would frighten me.

AJ: Well, I think it's tough for a mom to have three big boys in the house. And I think it would be incredibly difficult to be in her situation. But I also think, having seen how she has managed to get through all this, that she's maintained her own honesty. Because she did, at many times, refuse to go along with the family party line. She said she was willing to beg for bail money. She was willing to stay with her husband. But she wasn't willing to compromise her own memory and her own sense of truth. If she didn't know what really happened, she wasn't going to say that she did. And I think that's why the sons are so angry at her.

SB: Why wouldn't Seth, the middle son, get involved in the film?

AJ: Seth has a family now, and he basically told his brothers, "If this film makes the family's story any more public, I think it'll be bad for my new family." And it's netlike we had a dearth of family members who were willing to talk to us. One of the things I've discovered about family secrets is that not everyone wants to keep them secret.

SB: Memory is obviously an important theme in this movie.

AJ: At one point in the film David says [about home-video footage included in the documentary], "I think I shot the video so I wouldn't have to remember it myself." Later in the film he says, "It's like when your parents take pictures of you and you're not sure if you remember what happened, or if you remember the picture that's hanging on the wall." That was really a big through-line for me. People say they put memories in their "memory bank," but I don't think they just sit there. I think those memories are bubbling away, evolving over time to suit our needs.