And so my education comes from The Sorrow and the Pity. There was never a history course of mine in grade school or high school that touched on it. That film was a shock to me - that there was a bigger thing that it was about. And that's what we did because that's what our parents had done. We were fighting Germans in our backyards and killing Jerrys with our hand grenades and our Thompson submachine guns. That's my first introduction to the Holocaust - I was born in 1953. And my dad, not a Jew and myself, not a Jew, wanted me to understand. My dad made me sit down and watch Judgment at Nuremberg, where the prosecutors pull the blinds down, bring out the projector, and show the worst of the worst. MR: Let me ask you a quick question about prior Holocaust films - do you watch something like The Sorrow and the Pity before you do this? So we have survivors, we have people who get out, we have one survivor who survives Auschwitz, which is amazing, who doesn't get out but lives. And that's very important that we have bottom up stuff. This is a universal love letter that every woman wishes her man could write. But we waited until after that battle was over - until, in fact, the end of the episode - and did it as a coda to say, if you focus on the specific in Bull Run, forget about it. MR: Like Sullivan Ballou before Bull Run. Or it might be an odd letter here and there from someone who knows they're going to their death and writes a letter to a friend saying that I want the world to know that a person named David Berger lived. Or it might be Daniel Mendelsohn’s family. It might be, in the case of this film, the singular story of Anne Frank and her family. It becomes the obligation, as the writer Daniel Mendelsohn says in our film, to particularize what happened. There is a war pornography, a Holocaust pornography that people indulge in that can only seem to perpetuate the opacity of the situation - just like six million means nothing, absolutely nothing. KB: I won't describe it because it's so horrible. MR: What is the worst image that sticks in your mind right now? We get to see those worst of the images and try to figure out how to absorb them and relate to them. The thing that's important to remember about a project like this is that for the six and a half hours that these three episodes represent of finished film time, we've probably looked at 40 to 50 times that amount of material. Part of our job is a huge triage, a huge calibration, to make sure that we don't desensitize people by bashing them over the head with the very worst images. It's a kind of meditation, I guess, that allows me to work on these projects. Right now, I happen to be in the city, and I will take phone calls walking because I prefer to walk. I sometimes repeat that at the end of the night. I live in rural New Hampshire, and so early in the morning I walk three or four miles with my dog into nature. When you're working with something intense like the Holocaust, what do you do when you need to relax? Whether it’s Shelby Foote’s voice or “ Stand By Water” - there is something just calming about your work, even when you’re dealing with grave subjects. MR: So I interviewed Dan Doctoroff, and he and I share an experience of turning on your documentaries to relax and calm down. I suppose that I should continue to qualify that by saying, I hope that other films that I've done in the past would be as important. I've said ad nauseum that I will not work on a more important film. It seemed like something we needed to engage. But we had a real complicity in the inability of people to escape the Holocaust. and the Holocaust.Īmericans have had a luxury of avoiding thinking about the Holocaust, other than just as this event that happened an ocean and a continent away. And we looked at each other and thought this would be a really good topic: the U.S. There was a significant scene within those seven episodes about the Holocaust, and we were very surprised to have people coming up to us - peppering us with questions that reflected misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, but also some very interesting questions. Lynn Novick, Sarah Botstein, and I - along with Geoff Ward, who wrote the script - made a film on the Second World War, called The War, that came out in 2007. There are sometimes external stimuli as in the case of this particular film. KB: Sometimes it’s just really having mental ideas and then suddenly something emotional drops down from your head to your heart, and you say, “Yeah.” You get down on your knees and propose to the project. How did you settle on America and the Holocaust? MR: You said once that you decided to do the Brooklyn Bridge documentary in a fugue state after having pneumonia and reading the David McCullough book. MR: Yes, I watched it with my wife in Jerusalem. Max Raskin: I will say at the outset that this will not be an objective interview - I'm an unbelievable fan of yours.
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