it was his idea to make a film about Hitler when he was living in exile from Germany; it was his idea to make a film about the Holocaust; it was his idea to make a film about the CIA. He always had the idea to do a film about the United States. And, because of the way he operated—the way he loved to deal with ideas—he said, "Let me do a film about the CIA." And it was his idea to make a film about the Vietnam War. Because he had come to the conclusion that the Vietnam War was going to go on, one way or another. We didn't make the film about the war. We made a movie about the United States. _You always had an agenda with him, didn't you?_ Of course! _But you were not part of the CIA. So I don't know whether your agenda is in conflict with what he was doing._ That's for you to say. Maybe our agenda was, on some level, in conflict with his agenda. _Do you know what your agenda is? We're in the United States now._ I'm sure there are a lot of people who are interested in the United States. _It seems like you are very, very interested._ I'm interested in it the way it's covered in the media. _Of course. That's how you know it. That's all you ever have._ Okay, I don't know. You could be right. I don't think I have any agenda other than to talk about a movie I made about a country. This is the big question I always get: Why did you make this film? What's the agenda? I really don't have any agenda in this movie. There are obviously a lot of people who are opposed to making this film. I am very interested in talking about the United States, just as I'm very interested in making movies. I have no agenda in regard to that question. _It's obvious you are deeply concerned about the political and social situation of the United States, that you were deeply engaged in the political situation here and are still engaged, and that you want to keep your finger on that pulse._ We don't live in an authoritarian society. People will say that this was a more authoritarian society than it is now. I have no agenda to say one way or another. _I was going to ask you, before we got off the subject: One of the subtexts of your interviews is that you think that, in the United States, some of the things people have seen and have come to know are not true. So that if you were a journalist, or if I were a journalist, it would be my job to question things and challenge things, in an effort to expose untruths._ For sure. _But you didn't go into journalism. You've tried. You've covered the war in Vietnam. The war in Iraq. The war in Bosnia. Have you ever been a journalist?_ No. I didn't go into journalism. _You studied film._ I studied film in Germany. I would have liked to have gone into journalism. But I felt that, the way things were going, it would be a waste of time. So, I went back and studied political science and international affairs at the University of Zurich. I worked with the United Nations Economic Commission on Europe, then at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. I worked with a group of scholars at the University of Zurich on their research project on civil society in Eastern Europe. And I started to make a lot of political documentaries in Europe. Then I came to the United States. After I had lived in the United States for eight years, I thought I could possibly make a living there. I got in the business of making movies. That's what I did. I'm still trying to make a living doing that. _I think that you were born in the United States, but you have never lived in the United States. And so you don't live inside this country. And yet, you are not inside this country. You're sort of out of it. Which is almost like not living inside a film._ I'm not out of it. I'm inside. In fact, I'm right in it. It's just that the world is bigger than what I can see right now, and it's more interesting than what I can see. So, I actually like it better from the window of my airplane. If I could stay out here, I'd stay out here for two or three months. But I have to go back. So, it's like I'm going back, but I never really went away in the first place. _On a more personal level, your father was born in this country. You were born outside of it. Your father—an American of German and English descent—wasn't always easy to get along with, in the sense that his behavior was often erratic, or unpredictable. So, you may have learned to live in and with and through an erratic environment, even though you weren't born to it._ My father was an American who lived a German life in New York City, the American way, and a New York Jewish life. So, he would come to my school and ask for donations to a Jewish charity, and then he'd eat lunch with me at McDonald's, then he'd ask me to lend him money, to which I would say, "No." After lunch, I'd see him downtown, at a bank. He'd say, "Now, I need your help. I need you to lend me $40." I asked him why he didn't just ask his wife for $40. He said, "I can't ask my wife. She's not Jewish. She doesn't have anything to do with this stuff." So, there was a kind of chaos that existed in my family. When you come from a background where there are wars between your grandparents, and one side of the family feels you are on their side and the other side of the family feels you are on the other side, you have a kind of confusion that is just part of the fact that there are wars going on all around you. _Do you think that the wars you've lived through, and the family situation you grew up in, the war inside your family, has made you more open to war, or your own vulnerability, or, in other words, warlike?_ I don't think I have a warlike personality. War is not my thing. I'm not warlike. War is a bad thing, no matter who it's fought over. War is a horrible thing. I've never been comfortable fighting. I've never been comfortable with the fact that I have Jewish and German blood. I'm a product of the New York Jewish way. And all my relatives, the Jewish side, were from New York. On both sides, my family has been in New York for about 150 years. That's a long time. In the 1920s, in the Depression, I grew up, really, in a very difficult situation. _A lot of what you were describing was a situation that you have been able to create for yourself over the years._ I was making a living in the independent film business. And then I moved into the independent film business in Berlin at the same time I started to make a movie about a guy who was born in a concentration camp. I was making a movie called _Hitler's Henchman_ , which was about a guy who was born in the concentration camp. _Oh, how about that? How did that come about?_ One night, I went to a café to watch the American and French teams at the Montreal Olympics play in an ice-hockey match. I just happened to walk into the café and, sitting at the next table, there was a guy who I had known before I started to make films, who had been born in a concentration camp, and who was born in another country. But he had been born in a concentration camp. He looked like he was living on a park bench in Berlin, or living on the sidewalk in New York. He had grown up in the Berlin subway and was someone who had been an Olympic-class sprinter. He told me that he had been a concentration-camp prisoner, and how it was that he managed to escape from the concentration camp after being an Olympic-class sprinter. I asked him what happened at the Olympics. He said, "Well, the French team defeated the Americans, six to one." He had been in the box where the French team was sitting. He had seen that French team. So, I said, "You should go see this movie that they are making about the war. There's a lot of information in the movie about the war and how the Germans defeated the French team, and how the French lost to the Americans." So, he went to the movie theater to see the movie. And there was no problem. I came to the film with the German perspective, because that was my angle. I felt that the movie was being made in the United States, but by people who had lived in Germany, which is why there were all these jokes about Germany, but I thought the movie was kind of boring. Afterward, we went for dinner at a German restaurant. I said, "You were at the Munich Olympics. What happened?" He said, "I was there. But I couldn't go into the Olympic stadium because there was a German flag