He continues: "It's like when I ask Fred at the end of the movie, 'Fred, have you ever considered the possibility that you might be wrong?' and he says 'I'm well past that.' Well, none of us are well past that."

So to Morris, Fred's holocaust denial is "a device for examining false beliefs. False beliefs interest me. It raises so many questions, particularly given that 99% of what we all believe is probably false. False belief is not somehow the exception; it's the rule. It's just that there are instances where false belief becomes intolerable. There's a very interesting thing about lies: on the one hand, there's that factual issue, and then there's that question of, like, 'what are they thinking?' Is this conscious mendacity, or is he somehow in this twilight zone where he's somehow convinced himself that what he's saying is true?"

Although such exploration does interest him, Morris is quick to point out that he doesn't see himself as more enlightened than Fred, or any of the people (he calls them characters) he interviews. "I don't think I'm any less self-deceived than the next guy," he chuckles. "I don't think that I'm better than my characters, or different than my characters, or in some odd, privileged position from my characters. I think I'm one of them."

THE THIN BLUE LINE

With 1988's "The Thin Blue Line," Errol Morris took his compositional approach to documentary filmmaking further than he had with his two earlier works, "Gates of Heaven" and "Vernon, Florida." Instead of a misleadingly straightforward, observational style, this film includes entire scenes shot as reenactments. "I've been accused of creating reenactment television," Morris says, "but the reenactments in The Thin Blue Line are all ironic, they never purport to show you what happened. When I see reenactment television the conceit is that they're actually showing you what happened, whereas in my film, it's exactly the opposite."

"Basically, you're dismantling piece by piece by piece the case against Randall Adams [a man unjustly imprisoned for shooting a policeman], which consisted of five 'eyewitnesses.' There three wacko eyewitnesses that claim to have passed by the crime scene at that crucial moment, a policewoman, and David Harris, the chief prosecution witness who turns out to be the real killer. And so we learn sequentially that all of these accounts are wrong."

In this way, Morris says, "Mr. Death" can be seen as a companion piece to "The Thin Blue Line." Although both are "essays in false history," "in the case of Mr. Death it's a false history shared by very few people. In the case of "The Thin Blue Line," everybody believed the insane stuff. Could the Dallas police really have believed that Randall Adams was guilty?"

The most unusual thing about "The Thin Blue Line" is that it blends two genres: the mystery-detective story in which the writer is aware of the outcome even as the exposition takes place, and the documentary film, which is known for its spontaneity. Through this combination, the audience is treated to a step-by-step account of a real investigation.