From the Jul 11 – Jul 17, 2002 issue

Film

The Lie of Truth

An Interview with Henry Bean

by Charles Mudede

Henry Bean wrote the screenplays for Internal Affairs and Deep Cover, among others. The Believer is the first film Bean directed. Unlike most established writers who attempt to direct something they have written, Bean has actually transformed a fine script into a fine film.

The protagonist of your film seems implausible: a Jewish Nazi.
You know, it's implausible the way it's implausible that Gregor Samsa turns into a beetle. Nobody really could hold these opposing positions--it wouldn't work--but it's a way of talking about drives and impulses inside of us. So yeah, I don't think it's realistic in that sense, but I think it's real.

I understand that you intended the movie to be a comedy?
Yes, I did, because I think it's very funny. I think the idea of a Jewish Nazi is funny, and I think the idea of somebody who, the more he tries to pretend he isn't Jewish, the more Jewish he seems, is funny.

The Nazis in The Believer seem smart, organized, and almost convincing. I've always thought of them as dumb.
Well, when I started doing some research into neo-fascist groups in the United States, what I learned about them was that they were, to put it gently, unimpressive. And I felt that if I portrayed them as they seemed to be from what I knew, there would be no way that that world would balance in any sense against the Jewish world, and provide a plausible alternative to it [for the protagonist]. So I felt that I had to create a classier version of it.

Once I started to do that, I started to think about the Curtis Zampf [Billy Zane] character as a guy who'd gone to an Ivy League school and become enamored of the classics. So I wrote him as a neo-conservative, but pushed that position just a little bit so as to have a kind of intellectually respectable neo-fascism.

And you know, when I wrote the anti-Semitism for Danny, I tried to make it as convincing as possible, and I tried to find the part of me that can believe it. Ultimately, the research only led me to see what I had to invent. I would say I put together a lot of things and distorted reality. You know, as someone once said to me, "Art lies so it can tell the truth." And I'm lying about the way things really are politically and historically, so I can tell truths that I think are there.