Friedman: After almost every interview I had major doubts about whether we could possibly make a coherent story out of this. That was partly because of the language problem -- it was all being translated simultaneously -- and partly because some of the men speak very, very slowly. It's really not until we saw it written on paper could we figure out what they were talking about, because by the time they got to the end of a sentence we'd often have forgotten where they'd begun.

You follow a loose chronological structure, yet the connections among speakers always seems to be thematic, juxtaposing one guy's point of view to another's -- or in the case of the Alsatian, Pierre, his vs. everybody else's. His testimony and his rage are so potent. He can barely talk to Klaus because Klaus is a German.

Epstein: Pierre actually came to the Berlin Film Festival, incidentally. He made his peace with Germany through this film.

Friedman: Each of the people in the film serves a dramatic purpose; I think their stories dictate how they're used. Annette's story is essentially the Weimar story and it ends at the time that the lesbian subculture was pushed underground and she was forced to leave the country.

Epstein: Annette's story was probably the hardest to work in because it was a lesbian story, and lesbians weren't affected in the same way that homosexual men were. But nonetheless we knew we had to address it in some way. In a sense, we were addressing the absence of their obvious victimization, and we hope we found a way to have Annette represent that. That's typical of what we tried to do: to find out early on what the essence of each person was and then make it work for the film overall.

Few of us are used to seeing people talk as blithely as these old men about being teachers and group leaders yet having sex with their pupils or followers -- or, in the case of Gad Beck, being a student and jumping his phys ed teacher in the shower. They have the total openness that can come with feeling you have nothing to lose. When you were hearing these things, were you still thinking, "Why can't they talk faster?" [Laughter.]

Friedman: It was fun when these old men started talking about sex and you saw a gleam in their eyes; it was encouraging!

Epstein: I had more faith in the material than Jeffrey, which is a reversal of our roles. He's usually much more the optimist and I'm much more the pessimist. But I thought there were enough moments there to make it function.

I think the contradictions and murkiness you present actually spur a viewer to try to find out more about the subject. The movie is a series of twists: Hitler initially defends his bully-boy Ernst Röhm, the homosexual at the head of the S.A.; Hitler's enemies use Röhm's homosexuality to attack the Nazis. We're used to a Manichean view of the Nazi era, but your movie presents history as a series of feints and retreats and odd choices. Why wasn't there a total Nazi roundup of all homosexuals?

Friedman: For one thing, they were by and large Christian German men and they were potentially "curable" in the eyes of some of the authorities. And also, there was no real systemized way of dealing with homosexuals. In the courts, it was up to the whim of the judges. And in the camps, how they were treated was really up to the camp commander.

I think it also speaks to how difficult it is to make analogies between persecutions based on behavior and persecutions based on heredity.

Epstein: I'm sure back then that homosexual men did not think of themselves as being one class of people. They did not see themselves as a type, no matter what their homosexual behavior. For Jews the situation was very different.

And because of Röhm, the Nazis couldn't say they had no experience of homosexuality or no homosexuals in their ranks.

Friedman: Yeah, but does that mean that the Nazis were gay? Or does that mean that homosexuality was more integrated into German culture than you think it was, when the Nazis came into power? That's my interpretation, but I'm not a historian.

Epstein: The whole Röhm situation was something Jeffrey homed in on really early into the project. I think we went as far as we could with it in terms of specific information. But there's a whole other component to the theme of homosexuality in the camps that we were interested in, and couldn't really get into in this film, which is how homosexual acts were used abusively within the camp system. For a lot of other victim groups, like Jews, their association with homosexuality comes from having been victimized by Kapos and commanders who raped them and committed other homosexual abuse. That has nothing to do with homosexual identity. But it has helped to perpetuate the mythology of the homosexual Nazi.

What's the most pernicious effect of that mythology, apart from it being a misreading of history?

Epstein: In the long run, it demonizes homosexuals. At the time, I think it also made it more difficult for the Nazi persecution of homosexuals to be made public, because there was a prevailing notion that the Nazis were homosexual.

Friedman: It was the German opposition, first in Germany and then exiled in Europe, who used the homosexual angle in their anti-Nazi propaganda, and it was picked up after the war. It's become a convenient trope in movies.

Even though viewers may not identify totally with any of these characters, we experience the events they describe subjectively. This eerie intimacy comes from that poetic, impressionistic approach you keep talking about -- like your evocation of the "Singing Forest," where gays and Jews were hung on hooks from poles. That metaphor gets inside your brain, but you do it very sparingly with shots of limbs of trees and then an actual photo of the torture. To get to that place, where you experience these things fully enough to know how to communicate them, must have been hard.

Epstein: I think your job and hopefully your art as a filmmaker is to have a combination of connection and detachment. It's a dance; you constantly go back and forth.

Even when you shoot talking heads, you take care in the way these guys are framed, from the lenses you choose to the settings.

Epstein: Years ago I was accused, quite pejoratively, by a lefty documentary filmmaker, of coming from the "interior decorating school of filmmaking." Now I can say that's true with pride. We certainly work with the director of photography on what's in the frame and what the light is and what you can see in the room.

What was it like, coming from San Francisco, which is perceived to be a contemporary homosexual Eden, to do a history of Weimar Berlin, which was seen the same way in the '20s?

Epstein: I think that something I learned from the film -- and also, having lived long enough now, in my own life -- is that you can't assume the permanence of things. Even here in San Francisco, the city thought to be the homosexual Eden, we're seeing vast changes from what it was when we moved here 20 years ago. You realize how much of life is transitory. You can't take things for granted; you can't be complacent.

Friedman: Making "Paragraph 175," I kept being aware of parallels with "The Celluloid Closet." We were dealing with the same period of history in a completely different context, and it was the same story really. There was this time of freedom and openness, in the teens and '20s. Then came a clampdown in the '30s. I had to go through realizing again that life is not just a progression toward more freedom or progress. It's cyclical, and things are going on that can jump boundaries.

Maybe your next film should be the study of a year.

Epstein: 1933 would be the one, I think. It was the year of the Production Code. It was the year Hitler came to power. I don't know what the connection is!

Friedman: But it could be an interesting area to explore.

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