OK, but now that they have seen the footage again, 16 years later, do they realize their home video recording habits were unusually intrusive and intimate?

They would say that the family was very theatrical to begin with. In the opening of the movie, you see these credits that they made in their own home movies, in happier times. They'd put up a big poster board in the street and they would write "Presented by the Friedman Family," and then somebody off-camera would throw a basketball and knock it over. They were creative. They had a lot of good ideas. And they liked seeing themselves on film.

So they were well trained -- it was like being trained for battle or something. Suddenly this thing that was all about the comedy of being able to record home movies comes in handy and is like really, really important. There is a feeling, I think, that 10 years from now all documentaries will have this first-person camera component. But at the time the Friedmans were doing it, they were the vanguard, they were really on the cutting edge of self-documentation. They were ahead of the curve, although it's kind of tragic.

One of the most troubling things about the Friedmans' home videos is that they often appear to be making light of their horrific situation. The most glaring example of this is when Jesse is awaiting sentencing, and he's performing a Monty Python skit for his brothers on the courthouse steps.

That's certainly a moment that is play-acted intentionally, because they've been waiting for three hours to get in the courthouse and they're pretty freaked out and nervous. I understood that perfectly. The people who were watching them from the courthouse said, "Well, those kids are completely out of touch with reality." And once you believe someone is crazy, you can believe that they're capable of anything -- and that was what happened in the investigation.

For example, you see this moment where David puts a pair of underwear on his head and walks around the front yard yelling at the TV cameras [when his father, Arnold, is first arrested]. If you believe the detective, David was reverting to an infantile state. That indicates that, well, he and his family members are not only crazy but crazy in such a way that underwear is implemented -- "Aha!" But a second later in the film, David says, "There were 25 TV cameras. I reached into my bag and the first thing I came out with that I could put over my head was underwear."

It's hard not to compare your film with reality television. It's like what might happen if the Osbourne family were suddenly charged with gruesome sex crimes.

That's a fair characterization, but I also think the film is kind of epic and biblical and tragic; I really think it's a Greek tragedy meets "The Osbournes." There certainly is that voyeuristic quality. But I think here the stakes are so much higher -- there were consequences, a family was destroyed, countless other families left the process believing that incredibly horrible things happened to their children, people ended up in jail, people ended up dead! You watch reality TV and the highest stakes are, "Is the girl going to get the bachelor?" Then they're off to Cancun where you're not going to see them again, and you're going to turn on the next show.

With my film you don't walk away thinking, "Well, I don't know what happened, but who cares? Let those people rot in jail, let those other people feel like they were molested." You feel you have to have an opinion. I think that's what they're searching for, frankly, in reality TV: Making people care about the characters and not just making it some momentary spectacle like "Jackass."

I suppose the difference is clearest right at the beginning of the film, when David, in his video diary, says to the camera, "This is private. If you're not me, turn it off."

Yeah. Even in today's world of reality TV, it's OK to see somebody buried in a shallow grave with maggots all over them because that's their biggest fear. But when somebody says, "I don't want to be seen right now," it still grabs us a little bit.

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