What draws you to Wagner?
I think he's fascinating. Most of my films are about people. That's what gets me excited.

You plan to take "The Wagner Family" to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. How did that happen?
We were asked by Cinematheque in Tel Aviv. I was very surprised. We showed the big Wagner film [Palmer's 1983 "Wagner"] in Jerusalem in 1985. They expected trouble. There were armed guards at the door. But we were fine.

You have said that you live at the most Western point of England. How does that work? I live by Land's End...in the last house. My email address is isolde@ etc... I have that email because I live right opposite the ruins of King Marke's castle. He was the king who asked Isolde to marry him.

Finish this sentence. The Wagner family is...
A modern soap opera, which unlike most soap operas is a) true and b) endlessly fascinating.

The Wagner Family (Soap) Opera

Tony Palmer's documentary "The Wagner Family" sometimes echoes Richard Wagner's "The Ring of the Nibelungen." It has the same power-hungry patriarchs, rebellious offspring and layers of myth.

"The Wagner Family" unflinchingly details the history of the Wagner clan, from its involvement with Adolf Hitler (Richard Wagner's daughter-in-law Winifred was a card-carrying member of the Nazi party) to recent squabbles over leadership of Bayreuth (with bickering half-sisters Katharina Wagner and Eva Wagner-Pasquier currently at the helm).

Of all Wagner's operas, his family's (soap) opera is perhaps the most dramatic, with family archives buried in the garden, a hallowed wooden festspielhaus to protect, a legacy of transcendental art and familial hatred boiling underneath the surface.

And you thought your family's Thanksgivings were tense!

For a taste of the drama, look at Winifred Wagner, an English orphan, thrust into the arms of distant German relatives as a child, according to her biographer Brigitte Hamann, who Palmer interviews. As a teenager, she married Richard Wagner's only son, Siegfried, who was middle-aged and gay (awk-ward). The couple was not a German "Will & Grace." Winifred's job was to provide a Wagner heir, which she did.

Despite Winifred's unusual marriage, her relationship with Adolf Hitler is what keeps scholars fascinated. Maybe Winifred fancied Hitler, a charming man, closer to her age than her husband. Maybe, as she claimed, Hitler wanted to marry her daughter Verena. When he was jailed after the Munich Beer Hall Putsch, Winifred sent him the paper upon which he supposedly penned Mein Kampf (super awk-ward). The matriarch never apologized for her relationship with Hitler, continuing to celebrate his birthday long after the fall of the Third Reich.

Or take the newest leaders of Bayreuth, the half-sisters, Katharina, daughter of Wolfgang and Gudrun Wagner and nicknamed the "Bayreuth Barbie," and Eva, 34 years her senior, more serious and down-to-earth. Palmer includes wonderful footage of Eva in the 1970s earnestly elaborating on her plans to run Bayreuth. She could never have guessed the conditions under which she would lead it today. When asked by an audience member how the half-sisters get along, Palmer answered simply, "They fight."

With all the feuding, affairs and power struggles, it's no wonder some Wagners have lost faith in the concept of family all together. Wolfgang, the former director of Bayreuth, whose battles with family members have left him looking defeated, sighs during an interview: "Family is just a random collection of people who share the same name."

Forty-eight minutes was simply not long enough to appreciate the decades of Wagner family drama. When the two-hour version of "The Wagner Family" hits stores, I highly recommend checking it out. Go with an open mind and get ready to see what a bizarre "collection of people" make up the Wagner family. Just don't watch it at a family Thanksgiving. That would be awk-ward.