\u201cSo, you know, Russell and Michael and I sat round a table at Russell\u2019s house, going through all of it,\u201d says Vanderbilt, whose intricate script for Zodiac, a police procedural directed by David Fincher in 2007, established him as one of Hollywood\u2019s great writers. \u201cI\u2019d written it, but we were going through saying, \u2018Is there something we\u2019re missing? Is there a piece here we can use?\u2019 That was incredibly important.\u201d<\/p>\n
The first of the Nuremberg trials, where 24 senior Nazis were indicted for war crimes, was indelibly dramatised in Stanley Kramer\u2019s Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). Kramer also used court transcripts as a source, but put them in the mouths of fictionalised characters. Vanderbilt \u2013 who reveres Kramer\u2019s film, even watching it for inspiration immediately before he started shooting his own \u2013 cranks up the realism by using real names, documented events and an aspect of the story that had barely made it to the history books: the US Army\u2019s preliminary psychiatric evaluations of their Nazi prisoners.<\/p>\n
His source was The Nazi and the Psychiatrist by Jack El-Hai, published in 2013. The eponymous psychiatrist was Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), whose official task was to ensure that the accused were mentally capable of standing trial. His real job, as far as the Allied high command was concerned, was to get information that would ensure conviction, but he also had his own agenda. For him, this was a heaven-sent opportunity to write a smash-hit book about the madness of mass murderers. Hermann Goering, second in command to Hitler and the Allies\u2019 star prisoner, was his golden ticket.<\/p>\n
Malek plays Kelley with a frayed edge of weirdness; Goering, as portrayed by Crowe, is a self-satisfied narcissist who tells Kelley that nobody has ever outwitted him. Although the film culminates in the trial, the focus over the first 90 minutes is on their meetings in Goering\u2019s cell. Vanderbilt, who snapped up the book for adaptation when it was still no more than a six-page proposal, was captivated by the idea of their psychological duel.<\/p>\n
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Russell Crowe as Hermann Goering in Nuremberg.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was the quickest I\u2019d said yes to anything in my life,\u201d he says. \u201cThese two men are very, very different, but each of them is trying to get something out of the other one. As a storyteller, something in me was saying, \u2018I want to see this movie.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Crowe committed to it, Vanderbilt estimates, seven years ago, after a single reading of the script. \u201cUsually it\u2019s not this easy to get a movie star in your movie! But he was incredibly important, he stuck with it,\u201d the director says. \u201cA movie like this, they\u2019re hard to make. It\u2019s not a giant studio movie. The money comes in and the money falls out and every point in time where he could have gone, \u2018Right, see you later, guys, and good luck\u2019, he was always like, \u2018No, man, tell me when we\u2019re going and I\u2019ll go.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Other major actors came on board because Crowe was already there. \u201cThere is a domino effect,\u201d Vanderbilt says. \u201cAnd then when it came to actually playing the part, that is not an easy headspace to live in, being that guy. He never shied away from it, he embraced it, he learned the German, he did all the things you would expect an actor of his calibre to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Writer-director James Vanderbilt (centre) with his stars Rami Malek (left) and Crowe.Credit: Getty Images<\/p>\n
Kelley clearly comes to like Goering, even agreeing to deliver letters in secret to the Nazi\u2019s wife and daughter. That seems scarcely believable, but these are clearly strange times among the rubble of war; old certainties seem to have been cut from their moorings. There was no precedent for an international trial of a country\u2019s leaders: legally, Jackson was flying blind. There was also considerable opposition to this show of due process from those who thought these villains should just be shot by firing squad and be done with it. Goering himself would have preferred that: a respectable military death.<\/p>\n
For the proponents of courtroom justice, however, the trial was both a demonstration of democratic values and an opportunity to explain to the world exactly what the Nazis had done. As well as testimonies, there was an hour\u2019s footage from the camps \u2013 a cavalcade of skeletal prisoners and corpses being swept into piles \u2013 shown in court. About six minutes of that original footage is included here, a hideous reminder of what humans can do; Vanderbilt wrote this film for similar reasons.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think justice is very important. That\u2019s one of the things that drew me to this originally,\u201d he says. Although he won\u2019t be drawn on modern parallels, the Spanish audience responded with whoops to Kelley\u2019s warnings that any future government, even in the United States, might well go the same way unless the people remained vigilant. To that end, Vanderbilt was equally keen to show what happened to the audiences of today.<\/p>\n
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Crowe as the charismatic Goering. Credit: AP<\/p>\n
\u201cBoth of my grandfathers were in World War II; this was always a period of time that my generation could touch,\u201d he says. \u201cWe knew people who had lost family members in the camps, it was real to us. But I talk to my children about it and it\u2019s like talking to them about the American Revolution. Bringing that past back to life again was something very important to me.\u201d<\/p>\n
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