Russell Crowe in a scene from Nuremberg.Mongrel Media
It was the kind of creative decision that makes a producer nervous. The new drama Nuremberg naturally builds to the eponymous November, 1945 trials of the Nazi command, the first-ever prosecution of war crimes by the International Military Tribunal.
The film’s writer/director, James Vanderbilt, shooting in Budapest on a scrupulously recreated courtroom set, knew it would be a bravura sequence, packed with Big Moments for its actors. Hermann Goring (Russell Crowe), mastermind of the Nazis’ Final Solution, on the witness stand facing execution. The psychiatrist hired to examine Goring, Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), fearful that he’d found his subject too compelling, that he’d fallen for his charisma. A U.S. Supreme Court justice, Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon) and a British attorney-general, David Maxwell Fyffe (Richard E. Grant), desperate to convict. A packed house of witnesses and reporters (mostly Hungarian extras). The whole world watching.
Typically, a sequence like that is shot in several pieces and made whole later in the editing room. Vanderbilt, who’s best known as a screenwriter, for films including Zodiac and The Amazing Spider-Man, wanted to shoot the entire thing from beginning to end in single takes, each 23 minutes long. That makes creative sense – actors can stay in character, emotion and tension can build – but it’s not easy to pull off; any flub sends everyone back to the start.
Cherilyn Hawrysh, one of the film’s vast team of producers, was on set that day, holding her breath. (Born in Canada, she now lives in Los Angeles.) “The cast and crew did the whole thing five times,” she recalled in a video interview in September, a few days after Nuremberg’s four-minute standing ovation at the Toronto International Film Festival. “Each time James cut, the extras and all of us watching on the sides would stand up and applaud.”
Hawrysh is an executive vice-president at Walden Media, the company that swooped in to rescue Nuremberg after its financing had fallen apart three different times in 13 years. The film, which has an earnest-teacher vibe, was a good fit for Walden: Since its inception in 2000, the company has focused on family titles, including The Chronicles of Narnia and Charlotte’s Web. But lately it’s expanding into more adult-oriented fare, “hopeful stories about courage that whole families can watch together,” Hawrysh says.
Cherilyn Hawrysh attending the screening of Nuremberg at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 7.Reynaud Julien/APS-Medias/ABACA/Reuters
She’s a good fit for Walden, too. “I’ve always been interested in who we are as human beings, how we can learn through story to understand ourselves and one another,” she says. At the beginning of her career, in Victoria, she tried journalism, then moved into producing documentaries. But when she stumbled onto the script for American Beauty online, “it really lit me up. The idea of brilliant creatives and the details they bring, coming together in service of a story.”
She moved to Vancouver and met the producer Mary Anne Waterhouse, who was about to work on Kingdom Hospital, Stephen King’s adaptation of Lars von Trier’s series, for ABC. Hawrysh landed a job as executive assistant to that series’ lead producer, who’d worked with King for decades. It proved to be a mini film school: She was on the set; she was in the writers’ room for studio and network notes; she helped the actors coordinate publicity.
When the series wasn’t renewed, Hawrysh kept schooling herself: She moved to Toronto and did the Producers’ Lab at the Canadian Film Centre, where she discovered what kind of work she wanted to produce: “accessible, mainstream stories that move people and also open dialogues and discoveries, on a big, global scale,” she says. “Hollywood was the place I needed to be.”
She started at the Los Angeles Media Fund, where she assessed potential projects for a team of financiers (she helped develop Juliet, Naked there, based on Nick Hornby’s novel), then moved to Netflix, then to Walden. This past June she finished production on her next film, a thriller called Billion Dollar Spy, directed by Amma Asante. Crowe is in that one, too.
But back to Nuremberg’s courtroom scene – nailing a 23-minute take was actually the second-biggest challenge. The first was how to handle the stark, harrowing, real footage that had been filmed in some of the Nazis’ 120 concentration camps. Back in 1945, the prosecution showed some of those images during the trial, to the mounting horror of all who witnessed it. Vanderbilt, Hawrysh and the other producers wanted to show some of it in their film, too.
Cherilyn Hawrysh, right, with Russell Crowe.Kerry Brown/Supplied
“We needed to prepare the crew, the extras and the actors to handle that,” Hawrysh says. “James asked everyone to not watch any footage before the day we filmed the scene. The trial was the first time the world was seeing those images, and he wanted to capture the weight and gravity of that. So when we see the characters react to the footage, those reactions are genuine.”
Conversations about how much of the footage to show in the finished film continued in the editing room and after test screenings. “We didn’t want to overwhelm audiences, but we didn’t want to shy away from the scope or the power of it either,” Hawrysh says.
Nor did they want to minimize the fact that, like the psychiatrist played by Malek, many people who encountered Goring found him compelling and charismatic. “The fact is, evil doesn’t always look the way we think it’s going to look,” Hawrysh says. “It doesn’t announce itself or come dressed a certain way.”
She doesn’t explicitly mention her adopted country’s current President, or that his government is edging toward authoritarianism; she’s too diplomatic for that. But she does say that, after Nuremberg’s 13-year journey to the screen, there’s a particular urgency to its coming out in 2025: “It would be an important film if it came out 30 years ago or 30 years from now. But this does seem to be a perfect moment to help people remember what happened, and move us back to our humanity.”
Special to The Globe and Mail