{"id":259789,"date":"2025-11-03T23:08:11","date_gmt":"2025-11-03T23:08:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/259789\/"},"modified":"2025-11-03T23:08:11","modified_gmt":"2025-11-03T23:08:11","slug":"after-a-13-year-journey-to-the-screen-theres-a-particular-urgency-to-nurembergs-release","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/259789\/","title":{"rendered":"After a 13-year journey to the screen, there\u2019s a particular urgency to Nuremberg\u2019s release"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Russell Crowe in a scene from Nuremberg.Mongrel Media<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

The film\u2019s 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\u2019 Final Solution, on the witness stand facing execution. The psychiatrist hired to examine Goring, Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), fearful that he\u2019d found his subject too compelling, that he\u2019d 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. <\/p>\n

Typically, a sequence like that is shot in several pieces and made whole later in the editing room. Vanderbilt, who\u2019s 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 \u2013 actors can stay in character, emotion and tension can build \u2013 but it\u2019s not easy to pull off; any flub sends everyone back to the start. <\/p>\n

Cherilyn Hawrysh, one of the film\u2019s vast team of producers, was on set that day, holding her breath. (Born in Canada, she now lives in Los Angeles.) \u201cThe cast and crew did the whole thing five times,\u201d she recalled in a video interview in September, a few days after Nuremberg\u2019s four-minute standing ovation at the Toronto International Film Festival<\/a>. \u201cEach time James cut, the extras and all of us watching on the sides would stand up and applaud.\u201d <\/p>\n

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\u2019s Web. But lately it\u2019s expanding into more adult-oriented fare, \u201chopeful stories about courage that whole families can watch together,\u201d Hawrysh says. <\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Cherilyn Hawrysh attending the screening of Nuremberg at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 7.Reynaud Julien\/APS-Medias\/ABACA\/Reuters<\/p>\n

She\u2019s a good fit for Walden, too. \u201cI\u2019ve always been interested in who we are as human beings, how we can learn through story to understand ourselves and one another,\u201d 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, \u201cit really lit me up. The idea of brilliant creatives and the details they bring, coming together in service of a story.\u201d<\/p>\n

She moved to Vancouver and met the producer Mary Anne Waterhouse, who was about to work on Kingdom Hospital, Stephen King\u2019s adaptation of Lars von Trier\u2019s series, for ABC. Hawrysh landed a job as executive assistant to that series\u2019 lead producer, who\u2019d worked with King for decades. It proved to be a mini film school: She was on the set; she was in the writers\u2019 room for studio and network notes; she helped the actors coordinate publicity. <\/p>\n

When the series wasn\u2019t renewed, Hawrysh kept schooling herself: She moved to Toronto and did the Producers\u2019 Lab at the Canadian Film Centre, where she discovered what kind of work she wanted to produce: \u201caccessible, mainstream stories that move people and also open dialogues and discoveries, on a big, global scale,\u201d she says. \u201cHollywood was the place I needed to be.\u201d <\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

But back to Nuremberg\u2019s courtroom scene \u2013 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\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

Cherilyn Hawrysh, right, with Russell Crowe.Kerry Brown\/Supplied<\/p>\n

\u201cWe needed to prepare the crew, the extras and the actors to handle that,\u201d Hawrysh says. \u201cJames 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.\u201d <\/p>\n

Conversations about how much of the footage to show in the finished film continued in the editing room and after test screenings. \u201cWe didn\u2019t want to overwhelm audiences, but we didn\u2019t want to shy away from the scope or the power of it either,\u201d Hawrysh says. <\/p>\n

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. \u201cThe fact is, evil doesn\u2019t always look the way we think it\u2019s going to look,\u201d Hawrysh says. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t announce itself or come dressed a certain way.\u201d<\/p>\n

She doesn\u2019t explicitly mention her adopted country\u2019s current President, or that his government is edging toward authoritarianism; she\u2019s too diplomatic for that. But she does say that, after Nuremberg\u2019s 13-year journey to the screen, there\u2019s a particular urgency to its coming out in 2025: \u201cIt 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.\u201d <\/p>\n

Special to The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: Russell Crowe in a scene from Nuremberg.Mongrel Media It was the kind of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":259790,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,75,337,2922],"class_list":{"0":"post-259789","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-movies","12":"tag-noastack"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259789","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=259789"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259789\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/259790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=259789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=259789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=259789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}