The Oscar winner signed up just after reading the script, in which he could see Goering’s “ambition bloom” and “how his egotism told him that he could control the narrative”.
The movie contains devastating archive footage of Nazi concentration camp victims being bulldozed into their graves – the same film reel that was shown in the real Nuremberg courtroom.
Director James Vanderbilt said he asked his actors not to research the footage before they were confronted with it on the day the scene was filmed.
Crowe’s role was “a dark person to play – that takes an emotional toll on an actor,” Vanderbilt told AFP.
“He was game for all of it, and I’m eternally grateful to him for that.”
In an early review, Deadline called the movie “unrelenting” and “enormously effective,” praising Crowe’s “stunning” performance.
‘Stitches’
Elsewhere at Toronto on Sunday, Angelina Jolie premiered Couture, a drama focusing on some of the human stories behind the often superficial world of fashion.
Set in Paris and coming from French director Alice Winocour, it follows an American film-maker who is diagnosed with cancer as she prepares for a runway show, and told she needs a double mastectomy – echoing Jolie’s real-life health issues.
“It’s about couture – in French, it means stitches,” the actor told AFP.
“So stitches, when you think of our surgeries, our bodies, the way our lives and stories are sewn together, you understand what the film is.”
The film does not yet have a release date.
Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao walked the red carpet for Hamnet, which colours in the gaps of the little we know about William Shakespeare and his wife, and a tragedy that inspired arguably his greatest work.
“To see them fall in love and come together, be torn apart… it’s an inner civil war that we all battle with as we grow and mature,” she told AFP.
The movie, starring Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley, hits theatres in November and is expected to be an Academy Awards contender.
And at a Toronto press conference, stripper-turned-actor Channing Tatum said his performance in Roofman, which tells the true story of a man who robbed dozens of McDonald’s and hid out in a toy store, had helped him overcome “imposter syndrome”.
The film, out next month, recounts the life of Jeffrey Manchester, who robbed dozens of fast food stores through the 1990s, entering the restaurants through the roof.
He famously built a secret hideout inside a Toys “R” Us store in the city of Charlotte, coming out after closure at night to wash in the bathroom, surviving largely on snack food like M&Ms.
“For the very first time, maybe even on this movie, I feel like I’ve actually earned my seat at the table” with the role, Tatum said.
The Toronto International Film Festival runs until next Sunday.
– Agence France-Presse