{"id":15223,"date":"2025-09-11T04:18:06","date_gmt":"2025-09-11T04:18:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/15223\/"},"modified":"2025-09-11T04:18:06","modified_gmt":"2025-09-11T04:18:06","slug":"russell-crowe-is-terrifying-as-nazi-high-commander-hermann-goering-in-nuremberg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/15223\/","title":{"rendered":"Russell Crowe is terrifying as Nazi high commander Hermann Goering in \u2018Nuremberg\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

The tightly paced jailhouse and courtroom thriller <\/a>is steeped in Vanderbilt\u2019s meticulous research of historical events and based on Jack El-Hai\u2019s 2013 nonfiction bestseller, The Nazi and the Psychiatrist. It stars Russell Crowe as Goering and Rami Malek as Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Kelley, the Army psychologist assigned to assess him as he awaits trial for war crimes, in a city where Hitler held mass rallies for the Third Reich.<\/p>\n

The movie, which is scheduled to open in New Zealand theatres <\/a>on November 13, feels very of the moment, with its themes of how ordinary people can be capable of committing unspeakable evil.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe reminder that these are human beings, and they made these decisions as a collective because that\u2019s what they could get away with, is a very scary thing,\u201d Crowe said in production notes provided to the press.<\/p>\n

As Reichsmarschall Goering, Crowe is alternately towering and terrifying, mystifyingly funny and warm \u2013 a skilled social manipulator who lures Malek\u2019s Kelley into his web of lies. That viewers aren\u2019t immune either to the charms of this unapologetic architect of the Holocaust may make this one of the most bone-chilling portrayals of a Nazi ever depicted on screen.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a powerhouse return to Oscars<\/a> form for Crowe, who, to this non-German-speaker\u2019s ear at least, speaks flawless German for at least the first 20 minutes of the two-and-a-half-hour film.<\/p>\n

\u201cGoering was someone who people describe as the first person you\u2019d invite to a dinner party,\u201d Malek said during the Q&A. \u201cAnd so I thought, imagine being in the same room with that person, and then also [the] disparate aspect of him being a Nazi, right?\u201d<\/p>\n

Kelley\u2019s mission is, first, to make sure the Nazis are psychologically fit to stand trial and that they do not try to escape judgment by committing suicide, as Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler had all done. But Kelley\u2019s research was also into the nature of evil itself, and what would drive men to commit such atrocities.<\/p>\n

His unpopular conclusion, which led to him being ostracised for the rest of his career, was that there wasn\u2019t anything particularly special about the Nazis. \u201cWhat makes the Germans different from us?\u201d Malek\u2019s character asks in the film. It doesn\u2019t seem pointed to another character, but to the audience.<\/p>\n

Vanderbilt cast Crowe because he knew he wanted a charismatic movie star to play Goering. Crowe had just finished playing Roger Ailes in the series The Loudest Voice in 2019 (for which he won the Golden Globe) and read the script on his way home to Australia. He responded to it right away, diving into research and publicly announcing it as his next project even as funding was falling apart. That research would end up lasting five years.<\/p>\n

He learned of how Goering had hailed from Germany\u2019s upper middle class and been a flying ace in World War I, famous throughout Germany. How he was a man of incredible appetites, from his pill addiction to his mansion filled with art and jewellery stolen from Jewish Holocaust victims. How he founded the Gestapo as Prussian Minister of the Interior, and signed Reinhard Heydrich\u2019s order for a \u201ccomprehensive plan for the Final Solution of the Jewish Question\u201d, giving legal cover for the Holocaust. And how he claimed his antisemitism was merely practical, for his own gain.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe distance you\u2019ve got to take from your own humanity to say something like that is staggering,\u201d Crowe says in the production notes. The Goering he wanted to play wasn\u2019t overtly aggressive, but simply insensitive to horror, capable of saying (and doing) evil things in an incredibly casual way.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a short Q&A, yeah?\u201d Crowe said, jokingly, when asked how he figured out how to depict the character during the Q&A. \u201cOkay, so we\u2019re gonna have to get together tomorrow morning. It\u2019ll probably take about two hours to [answer] that question. So bring some sandwiches and something to drink, and if you have toilet problems, please go before we start.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then he got serious, describing acting with this ensemble, which includes Michael Shannon, John Slattery, Richard E Grant and Leo Woodall (The White Lotus), as walking into a Wild West saloon, where every single person is a gunfighter, willing to do exactly what is needed to survive the day.<\/p>\n

He\u2019d taken a chance on Vanderbilt, he said, purely because of the quality of the script. \u201cThe writing was magnificent,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd people kept saying, \u2018But the money dropped out three times. How did you stay with it?\u2019 It\u2019s like, \u2018Yeah, I\u2019ve been around long enough to know that when something\u2019s written really well, that\u2019s a good … start. So you hang on to that.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The movie arrived in Toronto with some scepticism. This is only Vanderbilt\u2019s second directorial effort, following 2014\u2019s Truth, starring Cate Blanchett and Robert Redford, about the controversy that ended news anchor Dan Rather\u2019s career. (He\u2019s the screenwriter behind David Fincher\u2019s Zodiac and The Amazing Spider-Man but has been working on this movie for 13 years.)<\/p>\n

The trailers are Hollywood slick, suggesting either popcorn Oscars bait aimed at older Academy voters or a thriller in which Americans really get to stick it to the bad guy. And Crowe hasn\u2019t had a good movie role in so long it felt like a welcome surprise to be reminded he\u2019s a great actor.<\/p>\n

\"RussellRussell Crowe attends the premiere of “Nuremberg” during the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. Photo \/ Getty Images<\/p>\n

For this film, Vanderbilt envisioned a chamber drama about the mental sparring between two men in a jail cell, which, at times it is. But after 13 years spent combing through archives, researching Kelley and the 218-day Nuremberg trials, he kept broadening the scope. He said in notes provided to the press that he\u2019d been aiming for something like his favourite fact-based films, such as Oliver Stone\u2019s JFK and Ron Howard\u2019s Apollo 13, which manage to inform while also telling a riveting story.<\/p>\n

The film also dives into the importance of the Nuremberg trials in establishing an international tribunal for prosecuting war crimes, when no case law or legal precedent had been written yet. The world had never before put the entire leadership of a country on public trial to answer for unspeakable atrocities.<\/p>\n

And it does so with some levity from Shannon as Supreme Court Justice Robert H Jackson, the chief prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials, who at one point guilts the pope into publicly supporting them, after pointing out that the Catholic Church was one of the earliest world entities to formally recognise the legitimacy of Hitler\u2019s regime. \u201cDid you just blackmail the pope?\u201d his aide asks.<\/p>\n

The same Holocaust footage shown during Goering\u2019s trial is viewed here, presented with the original narration and without music. Vanderbilt had asked the cast not to watch any of it beforehand. Instead, he set up four cameras in the room, to capture their reactions as they were experiencing them. \u201cWe took a moment of silence, and then we rolled,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd it was a really hard day, but it was really important, I think, for all of us, to honour what had happened.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vanderbilt said in the Q&A that he\u2019d worked so long on the film to honour his grandparents, who served in World War II. But the director, 49, was also was thinking of his children.<\/p>\n

\u201cI grew up hearing stories about [the war] and I had friends who lost family members in the Holocaust, and so for my generation, for me, it was a living thing,\u201d he told the audience. \u201cIt was something that I could touch. It felt like something that was tangible and really happened.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now his children can barely wrap their heads around the Holocaust let alone this six-month chapter of history between the end of the war and the execution of the Nazi high command. \u201cIt\u2019s almost like talking to them about the American Revolution,\u201d he continued. \u201cThe past grows farther and farther behind us, and so our efforts here tonight are to make that past come back alive, because there\u2019s so much that we can learn from it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The tightly paced jailhouse and courtroom thriller is steeped in Vanderbilt\u2019s meticulous research of historical events and based…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15224,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[17439,806,17442,17436,17434,17438,156,11765,17437,2959,17440,78,185,302,5158,4754,17443,6146,111,139,11738,69,193,17441,11763,17435,5662],"class_list":["post-15223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-adolf","tag-as","tag-command","tag-commander","tag-crowe","tag-easy","tag-entertainment","tag-goering","tag-hermann","tag-high","tag-hitlers","tag-in","tag-is","tag-its","tag-man","tag-members","tag-monsters","tag-nazi","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nuremberg","tag-nz","tag-other","tag-righthand","tag-russell","tag-terrifying","tag-think"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15223"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15223\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}