{"id":404065,"date":"2026-04-30T00:12:17","date_gmt":"2026-04-30T00:12:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/404065\/"},"modified":"2026-04-30T00:12:17","modified_gmt":"2026-04-30T00:12:17","slug":"diane-kruger-on-nazi-drama-amrum-and-working-with-fatih-akin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/404065\/","title":{"rendered":"Diane Kruger on Nazi Drama ‘Amrum’ and Working With Fatih Akin"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tWhen Diane Kruger<\/a> started acting, she had a firm rule about the roles she\u2019d take. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI never wanted to be in a World War II movie,\u201d Kruger says. \u201cWhen I started out, I didn\u2019t want to be pigeonholed as a German actress. It was such obvious casting for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tKruger has softened her stance, memorably playing a German film star who is an underground Allied agent in Quentin Tarantino\u2019s alternate slice of history, \u201cInglourious Basterds.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI got to help kill Hitler,\u201d Kruger says. \u201cThat was not just great for me, but also for my country and the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tShe returns to a World War II setting in \u201cAmrum<\/a>,\u201d a historical drama about Nanning Bohm, a boy whose Nazi family is struggling to accept the collapse of the regime. The film, which opened this month in the U.S., reunites her with filmmaker Fatih Akin<\/a>, who directed the 2017 thriller \u201cIn the Fade\u201d that won Kruger the best actress prize at Cannes.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019ve worked with some great directors, but Fatih is a filmmaker who gives you wings in the best possible way,\u201d Kruger says. \u201cHe\u2019s pushing you very strongly, but it\u2019s fine, because you have this trust with him. I\u2019d never experienced that before.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWith \u201cAmrum,\u201d Kruger had her pick of roles. She selected a supporting part, Tessa, a farmer who employs Nanning while making it clear she\u2019s opposed to the Nazis.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cTessa felt like a rebellious person,\u201d Kruger says over Zoom from her home in Europe. \u201cShe\u2019s someone I would have wished to be if I\u2019d lived in those times. Also, I\u2019m from the countryside, and my grandmother was always in the fields. As a child, I would have those summer jobs where I was bringing in the corn, raking hay and picking strawberries.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFor Akin, it helped to have a close collaborator like Kruger on set because \u201cAmrum\u201d was a leap of faith for the German and Turkish filmmaker. Nanning is based on the experiences of Hark Bohm, an actor, director and producer who is a staple of German cinema. The men had worked together on \u201cIn the Fade,\u201d which Akin directed from a script he wrote with Bohm. Initially, the plan was for Bohm to direct \u201cAmrum\u201d with the two men penning the screenplay. However, Bohm, who died in November at the age of 86, was in failing health. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019m not a director who can work as a hired gun,\u201d Akin says. \u201cI had to work with this material until it became very personal and close to me, and until it became a film of an auteur.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAkin says he keyed in on the tangled relationship between Nanning and his mother, a passionate supporter of Hitler who has plunged into a deep depression after the F\u00fchrer\u2019s suicide. \u201cAmrum\u201d ultimately asks difficult questions about complicity. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI don\u2019t think people are responsible for the actions of their parents, but they have some bloodline connection to them,\u201d Akin says. \u201cThat\u2019s a trauma that Germany is still dealing with.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tAs for Kruger, she was partly inspired to revisit this painful chapter of her country\u2019s history because it resonated with the present day. \u201cAmrum\u201d is being released as radical political movements are gaining strength around the world and authoritarianism is on the rise.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI\u2019m in a place in my life where I\u2019m thinking about what world my daughter\u2019s going to grow up in,\u201d Kruger says. \u201cThere\u2019s a sense of history repeating itself. I\u2019m feeling hopeless about what is happening in the world, because I feel like I have no power to change anything. And when you become a mother, it\u2019s very difficult to explain to your child what is going on and why this is happening. Given my country\u2019s past, I remember being a teenager and asking my grandfather, \u2018How could you go to war? How could this have happened?\u2019 I\u2019m still just trying to understand it all.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Diane Kruger started acting, she had a firm rule about the roles she\u2019d take. \u201cI never wanted…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":404066,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[208270,208271,156,208272,409,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-404065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-amrum","tag-diane-kruger","tag-entertainment","tag-fatih-akin","tag-movies","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404065","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=404065"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/404065\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/404066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=404065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=404065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=404065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}