‘Hermann Göring loved his kids. That’s what’s terrifying’: James Vanderbilt, Rami Malek and Michael Shannon on Nuremberg....

Russell Crowe has a malevolent charm as the Nazi on trial in a compelling new film. His co-stars and director explain how they understood this monster – and the persistence of evil today

 

Ryan Gilbey writes about film and theatre for the Guardian

 Among the Nazis who were prosecuted during the Nuremberg trials in 1945 and 1946 was Hitler’s second-in-command, Hermann Göring. Less widely known, though, is the involvement of the US psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, who spent more than 80 hours interviewing and assessing Göring and 21 other Nazi officials prior to the trials. As described in Jack El-Hai’s 2013 book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, Kelley was charmed by Göring but also haunted by his own conclusion that the Nazis’ atrocities were not specific to that time and place or to those people: they could in fact happen anywhere. He was ultimately destroyed by this discovery, and what he saw as the world’s reluctance to heed it.

The writer-director James Vanderbilt, whose script for David Fincher’s enigmatic serial-killer drama Zodiac similarly explored the real-life case of a professional being corroded by his pursuit of truth, has used The Nazi and the Psychiatrist as the basis of his new film, Nuremberg. Russell Crowe plays the preening, charismatic Göring, Rami Malek plays Kelley, and Michael Shannon is Robert Jackson, the American supreme court justice who was not only instrumental in mounting the trials but went head-to-head with Göring in court.

 The line ‘Hitler made us feel German again’ is haunting. Very reminiscent of a line we hear today

For Malek, it allowed him to re-examine ideas about evil that had been on his mind since playing Safin – the man who killed James Bond, no less – in No Time to Die. “When I was playing a Bond villain, I used to remind myself, ‘He’s an evil human being.’ Then I started to question those thoughts.” He wanted to believe in evil, he says, but his empathy kept getting in the way. “The banality of it all struck me as well as it did Douglas Kelley. It must have been quite jarring for him to know that this could happen at any time, under any political regime, and it wasn’t restricted to a group of men in that period. We see now, and will continue to see, that atrocity is able to rise furiously and vigorously in mere moments. Sometimes it is because we’re willing to turn a blind eye towards it.”

Vanderbilt recognised in this material a kind of real-life Silence of the Lambs quality, with Kelley drawn into a seductive dance with a psychopath. “One of the fascinating things about Göring was that he was funny, gregarious, charming,” says the film-maker. “He loved his wife and kids – which to me makes him even more terrifying. He wasn’t Darth Vader, you know? But he craved power and was comfortable with other people suffering so long as he could maintain that power.”

Shannon witnessed his co-star’s electrifying charisma in the role. “Russell really took the note about Göring being a charming man,” he says. “Some of the people playing the other members of the Nazi high command didn’t even have lines but he always made them feel like a group. They came in together singing songs, with Russell leading them.”

Crowe had been attached to the film since 2019, and Vanderbilt had already been working on it for five years by then. But before it began shooting, another Holocaust movie emerged that adopted a radical new approach to the subject: the horrors in Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar-winning The Zone of Interest, which is set largely in the house and garden adjacent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, are heard and hinted at but never shown.

“I saw The Zone of Interest while we were in pre-production,” recalls Vanderbilt. “It’s a great film. I loved its point of view.” How concerned was he that it might leave the more traditional Nuremberg looking archaic, or even obsolete? “I think there’s room for different approaches,” he says. “Our film is a little bit more classical. A friend of mine calls a certain type of film – and The Zone of Interest isn’t one of these – ‘spinach movies’. You know: you have to eat your vegetables, do your homework, take your medicine. I worked hard to not make Nuremberg feel that way.”

Shannon believes audiences should take their dose of Nuremberg, however. “It ought to be mandatory viewing,” he says. “Everybody should see the film, and everybody should think about what happened, because it has huge relevance to what’s happening now. But also, it’s a piece of entertainment. And that’s a strange thing, to make a piece of entertainment about such a serious subject. It’s a movie in the grand, old-fashioned sense of the word.”

He, too, admires The Zone of Interest. “It puts the audience in a position where they have to imagine what they can’t see,” he says. “That’s when you’ve truly engaged them.” But whereas Glazer’s film shows next to nothing, Nuremberg takes the opposite tack: it includes a five-minute excerpt from the documentary footage of the concentration camps that was projected during the trials.

Shooting the scene in which that is played in court left Shannon feeling queasy. “While I was being filmed watching the footage, I was very uncomfortable with the idea of quote-unquote ‘acting’. I didn’t want the camera on me. Something about it seemed kind of profane, and yet I understand why it is in the film. You’ll notice I introduce the footage and then they don’t cut back to me. I think that’s a reflection on how uncomfortable I was. They probably said, ‘Let’s not cut back to Shannon. He looks funny.’”

When I relay this to Vanderbilt, he laughs and denies any such thing. “Michael was brilliant. And we’re not always supposed to be comfortable when we’re doing our work, right? I asked the cast not to watch the footage from the camps ahead of shooting because I wanted them to be fresh on the day. We brought in a real projector. We had 300 extras in court. I went in and said, ‘This is going to be a tough day, but I think it’s very important for the story we’re telling.’ We had a moment of silence, then rolled the film. I don’t want to say that no acting was required, but you’re seeing a lot of real emotions in those faces.”

One area the film-maker seems less eager to pursue is the question of what it means to be releasing Nuremberg into a world in which fascist ideas are increasingly mainstream and even detoxified, and in which one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world can give what appears to be a fascist salute in public and still go on to be richly remunerated.

Much of the dialogue in Nuremberg resonates with our times. Not least the moment when Göring says admiringly of Hitler that he “made us feel German again”. Vanderbilt denies any intentional echoes of a more recent US political slogan. “I wrote that line in 2014,” he points out. Maybe so, but he also chose to keep it in the script even once the Maga movement had gained not only adherents but ubiquity. “Sure. Look, I understand the desire to relate it to today, and I’m not saying people shouldn’t. I’m not trying to be vague. I just think that all good drama speaks to us about where we are now.”

It’s understandable that Vanderbilt should not want to deter Trump supporters from seeing his film. Malek, though, is less circumspect. “‘Hitler made us feel German again’ is a haunting line that is shattering in its simplicity,” he says. “And it’s very reminiscent of a line we hear today, which ends with the same word.” He is conspicuously not repeating the Maga slogan to which he is referring. However: “I think everyone reading your newspaper will know exactly what I mean.”

Shannon goes even further. “The danger exists outside of this movie,” he says gravely when I ask whether giving so much screen time to Göring is playing with fire. “The danger is all around us. We are suckers for this charm. It’s going to be our downfall, it seems. We’d rather be entertained than taken care of. It’s tragic, really.”

He describes the experience of life in the US today as “a nightmare. America is a nightmare right now. The country is mentally ill. It needs help. There seem to be delusions of grandeur and self-loathing in equal measure. It gets grimmer every day. I’ve never seen such dysfunction in my life. It’s really embarrassing.”

At the end of the film, Kelley is reprimanded for bashing the US while promoting his book about the Nazis. Perhaps the publicists for Nuremberg will be tearing their hair out when they hear Shannon’s remarks. “I’m sure anybody who’s associated with promoting and selling this movie to the world is going to be horrified by everything I’ve said in this interview,” he agrees. “But I don’t really care.”

• Nuremberg is in UK cinemas from 14 November, and in Australian cinemas from 4 December

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/nov/11/nuremberg-interview-rami-malek-michael-shannon-hermann-goring-russell-crowe

 

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