Among the Nazis who were prosecuted during the Nuremberg trials in 1945 and 1946 was Hitler’s second-in-command, Hermann Goring. Less widely known, though, is the involvement of the US psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, who spent more than 80 hours interviewing and assessing Goring 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 Goring 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 Goring, 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 Goring in court.
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.
Photo: AFP
“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 recognized 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 Goring 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 Goring 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.”
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