In an entertaining talk at the Zurich Film Festival, Russell Crowe, on hand for the screening of James Vanderbilt’s “Nuremberg,” spoke at length about his interest in Hermann Göring, going the distance with top-league peers like Rami Malek and Michael Shannon, and the talent of the pic’s writer and director.
Based on Jack El-Hai’s book “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist,” “Nuremberg” is set just after World War II during the trials intended to bring war criminals to justice. It follows American psychiatrist Douglas Kelly (Malek), who is tasked with determining if the Nazi prisoners are fit to stand trial. In the process, he finds himself in a complex battle of wits with Crowe’s Göring, considered Hitler’s right-hand man.
Describing himself as “a little bit of a history buff,” Crowe said the project gave him the opportunity to take a deep dive into the person who was Göring.
“You just have to have the energy to go looking. Because it’s such a well-documented period of history, I was able to pinpoint his life from the time he was a kid, through school, even where he went to school, the marks he got at school, I was able to find this stuff.
“I was able to find sections of the German version of what the British Parliament would call Hansard, the political record of whatever is said in the Houses of Parliament. So I was able to find attitudes of his that were off the cuff. He hadn’t planned to say something, but somebody got under his skin in parliament and he blasts them, and I can read that. And I was like, oh, okay.
“Nuremberg”
Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics
“So I get a different level of his personality and his charm and his wit and also his penchant for burying his opposition. If somebody said something to him in that parliament house, where he was the Reichsmarschall, the head of the German parliament, he would frickin crucify people, including Goebbels. He’s on record telling Goebbels he’s a moron. That was interesting, right?”
Crowe discovered how Göring connected himself to people who he thought would advance his career and how his political power eventually declined.
“He always believed, and it’s the height of egotism, that he could totally control the narrative. And that was fascinating to me, because at a certain point, around about 1942, he lost control of the narrative. What does he do now? Because if he keeps going back to Rome, he’s going to get stabbed on the steps. So he stays out of the center of things, and Goebbels and Himmler and Heydrich, they sort of take over. They get Hitler’s ear.”
Despite his interest in the subject, Crowe was initially hesitant to read Vanderbilt’s script.
“In my profession, quite often you step into a job on sort of a leap of faith.”
Offering an example, Crowe recalled working with Ridley Scott on “Gladiator.”
“The two of us just sat in his office night after night just yelling at script pages, going, well, this is shit. That’s rubbish. That’s bullshit. So before we started shooting, we’d taken that 110-page script and we only agreed on 21 pages. And now we’re about to go and make the movie.”
Crowe noted that “Gladiator” is often talked about in such glowing terms, “but Ridley and I see that experience as one of the greatest bullet dodging exercises in the history of cinema.”
“Nuremberg” was a very different situation, Crowe adds.
“‘Nuremberg’ was a beautiful script. It was very well balanced. It gave a great insight into this moment in history. So I was connected to it immediately.”
Crowe noted, however, that he signed onto the movie back in 2019 only for the financing to fall through.
The project ultimately took five years to come together.
“And that five years is on top of the seven years it had taken Jamie Vanderbilt to get it to that point where he sent it to me. So sometimes you just have to be very patient and you just have to wait.”
While Crowe has seen a number of high-profile projects disappear, he continued to bet on this one.
“With ‘Nuremberg,’ I just felt it in my water. I felt a confidence in Jamie, a love for the script and a fascination for the character.”
Indeed, Crowe has nothing but praise for Vanderbilt and his high-caliber co-stars.
“This whole cast, for me, it was like walking into a saloon in the wild west. Every motherfucker is a gunfighter. Every person in that room is going to freaking win the end of the day. They have their guns, they have their skills, and they’re ready to fight. And that was a great energy.”
It was Crowe’s first time working with Malek.
“Rami is obviously very talented and brings a lot of stuff to the table,” he noted, lauding Malek’s determination and performance but not wanting to give away too much about the movie. “Things that happen in that character’s life are quite surprising, and Rami was very brave. He just pushed himself straight into it.”
“Nuremberg” was also an opportunity for Crowe to again go toe to toe with Shannon, who plays Robert H. Jackson, the U.S. chief prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal.
“Michael Shannon, one of the greatest American actors that there’s ever been: he is a towering fucking performer. We’d met before, Michael and I, we did ‘Man of Steel’ together, where I played Jor-El, Superman’s dad, and Michael played Zod, formerly my best friend, but now politically, my sworn enemy.
“So we knew each other. We’d worked together side by side in a gym in Illinois for three months doing this fight sequence. So I knew his capabilities, his capacities, his humor. It’s actually one of the great things of any given day that I’m on set with Michael trying to make him laugh.
“The thing is, he looks like a very dour person, and he does present that face to the world quite often. But I can make him laugh. And so I would do it every single day.”
Crowe recounted working on one particular scene in “Nuremberg” with Shannon that was 17 pages long.
“You know, three pages is a long scene in the film. Five pages is a very long scene. Seventeen pages is fucking ridiculous.”
The plan was to shoot the scene over four days.
“I felt that wasn’t going to because there was no natural breaks. It was one conversation.”
Up for the challenge, Crowe and Shannon pushed for it to be shot in one take. They went to Vanderbilt to convince him “to tell the production that he’s going to nail 17 pages in one shooting day. And I can see in his eyes, one was like, it’s impossible, but the other side of it was, it’s exactly what he was hoping for.”
Vanderbilt was hesitant, however.
“He said, ‘The production is not going to let me schedule the scene like that because it’s just not humanly possible to shoot 17 pages in one day.’ I said, ‘Jamie, Michael and I are extraterrestrial. We’re from Krypton.’
“And so he let us do it. We did 11 takes on the day. The first eight takes were the entire scene. I’m not bullshitting you — that room that was full of people, full of extras, we were sitting in Budapest, there’s like 600 people in the room — that room burst into applause on cut.”
