James Vanderbilt has written and produced over 20 films, including such diverse projects as David Fincher’s Zodiac, for which he was nominated for a Writers Guild of America Award for Best Adapted Screenplay; The Amazing Spider-Man films; the
Murder Mystery films;
White House Down and
Scream. As a director, Vanderbilt’s debut film was the drama
Truth, which starred Cate Blanchett and Robert Redford. His second film,
Nuremberg, is another gripping drama, set in the immediate aftermath of World War II.
As the world grapples with the horrors of the Holocaust, US Army psychiatrist Lt. Col. Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek) is assigned the task of assessing the mental state of Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe), the notorious former Reichsmarschall and Hitler’s second in command, along with other high-ranking Nazi officials, while the Allies — led by the unyielding chief US prosecutor, Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson (Michael Shannon), navigate the monumental task of creating an unprecedented international tribunal to ensure the Nazi regime answers for its atrocities.
To make the film, Vanderbilt assembled a team that included DP Dariusz Wolski, editor Tom Eagles and post supervisor Ryan Price. Here, in an exclusive interview with Post, he talks about the challenges involved and his love of post.
It’s been a decade since you directed Truth. Were you waiting for the right project for your second film?
“I found this film before I directed Truth and was developing them a little bit in tandem. It’s based on the 2013 book ‘The Nazi and the Psychiatrist’ by Jack El-Hai. He sent me this short book proposal, I read it and it was the quickest I ever said yes to anything in my life. It just ticked every box for me and pulled me in immediately. But then writing the screenplay took several years, as an enormous amount of research went into this and I kept discovering new stories. The book covers the story of Göring and Kelley, and I realized during research that the movie was changing and growing into a three-hander, as it had to also follow the story of Robert H. Jackson. Then, getting the financing took a long time until we got Russell Crowe attached. He just dove in with both feet and stuck with us.”
What did prep entail and what were the main technical challenges of pulling it together?
“The big one was figuring out how to shoot it and capture the scope of post-war Nuremberg and Europe, and the destruction, and then seeing the courtroom being rebuilt. We ended up in Budapest, which was really a gift because they have fantastic crews, construction teams and stages. They can build anything, and we knew we had to build a lot on stages, including the courtroom and the prison, all accurate within an inch of their original dimensions. But then when we went outside, we needed locations that had both pre- and post-war European architecture that could feel Germanic. So, we did a lot of scouting, casting, and all of it was (a) mammoth undertaking.”
The film looks great. Tell us about working with Dariusz Wolski.
“Dariusz was such a gift. He’s always busy shooting Ridley Scott movies, but he wanted to try something different. He read the script and we met and he was on board. We talked about how we wanted to shoot it classically, and for it to be simple and to feel beautiful, but we didn’t want it to feel like a period film shot in 1946. We wanted it to feel as modern as possible because I wanted younger people, who don’t have a sense of that period, to be transported into it and to feel that it was alive and not some dusty piece of history.”
How hard was the shoot?
“Every shoot can be difficult and hard. It was definitely joyous. We ended up shooting 49 days, and we had to move very quickly because it was a long, 130-page script. We were shooting five-day weeks, not the crazy six-day weeks, where you shoot 17 hours a day. It’s important to me that the crew is happy and excited to be there, and we were on the sets for two or three weeks to get all the prison and courtroom scenes, and then we didn’t have to travel too far for the locations. I think our farthest location was about an hour-and-a-half away. So, we built it production-wise to be sustainable within the city.”
Where did you post?
“All in Los Angeles. We rented offices in Woodland Hills, and we had a great post team, led by Ryan Price, our post supervisor, who was incredible. Tom Eagles was our editor, and it was just a fantastic post team all the way down.”
Tell us about working with Tom. Was he on-set or did you send dailies?
“We sent dailies. The reason I wanted to work with Tom is that, apart from being a brilliant editor, I really wanted someone who had experience not just with heavy things, but with lighter things. I knew that the dramatic things would work, but it was very important to me that we made sure we also had lighter, maybe even humorous moments that played against all the heavy drama to draw you in.
“The films I grew up with and love — The Godfather, Goodfellas, even Schindler’s List — all have some humor in them. I started sending him footage and we would talk, and he would send me cuts and notes on the weekend. I remember as we were starting to shoot all the courtroom scenes, he said, ‘When you’re in the courtroom, just make sure you give me cutaways,’ because with courtroom scenes, you always have to shoot coverage a hundred different ways. But by the third day, he said we could stop sending all the extra cutaway stuff, as he drowning in footage because we were shooting four cameras. And early on he said, ‘Do you want an assembly first or do you want me to try stuff?’ And I said, ‘I want you to try stuff. I don’t need to watch four hours of everything we shot. If you feel stuff can go, take it out. I can always look at it later.’
“I truly believe the relationship between the director and the editor is a collaboration. I can sit there and tell you to shave this or cut this, but — and it’s true of every department head, especially in post — you hire these people because of their creativity and their talent and their experience and the things that they’re going to see that I as a director won’t necessarily see. And Tom would just bring me cuts and say, ‘Look at this. I tried this, I moved this over here. You’re going to hate this, but I want to show it.’ And all of that is so wonderful because you start to really see your film through other people’s eyes.”
What were the main editing challenges?
“It was a huge cast, with so much going on, so for us it was the challenge of telling multiple stories and dealing with multiple spinning plates. And how many stories can you really tell? We had shot additional scenes with Goring’s family and wife and daughter, but as we cut the movie and kept going, you get a sense of where the movie wants to be. And we cut all that in the end, as it was very important to me that even though it’s over two hours long, it felt fast, that the pace propelled you through it and you’re on a ride.”
Did you do test screenings? Did that help?
“We did test it. I very much believe in test screenings, and they really helped us because there were certain people who were very nervous about some of our subject matter and some of the darker stuff, and we scored tremendously high. And you know, for a movie that ends the way our movie does, I feel like it plays as an audience film, so that helped us protect certain sequences in the film that we felt were very important and didn’t want to lose.”
Are you referring in part to the documentary real concentration camp footage you incorporated, which is still so shocking even if you’ve seen it before?
“Yes, and it was always in the script from the start. It was something we planned and actually projected on the day for real for the actors. And I had asked the actors not to see it beforehand, so the shock was real, not acting.”
All period pieces need visual effects. What was entailed?
“Jason Piccioni was the visual effects supervisor and he’s so creative. FuseFX, that is now absorbed into Folks VFX, did the VFX. I like to work practically as much as possible, just because I think it helps the actors, and the best visual effects people agree with me and tell me, ‘If you can build it, build it.’ But I think visual effects artists are brilliant, and there’s a lot of hidden VFX. The biggest one was the sequence in the stadium, for the huge Nazi parade. The stadium does still exist, but not in the form it did back then. So, we shot that scene with Michael Shannon and Rami Malik on an airfield at two in the morning outside of Budapest with nothing around them but bluescreen. And I had Eve Stewart, our production designer, build an old-school Styrofoam model to scale with tiny actors, so that Rami and Michael could see just how small they were in the VFX stadium. And then Jason had an iPad and had built a wireframe of what it would look like, so they could stand there and visualize what was around them before we shot. And I thought that was tremendously helpful.”
Tell us about the DI.
“We did it at Company 3 with colorist Stephen Nakamura, who’s so brilliant. We did a lot of very detailed work, especially integrating all the VFX and matte painting work, and I’m so happy with the way it looks.”
Did it turn out the way you hoped?
“Absolutely, and love it or hate it, this is the film I set out to make, and I feel very grateful for having such a great post team. I really love the whole post process and being able to craft this with Tom and Ryan Price, and my sound designer Michael Babcock. And composer Brian Tyler, who I’ve worked with for 25 years, was such a creative experience. Everything they brought to it just elevated it. That’s the wonderful thing about directing — yes, it’s your movie, but it takes a village to make it.”