Russell Crowe in Nuremberg. Photo / Scott Garfield
Nazis, Hannibal Lecter and Russell Crowe: writer/director James Vanderbilt on the 13-year journey to Nuremberg.
James Vanderbilt laughs and says, “There was a moment when my wife very politely asked if I could keep less books about Nazis on the nightstand.”
He pauses for a moment, then adds, “Which I felt was a reasonable request.”
This was 13 years ago and the writer/director was “deep down the rabbit hole” of research for what he hoped would be his next project, Nuremberg. He’d read a proposal from a journalist-turned-author named Jack El-Hai who was writing a book about the Nuremberg war trials, and he’d become a little obsessed.
The proposal was only six pages long and followed the strange and unique relationship that developed between Captain Douglas M. Kelley, an ambitious American army psychiatrist, and Hermann Göring, the charismatic Nazi military leader whose command was second only to that of Hitler himself. Kelley had been called in by the top military brass to assess whether the captured Nazi leader was mentally fit to stand trial after he surrendered to Allied forces in 1945. During Kelley’s ongoing assessments at Nuremberg Prison, the pair developed an unlikely bond as they mentally jousted with each other. The proposal left Vanderbilt “floored”.
“It was the fastest I ever said ‘Yes’ to anything in my life.”
El-Hai’s book came out a year later, in 2013, and was titled The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, while Vanderbilt continued work on adapting the true story into a historical thriller. He felt the historical weight of the story and “found solace in research”.
“I wanted to make it bulletproof,” he says.
But the more he researched, the more his story grew.
“When I started, it was about those Kelley and Göring. Robert Jackson, the lead US prosecutor, wasn’t in the book, but I’d started reading about him. The US Army didn’t want the Nuremberg trials. They wanted to shoot everybody in the head and call it a day. Jackson said, ‘No. We have to put these men on trial’. It was the right thing to do, and he fought to get the trials to happen. There’d never been an international tribunal before.”
His story had changed, so he started again. All the while those Nazi books kept piling up on his bedside table. Along the way he uncovered the story of Sergeant Howie Triest, the jail’s translator who worked with Kelley as he interviewed the captured Nazi military leaders. He knew he had to add it in.
“I thought my movie was over here, but now it’s also over here with this other guy. Then, I saw it was also over here. It kept growing and growing and growing.”
He grins and says, “which as a writer is terrifying”.
“When you’re trying to adapt something, you’re trying to shrink it. You’re taking stuff out. But the scope of Nuremberg kept growing. Ultimately, it was a real gift to find all of those stories and be able to fold them all into this one film.”
Aside from its gripping psychological angle, there was also a more personal reason why the story resonated so strongly with Vanderbilt.
“Both of my grandfathers fought in World War II,” he says. “Thankfully, both of them came home. I grew up with stories about their time and everything they had been through. I have friends who lost grandparents and family members in the camps. To our generation that had grandparents who went through it, that period of history always felt like you could reach out and touch it.
“You’d hear firsthand accounts from the people you loved about it. When I talk to my children about that period of time, it’s like talking to them about the American Revolution. It’s so far removed from their reality, which I completely understand. Time moves on.”
He wanted to bring that past back to life. To make it feel real to the generations who didn’t have that strong personal connection.
“We have to look backwards in order to look forwards,” he says. “You can read a book. You can memorise facts. You can take a test. You can know something. But movies make you feel something.”
With Nuremberg constantly expanding, he kept working on it in the background, while writing screenplays for other directors. He stuck mostly to crowd-pleasing fare such as the comedic-mystery Murder Mystery with Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston, the Independence Day sequel, and two entries in the slasher film franchise Scream. The only project in his long filmography that hints at his passion for research-driven, historical thrillers is 2015’s Truth, an American political thriller also based on a true story and starring Cate Blanchett and Robert Redford. It is also the only other movie that he has directed.
In the writing of Nuremberg, Vanderbilt walked a tightrope in keeping Göring the monster that he was, but also allowing his well-documented charisma to charm the audience. He knew that getting the casting right was crucial to the film’s success.
“Göring was known as an incredibly charming individual. Somebody once described him as the best dinner party guest you’ll ever have, which is not what you think of when you think of a Nazi. I knew I needed somebody who could play that charm and that seduction and had that magnetism. Göring was the most famous person in the prison and he had a movie star quality about him,” he explains. “So I wanted a magnetic, charming movie star to play this part. And Russell was my first choice.”
Vanderbilt sent his script to Russell Crowe’s agent, hoping for the best. A short while later he got a call back. The agent told him Crowe liked the script and was in.
“I said, ‘Great! When does he want to chat about it?’ and his agent goes, ‘No, no, no, no, no. He’s in’. I was like, ‘Oh, wow’. That just doesn’t happen.”
This was in 2019. Crowe stayed attached to the film for five years as it moved through the production channels, a rare dedication to a project for an actor of Crowe’s calibre. In 2024 cameras finally rolled on the film Vanderbilt had been working on for so long.
“Russell never wavered with his commitment to it,” Vanderbilt smiles. “It was incredible, and such a gift to the film. When it came to playing the part, doing the research and going deep with it, he was just astounding. There was nothing I asked him to do that he wasn’t willing to do. There was no vanity. He wanted to get to the heart of who this man really was, with all of his flaws and all of his charms. It’s a brilliant performance. I’m so grateful to him for going that deep with this.”
“Russell is a movie star, but he is a character actor underneath it. He always has been.”
Vanderbilt’s not wrong; Crowe is astoundingly good in the role. It’ll be shocking to not see him collecting armfuls of trophies come awards season.
Watching the film, it’s difficult to ignore how painfully relevant it feels to what’s happening in America right now, as armed police treat peaceful cities as battle zones and extreme right-wing rhetoric and political division seeps from the top. Those parallels feel intentional, a historical reflection of society in downfall.
“I wish I could say that 13 years ago I thought, ‘In 2025, this is going to fit perfectly. We’re going to be talking about Nazis again,” Vanderbilt sighs. “One of the things that attracted me so much to this material was that I thought it was relevant 13 years ago. It’s even more relevant today and it probably will be relevant, unfortunately, in the future. We forget the past at our peril.”
Vanderbilt was influenced by classics of the genre, like Oliver Stone’s JFK, Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 and Edward Zwick’s Civil War movie Glory. All films he loved growing up.
“They’re about these serious moments in history, yet also have a timeless quality to them that you can watch them any year and the emotion still makes sense. The things they’re about still makes sense,” he says. “We were very much trying to make a movie that did that as well.”
But he also took notes from Jonathan Demme’s classic psychological horror thriller Silence of the Lambs, with the movie being a major creative inspiration in how the psychological conversations between Rami Malek’s Dr Kelley and Crowe’s Göring were written and filmed.
“The Clarice and Hannibal scenes are some of my favourite scenes ever put on film,” Vanderbilt enthuses. “Their one-on-one relationship and exchange of ideas. It felt like we kind of got to do our own version of that here. One of the things that initially attracted me to the movie was how much these two men ended up influencing each other’s lives, in ways that neither of them could have predicted or saw coming.
“There’s an exchange, where, Göring asks, ‘Are we friends?’ and Kelly says, “I think that might be a little complicated for what we are”. I was fascinated by what that relationship was. What did they see in the other one that they recognised in themselves?”
An admitted stickler for historical accuracy and detail, Vanderbilt nevertheless wanted to make a film that entertained audiences, whose story intrigued them as much as it did it him and that pulled them into the past to make all of its dark atrocity painfully real to generations whose connection to it had been lost with the passing of time.
“Sometimes movies like this can be a little plodding and boring and sort of lecturing. I, as an audience member, turn off when that happens.”
Now, 13 years after that skimpy six-page proposal altered the course of his life, Nuremberg is finally in cinemas. Vanderbilt’s extremely proud of both the film and the work that his cast and crew put into it.
“I love that we made a story about a period of time where people came together and chose justice over vengeance,” he says.
“That’s an important thing to remember and not to forget.”