Click here to listen to the interview. When I spoke with Paula Apsell via Zoom on April 10, 2024, I couldn’t help but start by thanking her for making a film that portrayed Jews in the Holocaust as something other than passive victims. That narrative is all too familiar, and for too many years, was… Read More »
ONE LIFE — James Hawes Interview
Click here to listen to the interview. ONE LIFE had been in pre-production for many years before finally premiering now in 2024. When I spoke with its director, James Hawes, via Zoom on March 13, 2024, I couldn’t help but ask him if he thought there was some sort of synchronicity at work with the… Read More »
TRANSIT
Christian Petzold has done something extraordinary with TRANSIT. Using the novel of the same name by Anna Seghers, he has taken the story of a young German fleeing the Nazis during World War II and transmuted it into a universal story of refugees. By removing the specifics and setting it in the first-world present, the… Read More »
NEVER LOOK AWAY – Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck Interview
Click here to listen to the interview. Before I started recording my interview with Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck on January 14, 2019, we reminisced about the last time we had met. It was just before his film, THE LIVES OF OTHERS, had beaten Guillermo del Toro’s odd-on favorite for the Best Foreign Language Oscar™, PAN’S… Read More »
ALLIED
There is an artistic license that we allow films that sweep us along when their emotional resonance is overpowering. Minor plot points that aren’t resolved, or factual errors. For an example of the latter, one need look no further than the Letters of Transit, desired by so many in CASABLANCA. No such thing. Yet it… Read More »
ANTHROPOID
ANTHROPOID is divided into two episodes, one more gut-wrenching than the last as it tells the fact-based story of Czech partisans on what is essentially a suicide mission to assassinate SS General Reinhardt Heydrich, Butcher of Prague, co-planner of the Final Solution, and third in line in the Nazi hierarchy. While the first part is… Read More »
Géza Röhrig and László Nemes on SON OF SAUL
When I spoke with actor Géza Röhrig and director/co-writer László Nemes on December 12, 2015, I knew it was going to be a serious conversation. I also knew that it was going to be as insightful as their film, SON OF SAUL. We started the interview with my asking why these two would want to immerse themselves… Read More »
MAX
As an exercise in ethics, people have been known to ponder the morality of going back in time to kill Hitler before he rose to power and committed any crimes against humanity. Some though, to adhere to the polar opposite sort of principles that Hitler espoused, thought a much more effective way to stop him… Read More »
Adrien Brody is THE PIANIST, Thomas Kretschmann, his Tormentor
Meeting Adrien Brody and Thomas Kretschmann is like spending time with two old pals who still enjoy joking around with each other even after a difficult shoot in Europe and a grinding publicity tour schedule to promote their extraordinary film, THE PIANIST. Once we began talking about that film, though, they were deadly serious about the subject matter, the… Read More »
Noah Taylor and MAX
It would have been surprising if Noah Taylor hadn’t had a few qualms about playing the Adolph Hitler seen in MAX. Rather than the madman behind the Holocaust, Hitler here is a rather pathetic creature, standing in bread lines along with so much of the rest of the German population after WWI. When we spoke… Read More »