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I met with Barry and Jay over the course of a week, reading through the screenplay
and making a list of all scenes in which projection sequences were to appear. Although
the screenplay specified projection in a limited number of scenes, it became clear
that the director envisioned projection in over half of the film, meaning that more
than 60 minutes of film needed to be prepared in advance. This realization of the
amount of footage required occurred about six weeks prior to the scheduled start of
principal photography.
Earlier in the process, crude video copies of many Nazi-era films were obtained from
the National Archives. As we watched these films and studied the script, occasionally
we knew precisely the imagery we wanted. However, for most scenes, we struggled to
define how the imagery would fit with the dialogue, with the psychology of the character,
and with the theme of a scene. Would the images reinforce or undercut; would they be
coherent or disjointed; and would they be presented straightforwardly or be manipulated
- for example, slowed down, optically processed or enlarged?
Once we had a set of rough projection sequence notes, I immediately went to the
National Archives in College Park, Maryland and began screening Hitler-era films of
all kinds: propaganda films, military training films, films which supposedly documented
the war's progress, and newsreels. I watched films made by Germans, Americans, Russians,
Italians and Spaniards. Other than in the opening title sequence, for which the director
had a very specific film sequence in mind (see creation narrative),
the films would play silently, so the fact that the narration was in Spanish or Italian
was of no consequence.
We knew that Leni Riefenstahl's documentary/ propaganda film "Triumph of the Will" could
provide iconographic images of Hitler and of Nazi pageantry, but we found that its
copyright was disputed. In fact, we also learned that many American newsreels that were
made during wartime incorporated German films. The Americans considered these films to
be captured enemy war materials. The Germans considered them to be copyrighted. After
the war, the U.S. government had apparently acceded to the German contention that their
copyrights were valid, at least in Germany, while maintaining that they were public
domain in the United States. While I was cutting the projection sequences, Producer/Visual
Effects Supervisor David D. Johnson navigated the labyrinth of international copyright
conventions and negotiated with the German government. I attempted to cut alternate
versions of the projected sequences which excluded all the potentially-copyrighted
material. In the final analysis, we found that we couldn't exclude all this material
and still have viable projected sequences. We also found that Leni Riefenstahl's images
were so strikingly superior to all the rest, even other Nazi films which she might have
directed, that, in the end, we licensed the rights to a limited amount of "Triumph of
the Will."
We wanted to find images that would reflect and illuminate Hitler's evolving state of
mind. We thought of the notorious medical experiments the Nazis undertook, and we thought
of Hitler's racial dementia. I went to the History of Medicine Museum at the National
Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. I thought that it might have films depicting
experiments, operations, and human deformities which could become nightmarish if cut
together in disjointed ways. It turned out that there were many disturbing films at this
museum, but only a few of them could be used for the purposes we had in mind.
Time was short so there were many potentially relevant films we did not have time to
view. During a week of viewing, we made low-quality video copies of lots of footage.
I returned to Los Angeles and reviewed the footage with the creative team. We selected
the films we thought were promising. Working with David D. Johnson, we obtained the
highest quality duplicates of these films, which we digitized and edited on an Avid
Film Composer nonlinear editing system. Avid editing technology allowed us to visualize
many kinds of manipulations of the film, e.g., layering, zooming, and speed-change
capabilities.
The projection sequences were being prepared before an actor had been cast as Hitler
and before any rehearsal took place, so it was critically important to estimate how
long the scenes would take. I first cut the sequences to my own estimates of how long
the scenes would play. When we had actors read the script for timing the scenes, I
found that some of my estimates were short by as much as 50%. Thus, many sequences
had to be doubled in length. Then, when we started shooting with Norman Rodway, we
found that a few of the sequences were still far too short. His actor's sense of the
proper pacing of the dialogue was longer than I had anticipated.
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