At a 2014 screening in New York of her award-winning documentary The Decent One, about SS leader Heinrich Himmler, Israeli filmmaker Vanessa Lapa was approached by a member of the audience. His name was Stanley Cohen and he wanted to talk about Albert Speer, the architect who rose to become Adolf Hitler’s minister for armaments.
As owner of the film rights to the English translation of Speer’s bestselling memoir, Inside the Third Reich, Cohen had spoken to Paramount Pictures in 1971 about turning the book into a movie.
Paramount assigned 26-year-old British writer Andrew Birkin, a protege of director Stanley Kubrick, to work on a script. It was five years since Speer’s release from Berlin’s Spandau prison and the worldwide success of Inside the Third Reich had made him a media star. Birkin travelled to Speer’s home in Heidelberg and the pair spent three months discussing ideas for the film.
Cohen suggested that Lapa might be interested in meeting Birkin, so in early 2015 Lapa flew to Wales to see him. “Andrew told me he was a little lazy,” Lapa tells Inquirer via Zoom from Israel. “Instead of taking notes of his conversations with Speer, he had recorded them. As we sat there he pushed ‘play’.” Within five minutes Lapa knew she had the raw material for what would become her next documentary film: Speer Goes to Hollywood.
Read the article by Tom Gilling in The Australian.