`Conspiracy'

HBO film stars Kenneth Branagh as the man who led the top-secret
meeting that planned Hitler's "Final Solution."

NAOMI PFEFFERMAN
Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles

IC

enneth Branagh, dapper in his SS cos-
tume, his blond hair neatly slicked back,
coldly spat out the words during pro-
duction of the HBO film Conspiracy, a
"dramatic reconstruction" of the fateful Wannsee
conference. "Dead men don't hump. Dead women
don't get pregnant. Death is the most reliable form
of sterilization."
The renowned actor was sitting on a soundstage that
was an exact reproduction of the lavish Wannsee villa
where 15 high-ranking Nazis, over Lucullian food and
drink, matter-of-factly planned the Final Solution on
Jan. 20, 1942, in a
matter of less than two
hours.
Branagh was playing
SS General Reinhard
Heydrich, who led the
brief, top-secret meet-
ing like a ruthless
CEO. His fellow actors
sipped liquor and
puffed cigars as
Branagh completed the
scene, feeling repulsed.
"It was very claus-
trophobic, very smoky,
because once those set
doors were closed, all
the actors were in
there all the time,"
said Branagh, who is best known for directing and
starring in film adaptations of Shakespeare. That
meant that at the end of every take you rushed out of
the room, pealed off your SS uniform and took a
breather from that creepily atmospheric place."
Branagh, who suffered sleepless nights as a result
of the material, actually fled the set in the middle of
one scene. He was reciting the dialogue where
Heydrich refers to the gas chambers and advises:
"The machinery is waiting. Feed it."
"I had to go outside for a little while," confided the
Oscar-nominated actor-director. "I just felt the cumu-
lative weight of it all. At all times I was reminded that
this happened. It was not a fiction. It happened in a
room like this and it took only 90 minutes and this
man, this fantastically intelligent man Heydrich, was
at the heart of it.
"I just felt this underlying revulsion at what hap-
pened and at the man himself. I didn't want to say
the lines. It was the most disturbing experience of
my 20-year acting career."
Conspiracy, which debuts on HBO 9 p.m.
Saturday, May 19, is the brainchild of director Frank

Pierson (the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Dog Day
Afternoon), who labored for eight years to bring the
project to the screen.
Though Pierson is not Jewish, he felt close to the
material. As a scholarship student at an elite New
England prep school in the late 1930s, he befriended
two Jewish classmates who were refugees of Nazi
Germany,.
The boys, who were outcasts at school, didn't like
to talk about their experiences. Pierson learned
something of what they had gone through when he
avidly read about the Shoah after the war.
Cut to the mid-1990s, when Holocaust refugee
Peter Zinner, a film editor, gave the director a tape
of the subtitled 1984 Austrian-German drama Die

Reinhard Heydrich,
portrayed by
Kenneth Branagh,
right, was known
as "The Hangman"
throughout occupied
Europe and was
second only to
Himmler in the
SS hierarchy. He
coordinated the
"Final Solution"
with his deputy,
Adolf Eichmann,
played by Stanley
Tucci, left.

Wannseekonferenz.
"I can't say I enjoyed it," said Pierson, the director
of HBO's Truman and Citizen Cohn. "But I watched
it like I was seeing a terrible auto wreck. I couldn't
take my eyes away.
Pierson hoped to re-make the movie "to elicit in
viewers a kind of tenderness for the thin veneer of
civilization that keeps us all from savaging each other
to death." He hired screenwriter Loring Mandel to
write the script based on the 15-page Wannsee "pro-
tocols" and meticulous historical research.
Pierson's goal was to engage audiences by "making
them feel as if they were in that room at Wannsee, as
if it were a live event," he said. To that end, he
"kept the cameras always at eye level so viewers
would imagine that they were sitting at the table."
To allow the actors to feel they were really at
Wannsee, he shot 10-minute takes at a time and used
smallish 16mm cameras so he could fit two on the set
without having to pull out a wall.
Branagh, 40, confided that he had known no Jews
while growing up in a working-class Protestant
home in Belfast in the 1970s.

"

He did know something about bigotry and ethnic
strife; when he was 9, his family fled the "troubles"
between Protestants and Catholics by relocating to
Reading, England. There, Branagh's thick brogue
made him the object of taunts by the school bullies;
as solace, he lost himself in 25-cent paperback copies
of Shakespeare's plays.
By the age of 24, he had been accepted to the
Royal Shakespeare Company; over the years, he
made his mark with film versions of Henry V, Much
Ado About Nothing and Hamlet.
But nothing quite prepared him for the challenge
of playing Reinhard Heydrich in Conspiracy, he
revealed. Branagh accepted the role, in part,
"because I felt myself to be reasonably well-informed
about the Holocaust but was shocked to discover I
knew nothing about the Wannsee Conference," he
said.
He dutifully visited Holocaust museums and read
biographical material, only to find that Heydrich's
inner life remained an enigma. Mandel tried to help
by typing up a psychological profile of Heydrich, a
talented musician also known for his brute courage
and bullying manner.
"We were looking for elements that would lend to
an understanding of his behavior, whether it be a
childhood trauma or some physical or mental dis-
ability, but nothing seemed to make psychological
sense," Branagh said.
"My previous experience of playing somebody quite so
dark and evil was Iago in [the Castle Rock film of]
Othello," he added. "And yet, inside that part are many
motivations — sexual jealousy, thwarted ambition —
that you might regard as human, however unappealing.
"But I didn't find that with Heydrich. It was very
difficult to discover what was human inside him."
In the end, the key to Heydrich "was just that he
relished power, his ability to judge and be ruthless
with people," Branagh said. "I didn't even think he
had any deep-rooted hatred against the Jews. I think
that if he had been asked to get rid of 11 million ten-
nis players, he would have done it with exactly the
same efficiency and skill."
The casual tone of the Wannsee meeting was as
shocking to Branagh as the concentration camp pho-
tographs he perused while researching his role. To
cope with the difficult subject matter, the cast played
a movie trivia game in between takes "with a mad
zeal that I have never encountered before," Branagh
said. "We threw ourselves at the banal and the silly
and the superficial in a hysterical way."
At the end of this interview, the actor said he was
flying off to Greenland to live on an ice-breaker while
making a movie about legendary British Antarctic
explorer Ernest Shackleton.
"He was a man who valued life and was awash
with compassion," the actor said. "It will be healing
to play him. He was the exact opposite of
Heydrich."

Conspiracy debuts 9 p.m. Saturday, May 19, on
HBO. It will be repeated -1 p.m. Tuesday, May
22; 12:15 and 11 p.m. Sunday, May 27; 2:30
and 11:55 p.m. Thursday, May 31; 10 a.m. and
8 p.m. Monday, June 4; 5:30 p.m. Saturday,
June 9; and 5:15 p.m. Wednesday, June 13.

5/18

2001

79