Nuremberg with James Vanderbilt

Nov 19, 2025

James Vanderbilt, the screenwriter behind Nuremberg and known for Zodiac, explores the monumental trials that followed World War II. He delves into his fascination with 'evil' characters, examining Göring's charisma while ensuring his atrocities are condemned. Vanderbilt shares personal connections through family history, highlights warnings against authoritarianism from the past, and discusses the innovative use of film evidence in court. This conversation reveals the importance of remembering history through the humanity of its characters.

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ANECDOTE

Grandfathers’ Stories Shaped Perspective

James Vanderbilt recounts growing up with two grandfathers who fought in WWII and how their stories felt tangibly recent.
That personal connection motivated him to bring the past vividly to life for modern audiences.

INSIGHT

Two-Person Psychological Core

Vanderbilt saw the story's cinematic core as a two-person psychological duel akin to Silence of the Lambs.
That dynamic promised a compact, intense drama between Kelly and Göring.

INSIGHT

Charm Makes Evil More Terrifying

Vanderbilt intentionally shows Hermann Göring's charm to make his evil more disturbing and realistic.
Portraying Göring as human amplifies the horror when documentary evidence reveals the atrocities.

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The history books will tell you that World War II ended on September 2, 1945. The filmmaker James Vanderbilt, however, will tell there was still one last battle left to fight as the conflict officially drew to a close. It was a battle to be fought not in the trenches but in a court room, with the eyes of the world watching and the stakes were impossibly high. The Nazi party of Germany had been stopped, with the surviving members of their high command arrested. But it wasn’t enough to simply shoot them behind closed doors. They had to be brought to trial and held publicly accountable for the unthinkable horrors of the Holocaust – the entire planet made aware of the systematic cruelty they’d inflicted.

Giving these charismatic monsters a chance to excuse their actions in front of the global media, though, ran the risk of giving their ideology a chance to spread. Get this wrong and in fifteen years, the Nazis might come back stronger than before, some on the prosecution worried. It’s this terrifying prospect that propels James’ new historical drama, Nuremberg, starring Russell Crowe and Rami Malek, delving into the legal saga that followed the supposed war to end all wars.

Today on the show – a spoiler conversation about Nuremberg in which James and I break down the need to tell this story at this moment in time, as the number of people who lived through the Holocaust dwindles. We talk about the throughline between this film and 2007’s Zodiac, written by James and directed by David Fincher, which James came on Script Apart to discuss in 2020. You’ll hear about how Silence Of The Lambs became an unlikely roadmap for this wartime epic. And we also get into why the movie ultimately arrives at the message that the barbaric tendencies of Hitler and acolytes weren’t unique to the Nazi psyche; fascism and authoritarianism could happen – and perhaps is happening – right underneath our noses today.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on thescriptapartpodcast@gmail.com.

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