Leni Riefenstahl, known to history as Hitler’s favorite filmmaker, has long enjoyed a remarkable degree of approval in Hollywood. Quentin Tarantino has expressed admiration for her cinematic gifts, and Francis Ford Coppola reportedly dined with her at the first Telluride Film Festival in 1974 where both directors were honored. A 2007 New Yorker magazine piece reported, “George Lucas praised her modernity and acknowledged the indebtedness of Star Wars to [Riefenstahl’s] Triumph of the Will.”
Such flattery reflects Riefenstahl’s success after World War II in scrubbing her reputation of complicity with the Nazi regime and a widespread buy-in to her carefully crafted narrative: that she was an apolitical artist who merely took assignments from Hitler and his minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. That fantasy is exploded in the documentary Riefenstahl, directed by German filmmaker Andres Veiel. It’s now playing in U.S. theaters through Kino Lorber and will get a campaign for Oscar consideration.
On the new edition of Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast, Veiel explains how he uncovered evidence that Riefenstahl – far from being an artist unwillingly drafted into the service of Hitler – in fact enthusiastically adopted Nazi ideology beginning in the early 1930s. By combing diligently through her archives along with his producer, journalist Sandra Maischberger, Veiel found damning material overlooked by other researchers – including friendly post-war communication between Riefenstahl and Third Reich official Albert Speer, noted architect and Minister of Armaments and War Production for the Nazis.
Veiel tells us about chilling evidence he discovered that Riefenstahl witnessed war crimes shortly after Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, and that she used Roma confined in a concentration camp as extras in a wartime film production – innocent people who were later put to death by the Nazis. He also reveals Riefenstahl’s reaction when an important cinematographer on her film Olympia was later sent to a mental institution and forcibly sterilized in accordance with Nazi belief in eugenics.
That’s on the latest edition of Doc Talk, hosted by Oscar winner John Ridley (12 Years a Slave, Shirley) and Matt Carey, Deadline’s documentary editor. The pod is a production of Deadline and Ridley’s Nō Studios.
Listen to the episode above or on major podcast platforms including Spotify, iHeart and Apple.