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Award-winning English director David Evans helmed\u00a0the feature film Fever Pitch<\/em> (the original, superior British version about soccer, starring Colin Firth, for which Nick Hornby adapted his best-selling book of the same name), and is now established as a leading director of high-end TV drama in the UK, including Shameless, Downton Abbey<\/em>, and Russell T. Davies’s Cucumber<\/em>. So it could be seen as\u00a0a dive into unexpected territory to make a documentary about two men whose fathers were Nazis in World War II, the subject of\u00a0his new film, My Nazi Legacy<\/em><\/strong>,<\/a> which premieres on Independent Lens<\/em> on PBS Monday, May 2 [check local listings<\/a>].\u00a0My Nazi Legacy<\/em> is a collaboration with old friend Philippe Sands, a renowned author and human rights lawyer who’s been working on a book in tandem with the film. [See our interview with Sands<\/a> on this site as well.]<\/p>\n “Right from the start, this involving documentary asks much of its audience and poses questions that are unnerving yet engrossing,” writes Ken Jaworowski\u00a0in The New York Times<\/a><\/em>.\u00a0“Outstanding… challenging, and disturbing,” adds Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n How did you first connect with Philippe Sands and decide to work together to make this film?<\/b><\/p>\n My Nazi Legacy filmmaker David Evans<\/p><\/div>\n Philippe and I are old friends; in fact he directed me in a play at University. I think it\u2019s telling that he did not go on to become a director, nor I an actor.<\/p>\n But the prospect of this film grew from a conversation round his dinner table. He realised that in researching his book East West Street he had found these two men, whom he had little use for in the narrative of his book, but who clearly had a fascinating story to tell. He thought it might make a film. I agreed.<\/p>\n What was that working relationship like for you both as collaborators?<\/b><\/p>\n At first I was concerned that the stresses of making a film together should not jeopardize our friendship; but I didn\u2019t need to worry. Philippe was, from start to finish, utterly respectful of those parts of the process which he recognized as lying within my sphere of expertise, while at the same time having enormous passion to make the film as good as it could be; this meant accepting a much bigger on-screen role for himself than he (or I) had initially bargained for. But of course the film would have been diminished had it been about only two rather than three men sharing the same history. So from my point of view it was an ideal working relationship.<\/p>\n How did you come to see this project as different from previous films about the Holocaust? What about it appealed to you as a filmmaker?<\/b><\/p>\n I determinedly refused to see it as a “Holocaust documentary”; partly because that would have meant taking on a fearful weight of moral responsibility, and partly because, truth to tell, we needed to invent a genre for our work to fit in. We are, after all, explicitly concerned with the legacy of the Holocaust in terms of the way in which subsequent generations cope with the memory of atrocities perpetrated by, or upon, their antecedents. This is a much smaller genre containing very few films \u2014 Hitler\u2019s Children<\/em> being an example.<\/p>\n The passage of time makes it inevitable that documentaries concerned with the Holocaust become secondary accounts of the events themselves \u2014 but that\u2019s not the whole answer, as we discovered in the cutting room: the more we allowed the film to become preoccupied with the way in which memory is shaped by the narrowly personal as well as the historically momentous \u2014 by filial pride or hatred, as well as recognition of the historical facts \u2014 the more universal the film\u2019s implications became. When the film was released people from Cambodia and Argentina claimed our story of shame, blame and exoneration as their own.<\/p>\n What was your own first exposure to learning about the Holocaust? Was it through fictionalized films or documentary? Did your own family talk about it?<\/b><\/p>\n Like any British boy of my generation I was educated about the Holocaust at school, and I saw the episode of The World at War that screened on TV, with my family. I\u2019ve never liked fiction films about the Holocaust. It was never talked about in my household.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Was it emotionally challenging to dig into and look at archival footage from the Krakow ghetto, for example, and other images from that time?<\/strong><\/p>\n First, you have to remember what a boon that trove of archive footage was! We knew we had a great film in the making before we were given access to that material \u2014 but to see that color footage from Hans Frank\u2019s personal archive, never before placed in the public domain… it was simply amazing. And then for Horst to counter, as it were, Nik\u2019s offer with the revelation that he, too, had home movies: of his relaxed father rowing on the lake and so forth. These discoveries transformed the film.<\/p>\n And so for a long time I didn\u2019t really\u00a0“see” the archive footage, because I was so concerned at using it most advantageously in the cut. It was only when I watched the film for the first time with an audience that I thought about what a public screening of that material meant. There\u2019s something about the curious, guileless expressions of the young people, all of whom surely perished \u00a0\u2014 combined with the sense, that, had it not been for this film, those trusting glances may never have been seen by anyone at all \u00a0\u2014 that evokes a strange atmosphere of the uncomprehending past looking out of the screen at the present.<\/p>\n But in all honesty the most overwhelming moment for me personally was walking into the derelict synagogue in Zhovkva \u2014 I\u2019m not quite sure why.<\/p>\n Have Niklas Frank and Horst von\u00a0W\u00e4chter seen the film and if so have they given feedback (especially Horst) on seeing their own painful stories portrayed?<\/b><\/p>\n Yes, of course. Indeed they have jointly attended public screenings followed by audience discussions in Vienna and Nuremberg (where the film was screened in Courtroom 600 itself). Horst, I think, feels kindly disposed towards us \u2014 in that he knows we have represented his views fairly \u2014 but in general he feels that the film misses the point, that the true story of his father is yet to be told.<\/p>\n Interestingly, it was Niklas who picked out a moment in the film which he was passionately convinced we should change: near the end, in the Nuremberg court sequence, where we now hear Hans Frank testifying to his official positions in the Nazi government, we had originally included a short section of the famous speech in which Frank remarked on the guilt of the German nation. Niklas was indignant that this painted his father in too positive a light, that he should not be allowed even this much room to win the audience\u2019s sympathy. I agreed to the change \u2014 in truth the issue of Frank\u2019s \u2018confession\u2019 is a vexed one, which the film does not explore, so it\u2019s perhaps best left out completely \u2014 but it was a stark reminder of the depth of hatred Niklas still feels for his father\u2019s memory.<\/p>\n I think both men found the film hard to watch to begin with; and as filmmakers we have always been aware of the debt we owe both of them as willing participants in a process that from start to finish was exhausting and occasionally distressing.<\/p>\n You’ve worked successfully for some time as a director of fiction film and TV before returning to documentary for this. What was different for you in the process of making a non-fiction film, what were unique challenges that came up?<\/b><\/p>\n Challenges \u2014 I don\u2019t know… there were opportunities a-plenty though. In TV drama, one is always bound by the script \u2014 the writer or showrunner is the auteur \u2014 and while that leaves a lot of room for interpretation, how much varies from show to show, it places a great burden on the director\u2019s shoulders just to shoot what\u2019s on the page, and not to the detriment of the schedule and budget. There\u2019s a great deal of satisfaction to be had in jumping through those hoops and coming away with something of top quality; but it doesn’t compare to the creative risk one finds sitting in a room with a bunch of rushes and hoping there\u2019s a film to be found there.<\/p>\n At the same time the stakes were conspicuously low, at least to begin with: Philippe and I didn\u2019t start off thinking that our project would become a feature-length theatrical documentary, and our producers Amanda Posey and Finola Dwyer had bigger fish to fry because they were in the middle of making Brooklyn<\/em>! Even when our edits were ready to be exposed to critical scrutiny \u2014 by Amanda and Finol, and Nick Fraser, the presiding genius of the BBC Storyville strand, who was an early and fervent supporter of our project \u2014 even then there was an assumption that the final author of the film was me. I\u2019m particularly grateful to Philippe, who was the instigator of the project and, of course, intimately engaged with it at every stage, that he, too, opted to see what came out of the cutting room before applying his own finish to the film.<\/p>\n This was an unequivocally positive experience. It meant that I could relate to the material with a completely open mind, and I had a perfect companion in that process in film editor David Charap, whom I have know for years but had never worked with. He has racked up credits with some of the most exciting filmmakers working in the UK, including Pavel Pawlikowski and Terence Davies. I feel that the structure of the film was born out of the creative, blue-sky, no-strings conversation in the cutting room between me and David, and it has marked a permanent change in my attitude to filmmaking.<\/p>\n The more complicated we chose to make the film, the more thought, depth, and nuance we tried to squeeze into it, the better it became. This is something I always hoped would be true, but popular drama isn\u2019t always the best arena to put that theory to the test; however, now I have the proof!<\/p>\n I missed working with actors though…<\/p>\n![\"My](\"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/independentlens\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/david-evans-mnl.jpg\")
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