Colin Firth - in Conspiracy

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Colin Firth on Conspiracy:
"The character I'm playing is Stuckart. He's the Interior Minister. He probably joined the party - the Nazi party - earlier than any of the other people at this table. So he's a real zealot."

Review of Conspiracy, from The Times of London, January 21, 2002
Conspiracy Brandy and cigars and the Final Solution
STUART WAVELL
But one of those present voices passionate opposition: is this a lone voice of conscience? The answer is much more bizarre, says Colin Firth, who plays Dr Wilhelm Stuckart, an interior ministry lawyer.

There’s a moment when you think this one guy is going to champion humanity, and then you realise that is not what it’s all about. He wanted a much more subtle and thorough-going way of eliminating a race of people - sterilisation.

Firth, last seen parodying his doppelgänger Mr Darcy in Bridget Jones’s Diary, immersed himself in Holocaust literature for the part and found himself haunted by the experience. Yet the first month of filming was marked by fits of the giggles.

That could be quite hard for people to understand, and possibly offensive. When you put 15 boys together and introduce something that makes them all a bit nervous, it’s a recipe for slightly hilarious ribaldry, although we weren’t joking about the subject matter.

In fact, this flippancy served the mood they were required to create, he believes. Those men were not sitting there discussing tragedy. They were simply dealing with the administrative difficulties of mass murder. That is what is so mind-blowing about it.

In the initial read-through, the actors found themselves laughing at a scripted joke and instinctively covered their mouths in remorse, he says. It was when they were discussing how to sterilise people without them knowing. Someone said you could have an x-ray machine hidden under a desk. At which, another character says, ‘I’m not coming into your office.’

All the levity was knocked out of them, however, when they went to Berlin for the last week of shooting Conspiracy - The Meeting at Wannsee, which begins on BBC2 on Friday. The venue was the actual villa where the conference was convened by Heydrich in the suburb of Wannsee, preserved as a Holocaust museum.

I was born in 1960, and for those of us not directly affected, the Holocaust had seemed like ancient history. It had been difficult for me to maintain my outrage. But there were photographs in that museum - medical experiments, some involving children - which are some of the most horrific things I’ve ever seen. I was haunted for months afterwards.

Other memories intrude. One day the cast, wearing their German uniforms, were taking a break outside when they were spotted by a group of German schoolboys, who began cheering them. Firth is still not sure if it was mockery or something else. And near his lodgings in east Berlin, he noticed a synagogue surrounded by a protective ring of army trucks.

His most abiding sense was of the banality of evil that floated in the cigar smoke and brandy fumes filling the villa on January 20, 1942. His character, Stuckart, had helped to draw up the Nuremburg laws on racial purity, but balked at mass extermination because, paradoxically, it flouted the rule of law.

His argument was not, ‘Save the poor, innocent people’ but, ‘Have patience. Wait a generation and we’ll rid the world of a pestilence through sterilisation. If you hurry things, there’s going to be a backlash’.

He is overruled with a few words by Heydrich: "Death is the most reliable form of sterilisation."

Review of Conspiracy, from the Seattle Times, May 18, 2001
Conspiracy powerful
The blood-curdling aspect of "Conspiracy" lies in its resemblance to a corporate meeting where the participant's souls have become completely detached from their intellects and the need for consensus overrides common sense. This madness reaches its apex in Firth's fine portrayal of the - surprise - lawyer who wrote the Nuremberg Laws.

Review of Conspiracy, from the L.A. Times, May 18, 2001
by Howard Rosenberg
This script from Loring Mandel, direction from Frank Pierson and performances around the table yield a quiet terror that turns to intrigue during short breaks when the participants gossip and jockey privately for position. Especially strong are Colin Firth as Wilhelm Stuckart, co-author of Nazi laws proclaiming a Jewish-free society; David Threlfall as turf-guarding Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger; Stanley Tucci as the obliging Eichmann; and Ian McNeice as that foulmouthed SS sausage Gerhard Klopfer

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