Andres Veiel and Sandra Maischberger Document the Life of Leni Riefenstahl

Andres Veiel is an award-winning German filmmaker, writer, and director renowned for his incisive examinations of history, politics, memory, and moral responsibility. Trained in psychology before turning to filmmaking, Veiel’s acclaimed works include Black Box BRD, Beuys, If Not Us, Who?, and Riefenstahl. Sandra Maischberger is one of Germany’s most prominent journalists, broadcasters, and documentary producers. Best known as the longtime host of the political talk show Maischberger, she has spent more than three decades interviewing world leaders, artists, and influential public figures. Together, Maischberger and Veiel made the 2024 documentary Riefenstahl, which reexamines the life and legacy of filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, director of Triumph of the Will. Drawing on newly uncovered archival material, the film investigates Riefenstahl’s relationship to the Nazi regime, the enduring power of propaganda, and asks the difficult questions surrounding her artistic achievement, complicity, and legacy. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:52Alec Baldwin?

  This is Alec Baldwin, and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio. Some films stand the test of time because they help shape our culture and inform our history. Even if they make us profoundly uncomfortable, filmmaker Lenny Riefenstahl occupies this strange space in cinema history. As the director of the Nazi propaganda film The Triumph of the Will, Riefenstahl's legacy remains a mystery. My guests today are filmmakers Andres Wiel and Sandra Maischberger, who sought to examine Lenny in their 2024 documentary, Riefenstahl. Sandra Maischberger is one of Germany's most

• 2:33Alec Baldwin?

  prominent journalists, broadcasters, and documentary producers. Best known as the longtime host of her political talk show Maischberger, Sandra has spent decades interviewing world leaders and cultural figures. In 2018, she recruited acclaimed German filmmaker Andres Wiel to direct the documentary on Lenny Riefenstahl. Known for his explorations of history, politics, and moral complexity, Wiel's award-winning films include Black Box BRD, Beuys, and If Not Us, Who. Both raised and educated in Germany, I wanted to know what their experiences were like growing up in post-war Germany, particularly what their grade-school education

• 3:18Alec Baldwin?

  on Nazi Germany looked like.

• 3:20Speaker 06

  Well, we had a lot of teachers who were somehow stuck in the Nazi time. So, history lessons ended in 1920, 1925, 1930. Yeah. But then there was a shift in the very end, in the last years of school, in the two last years, we had a young teacher. And he pushed us and gave us some conscience about the concentration camps, about the Nazi past. Of the older teachers, yeah, actually, they were all crippled. They were really, most of them had really traces of the war. You could find in the body and in the soul. And

• 4:02Speaker 06

  for me, it was like waking up in a way. I started then questioning also my father, my mother, a lot about the German past, how they were involved. And suddenly, the interest came up. It was like an ignition.

• 4:17Alec Baldwin?

  For you.

• 4:18Speaker 06

  Starting point for for me, yeah.

• 4:20Alec Baldwin?

  What did your parents tell you?

• 4:22Speaker 06

  It was really a challenge because I got two different stories. My mother was very conscious about everything what happened. She grew up in a house of Jews. So she experienced discrimination, the violence from the very beginning. And my father had the same way to school. And he said, no, nothing happened in this little town. You take it from another experience, maybe from films. So he was ignoring or even, well, I don't think he lied, but he has had a totally different conscience of what happened. And he had somehow to repress a lot. And at the age of seventeen or eighteen, I discovered, okay, history, it's not a fact story.

• 5:07Speaker 06

  It's a story very individually told by different aspects and the necessity to repress memories who are painful, who are somehow connected to guilt. This was a starting point to become a psychologist. Because I thought, okay, it has a lot to do with not only facts, it has a lot to do about the past, the necessities to repress, and, well, the unconsciousness.

• 5:34Alec Baldwin?

  Sandra, same for you, whether it be in Italy or in Munich, how did your parents or your teachers express the Nazi past and the Nazi history to you?

• 5:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm slightly younger than Andres. So in my school time, we did have the talk about the Holocaust for sure. And nearby, my hometown, which is in the north of Munich, there is the concentration camp of Dachau. So you would go there as a pupil in school. You would be taken there, you would go there. But it was kind of abstract because I remember that the first Jew, the first living Jew I met was when I was twenty. Until then, nobody would come forward in our class, in our school. And it was a huge school, one thousand five hundred people going there. Nobody would come forward and tell, you know, I'm a Jew. So that came later.

• 6:27Speaker 03

  So in a way, it was part of our school teaching, but it was nothing. Thing you would talk about, and I remember clearly that the first really emotional impact after Dachau, which is they do a very good exhibition, you know. But I know that emotionally, the Holocaust really got me with an American serial Holocaust. So that was aired in Germany in the eighties. So and I remember clearly that that was the first time that I really got emotionally into it. And then we read Anne Frank, of course, that was the tale of a schoolgirl. As someone who was our age, and that was that was the first times where we really

• 7:09Speaker 03

  started to think ourselves about the story and our teachers wouldn't be connected to the Third Reich in a way. They were younger. So we didn't have those who had the experience. My family was divided. We had a part of the family at Rhein. They would help prisoners of wars, Russian who were detained in a camp nearby. And so they were anti-Nazi and the part of the family of my father, they were clearly Nazis. And they they stuck with the ideology for the whole life. But they wouldn't come forward to tell. They would kind of hide it, but it was clear that they thought that was the best time of Germany in their part, in their point of view.

• 7:52Alec Baldwin?

  Well, of course, Americans, you mentioned the television series Holocaust in this country. And of course, Americans never miss an opportunity to moralize about what's happened around the world, you know, in Nazi Germany and so forth. And choose conveniently to sidestep any meaningful discussion of what they've done. You know, you're never gonna, I mean, there are fabulous programs about the Vietnam War, which and I always set aside the troops. I set aside the soldiers who were ordered to do these things, but the Defense Department, the White House, the CIA, all the institutions involved in that decision, which we knew was a horrible decision, eleven years before it was over.

• 8:35Alec Baldwin?

  We pressed on eleven years after we knew the Pentagon Papers and the whole thing was a mess. The whole thing was a waste of time. We were never going to achieve our goals. And that America, they hardly ever teach any of that in schools here in this country, ever, to look back on how the military was wrong. But for the two of you, I want to go to Andres for a minute and say, both of you have these really serious careers. Sandra's a journalist and does all these shows and, you know, her namesake show, and she's doing everything, writing and interviewing people on TV and shows on television. And you, Andres, are making lots of films. You're making a lot of films. And I was wondering, when this film, because I want to ask you about some of your other films in a moment, but when this film comes together, she was the producer who approached you, correct?

• 9:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, Sandra asked me, yeah.

• 9:20Alec Baldwin?

  And what was it that made you say yes?

• 9:22Speaker 06

  I tell you frankly, in the beginning, I was reluctant because the estate was huge, for sure. We already knew, 700 boxes. And we didn't know, what about the treasure box? Is it a treasure box? Or is it just a big heap of lies and manipulation? So I had to get seduced and we had Sandra paid very good archive researchers and they presented some of the findings, like private films, like insight into diaries, personal notes, a lot of photos I have never seen before. And so I felt there are two questions.

• 10:03Speaker 06

  First of all, we could get closer, we could create some sort of close-up of Linie Riefenstadt with all this footage. That was the first seducing moment. And the second was, Sandra and I was, we were always talking about, what does she mean for today? And the deeper we went into this huge amount of findings, we realized it has a lot to do. It's so current, so many questions are current. So it won't be just a film on a very, well, controversial filmmaker of the Nazi period. It will be a film about all the current issues we have to deal today with the question, the

• 10:47Speaker 06

  separation of we and them, so the supremacy.

• 10:52Speaker 06

  Is a superiority of a specific group because of a nation, because of nationalism, because of a race or whatever. And we experience it in Germany. We experience the rise of the far right in many other countries. We don't have to look to Russia or to China or to North Korea. It's also an issue, a question in the US. And so the necessity to make this film was pushed really a lot. Why? Because of the second question.

• 11:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, I agree with Andres. For me, in the beginning, it was a personal thing because I I did an interview with Lenny Riefenstahl around the year two thousand two, when she was almost a hundred years old, around her hundredth birthday. And so I got to her house and I spent two and a half days interviewing her. And I left this house and I knew clearly she was lying to me. But it was so difficult to, you know, get to the core of the lie. Why was she lying? Where was she lying? Was she lying to me? Or had she been lying to herself all the lifetime? And it was a long life, denying what she did, what kind of role she played in this period of time.

• 12:03Speaker 03

  And so I I stuck around with more question marks than answers. And when I finally got the chance to, after the death of her husband, to get an access to the estate, I got after it, hopefully finding the answers I was looking for. So in the beginning, it was a personal quest. And then it began to be more than that because there is so much more to know about this personality. It's not about one biography. It's about, it's clearly about a whole system of lies. It's clearly about fascism. It's about the mechanism of propaganda. So there are so many things which are much more than just doing a film about Lenny Riefenstahl. That wouldn't have been enough for us.

• 12:46Speaker 03

  There was the necessity, as Andres said, to do it in a way so we know something about our present time and maybe get a glimpse of what could be a future if we're not, you know, aware of what happened in the past.

• 12:59Alec Baldwin?

  Describe to me your relationship with Riefenstahl's family. First of all, who told you about the trove of all this personal items of hers? That you you went to them and had heard it was there? Or they told you it was there? How did you get on to that whole thing?

• 13:14Speaker 03

  Because I was asked to do the interview and the producer who asked me was the same one who did the other film in the nineties, which was a brilliant film at this time, The Wonderful Horrible Life of Lenny Riefenstahl. And so he asked me if I was interested in doing the interview. So this, this is my whole connection to the Riefenstahl family. There is no such Riefenstahl family today because she was, she didn't have any children. She had a brother. There is some people still alive from this part of family, but the Riefenstahl family is not really present thing here. Now, it was purely a journalistic interest in getting there, so there is no connection whatsoever.

• 13:54Alec Baldwin?

  Now, why did you feel you wanted to explore deeper into, if it's a general consensus among historians and writers in Europe, in Germany, around the world, that she's a liar? That she was a chronic liar who wanted to mask the depth of her relationship with Hitler and the Nazis and so forth. The flowers she gets on her birthday from Hitler, you know, Hitler does that for everybody. He sent me flowers. It's nothing. Hitler sent flowers to all the people in the German media. But anyway, what was it about you felt this needed another examination?

• 14:27Speaker 03

  Because you see, growing up then, as a German, you always ask yourself, how could this have happened? How could we go that wrong? Why did the people, you know, not stop Hitler when they could have stopped him? And that brings you back to the question, what would you do in the same situation? What would you do if you are being offered all the possibilities that, you know, a dictator offers you as an artist, for example, what would you do? And my question was always, how much of Lenny Riefenstahl is in myself, in my character? Would I be able to be seduced, you know? And that's a very present question. And this is what, what, you know, when I wake up at night and I see what's happening in the world,

• 15:10Speaker 03

  I always ask myself, how can we prevent to go wrong? And this is the one question that took me deeper into her biography because I felt it didn't have something to do with her. It had. Something to do with us. And yes, we are all lying. We all deny what we don't want to be aware of in our past. So there is so much to learn about us. And that was really what I wanted to go into, besides this history of Germany, of course.

• 15:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, to add something. You might know I'm a psychologist. I studied psychology. So I'm of course interested to user in a way as a role model or even as a prototype of fascism to look closer. And so two questions came up, diving into all the findings. First of all, I asked myself, the moral issue, she is lying. Yes, she is. And we know it. She's opening her mouth and she lies. But the moral question is not so important. It's much more interesting. Why she had to lie? What is the background? Or you could tell it like the rules of manipulation, fake news and lies.

• 16:16Speaker 06

  And when you look into her biography, we had one finding, one point of crucial moment in our research. It was the letter of the accedant. I have to explain it in two sentences. She was a war correspondent in Poland. And she was an eyewitness. She was a witness of the first massacre of 22 Jews in Poland by German troops. But this letter tells another story. He tells something like she gave a stage direction. She wanted to shoot a film, The Courageous German Soldiers, and not Jews who were digging a grave for soldiers that were killed the night before.

• 16:56Speaker 06

  So she said Jews off. And suddenly she became a catalyst of the massacre. Why? Because the German soldiers, they were aggressive. They pushed the Jews to get off and they panicked and suddenly a soldier shot. And then many soldiers shot and at the end 22 Jews were killed. So the question of guilt or the charge of her guilt, taking this as a very good example, is maybe she is much more involved in the charge of a guilt, meaning she was the catalyst of the massacre. And this is a very good example to go. Deeper, not just to tell again, she is manipulative, she is a liar.

• 17:37Speaker 06

  Why she had to lie, because the amount of guilt, the amount of responsibility for the first massacre, you can even say the start of the Holocaust, she was a catalyst of it. And this is a very interesting point for me, because then I understand if the guilt is so heavy, the load of guilt, she had to repress it and in the very end, she always said after the war, I learned about the atrocities of the Holocaust, but not before. She was an eyewitness and she was a catalyst of the first massacre. So for me, it was always the idea to use the archive, to use the estate for a close up, to get closer to her, to understand, not to exonerate her,

• 18:21Speaker 06

  not to apologize or to excuse her responsibility, no, on the contrary, but to show also why she became what she was in the very end, a prototype of fascism.

• 18:33Alec Baldwin?

  Now, is it possible to track Riefenstahl's reputation over the post-war years? Because she could have gone away and she could have just vanished from the public spotlight. She could have moved to any number of places to Paris. You know, it seems like everyone that's running away goes to Paris and lives a decent life there. But is it smart to say, is it correct to say that after the war, she's not always a pariah, she's not always an outcast and viewed as a Nazi sympathizer. Did she have a period where people were accepting her and believing her? Was her press different during some run of time? Did it undulate up and down between good and bad, good and bad, over the many years after the war?

• 19:16Speaker 03

  Well, it depends where you're looking at. There was always a core of hardcore Nazis around her, people who survived the system and who were not prosecuted in the Nuremberg trial. There were so many, there were people, you know, in the legal system, in the politics, in everywhere in life. And what they tried to do, like Lenny Riefenstahl, was somehow to, you know, gain their lives back and survive in Germany. So she was a German, she was a German director. She tried to be in, you know, succeed in the United States before, in the 30s, and she didn't. So clearly for her, there was no option. She was not rich enough to just, you know. You know, make a living out of what she earned before.

• 20:00Speaker 03

  So she had to start again to, you know, be what she was before. And then I think it was for her even very personal thing to get back to the admiration she once had felt. She was a star in Nazi Germany, so she wanted to be a star again. This is what I think about her. And so she started a fight to get back on, you know, stage and get back to the hearts of the German audience. So in the beginning, she was a pariah, but not for all in Germany, but on the, on the surface, yes. And then it was the Nuba photos she did, um, that brought her back to the audience, to the attention of the audience, and that brought her back to be a star.

• 20:43Speaker 03

  It's a book full of close-ups of native African tribes in Sudan that were not touched by civilization when she first met them. She took those pictures and that brought her back to the attention. And then she didn't want to leave because she said, okay, here I am, I'm back, everybody loves me. And, and finally she got her life back and, and all the admiration she was longing for. Andres, tell us something about the book.

• 21:11Speaker 06

  Well, when, when you look at the photos, first of all, it's, they're very in aesthetics. They're very similar to Olympia and Triumph of the Will. Why? Again, it's the celebration of the strongness, of the beauty, and as of the victorious there. Hardly know people who are sick, who are old or who are failing. And she always thought, I, I, I escape, I do photos now with so-called Black Nuba tribe. And nobody can reproach me from being stuck in the Nazi ideology, but the aesthetics were so, there's such an affinity between Olympia and Triumph of the Will on the one side.

• 21:52Speaker 06

  And the other side are the coffee table books and sex sells, of course, there's a lot of nakedness on the pictures, bare breasts, et cetera. So she knew that's something she could sell very well. And when you compare it, there was a Another photographer, George Rocham, who was a little bit earlier at the same tribe, and he did also very good photos, but he sold 5,000 and she sold 500,000 copies. Why? Because she was very ingenious. She always combined the interviews. She always said, "I don't speak about politics. I don't speak about Hitler." But after 15 minutes, the interviewer asked her, "May I ask just one question?" She got upset, but then she

• 22:34Speaker 06

  was talking one hour about her relationship to Hitler. And that was a unique selling point. That made the book so successful.

• 22:42Alec Baldwin?

  Wow, that's interesting. To sell the book Nuba, she would acquiesce and throw a couple Hitler anecdotes on the table during the interview. That's amazing.

• 22:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, that was the unique selling point, and she knew to sell her. She was really excellent. She was an Instagram girl in a way. She always combined it with personal stories. And that's something that people want to listen to.

• 23:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, Helmut Newton wanted, you know, he wanted so badly to take pictures of her, Helmut Newton, the survivor of the massacre of the Holocaust. And he said he would sell his grandmother if he would be able to work with Lenny Riefenstahl. So there was this appeal, you know, the attraction of the devil always with her in everything she did.

• 23:27Speaker 06

  Even in the US, she got a lot of support by Coppola, by Andy Warhol. They all celebrated her. As even Tarantino said, "She is the greatest artist ever, film artist, filmmaker." So the separation from politics and aesthetics is impossible.

• 23:46Alec Baldwin?

  Yeah, let's just set aside that whole concentration camp thing, and let's sell some books here, a beautiful African people. It's incredible. But now let me ask you this. Who was Riefenstahl? Meaning, she was a woman as a young woman. She was very young when she gets into the fold with the Nazis, correct?

• 24:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, she was, when you think about, she was something like 30, so she was not adolescent. For me, as a psychologist, I always, I'm interested in the childhood. That's very natural.

• 24:15Alec Baldwin?

  And what do you have there?

• 24:17Speaker 06

  Well, what I found were notes, drafted notes of her memoirs, not printed. And the interesting point was for me, like an episode or anecdote, she was writing in the in the drafts of her memoirs about an experience she had to learn how to swim and her father threw her into the water and she was close to drown. And she survived and the conclusion was not I had an aggressive, dangerous father. No, the conclusion was I became a good swimmer.

• 24:48Alec Baldwin?

  Right.

• 24:48Speaker 06

  And that's something like a core situation for me. Why? Because she had to identify with the aggression to survive. She had to identify with the superior, with the victorious moments. And at the same time, to contempt the weakness, because being weak means get killed, get drowned. That's something like when I call her a prototype of fascism. Fascism didn't start in nineteen thirty-three, when she met Hitler a year before. Her fascism starts much earlier by this brutal Prussian-style education. And in a way, you can see it later, twenty years later, when she met all these guys from the Second World War, the fighters, the veterans.

• 25:33Speaker 06

  It's the same attitude. When you think of the letter of Udet, the pilot, he said, we came out of the ashes of the First World War and we became even stronger because of everything what we had to experience there. And that was a good preparation to assemble under the flag of the Führer. And there you have the direct line from this attitude, from the ideology, being strong, being healthy, being better than, and the contempt for the weakness. And that was her second lesson. So, meeting Hitler, she was prepared, she was well-prepared. Fascism started in her life when she was five years old. And so Hitler was just, in Germany, we have a funny expression, the Kirsche auf der Zahn

• 26:18Speaker 06

  hat, it means the cherry on the cream cheese, you know? It was the last point for her to get involved. And he offered her a career and he'd ask her, you or even begged her, you have to do our films. And he had a good intuition. She was the right person for it. But she had to be prepared and she had to be prepared also for lies and manipulation. It was also a story in the child to think of the chocolate. She stole the chocolate. Her father was beating her up and she was put in the closet for 12 hours. And she said, no, I didn't steal the chocolate. She knew she did. But she wanted to tell my father was not right beating me up.

• 27:01Speaker 06

  So she lied as a little girl of 10 or 11 years old. So this is the pattern and it continues.

• 27:08Alec Baldwin?

  You admit nothing. Contrary to the evidence, you admit nothing.

• 27:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, that's the pattern. And for me, it was interesting to see what are the roots of it? Not just the superficial, oh, she's lying, she is manipulative, she made propaganda. We have to look what are the necessities behind? And then we can understand maybe what we can do in early years to prevent people to become fascists.

• 27:39Alec Baldwin?

  Documentary filmmakers Andres Veiel and Sandra Maischberger. If you enjoy conversations with documentary filmmakers whose work focuses on crime and social justice issues, check out my episode with Joe Berlinger.

• 27:53Speaker 02

  I mean, there's something wrong with our legal system where this is what it takes to get somebody out of prison. And why don't they have that kind of defense right from the get go? You have three guys who were wrongfully convicted, spent their entire adult life up till now in prison for a crime they didn't commit. And the state of Arkansas is making them plead guilty so that A, they won't be sued for wrongful conviction. So they're not going to get any compensation. Exactly. And B, that means the state of Arkansas is not looking for the real killers.

• 28:23Alec Baldwin?

  To hear more of my conversation with Joe Berlinger, go to here's the thing.org. After the break, Sandra talks about interviewing Lenny Riefenstahl in 2002 and why that interview was not included in the 2024 documentary.

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• 31:45Alec Baldwin?

  I'm Alec Baldwin, and this is Here's the Thing. Sandra Maischberger first had the idea to make a documentary about Lenny Riefenstahl after interviewing her in 2002. It wasn't until 2018 that Andres Vial and his team of editors joined the project. The film was eventually completed in 2024 after an editing period of only 18 months. I wanted to know more about the film's development process and whether or not there is public support and German government funding for documentaries about Nazi Germany.

• 32:19Speaker 03

  Well, it is not the government himself, but we have a federal system of funding. So you go to different funders and they are not government-owned. And the money comes from the government, but they are independent. That's really important. The government does not have means to control what is done artistically. This is one of the lessons we had from the Third Reich. Because never again we should, you know, allow a government to control what artists are doing, whether they are filmmakers, writers, or whatever. Or even the television is not government-owned. That's very important. But in the beginning, it was difficult because we were amidst, I would say, the peak of the cancer culture.

• 33:02Speaker 03

  So the funders, the people we were applying for funds, they would say, "Don't let us spend money on a Nazi star. We had enough." Of Lenny Riefenstahl, there is no way to explore more. You have the estate, but it's not enough.

• 33:18Alec Baldwin?

  Nothing else to say.

• 33:19Speaker 03

  Nothing else to say, right. So we, it was a year of running behind the money. We wouldn't have been able to do this without the television input in it. So we have a federal system there again. We had five broadcasting system, five fundings. And of course, a lot of my own venture capital, if you want to put it this way. The money I earned as a journalist was the one funding that started the whole thing off. I couldn't have been there, you know, financing the research before we got any money to produce the film. So that was not easy. So what we have here is an up and down. So there is, of course, we do have a culture of exploring our past. It's very important. There's a lot of money going into this,

• 34:05Speaker 03

  into projects to who are exploring the German past. But in times, it's difficult to reason what exactly you want to do. And but then, you know, what happened was the war against Ukraine. In a way, it helped us because there was all the imperialism was back. The war was back. The tanks were back in Europe. So the, in a way, people had seen that there is a urge to tell this story at this time. That helped, but it was a, it was a journey.

• 34:34Speaker 06

  And actually, yeah, just to add a little episode, by chance, Sandra and I watched a parade in Moscow after the war started in May twenty twenty two. And it was Triumph of the Will. The aesthetics of how this parade was filmed was so close to Lenny Riefenstahl, you thought, okay, she was the teacher or did they learn by watching again and again Triumph of the Will, low angle shot on Putin, the masses from above, like the elevator shot in Triumph of the Will. So this was a starting point of what we call the Renaissance of the aesthetics.

• 35:13Speaker 06

  And it was, of course, not only Russia. Before, you could see it in China, the opening of the Olympic Winter Games. It was so. Similar to Olympia, even more perfect, the way how they arranged the bodies, the beauty of the bodies and the strength. It was Olympia. And we've said, okay, now we have the key for the film, also for financing. So I rewrote the whole script. I worked for nearly another year on it. And then we said, now or never, let's try. And then we succeeded. And we got all the money, most of the money we needed. And we had, before we had, it was really great to work with Sandra.

• 35:56Speaker 06

  She said, okay, let's go for, we called it a proof of concept. We had a lot of audio footage. We needed some way to deal with all this audio because we didn't want to make a radio play. And so we started to work with graphic novel, with comic strips. Everything was not a good solution. So in the end, after four months, we said, okay, we don't have a solution, but we now know what doesn't work. So, and this was really, again, a roller coaster drive. We had in the very end eighteen months of editing. I had three editors.

• 36:31Alec Baldwin?

  Well, I was gonna say, who, who, that was one of my questions. Who was your editor? You had three.

• 36:35Speaker 06

  The main editor was Stefan Grumbiege. I worked with him on the film of, on Joseph Beuys already. And I, he and his team, there are two other editors.

• 36:47Alec Baldwin?

  Remarkably edited, wonderful editing.

• 36:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, and one is really ingenious on another level. It's Olaf Vogtlander. He has a lot of ideas for the graphic approach, for the formal approach. And we have a very good editor from Mexico. He looks in another way on German history. He always said, oh, Andres, if you, guy with your strange guilt complex, get off. So we had a lot of debates in the editing room and, but productive debates.

• 37:13Alec Baldwin?

  Who was, who was the Mexican editor? What was his name?

• 37:16Speaker 06

  It's Alfredo Castro.

• 37:17Alec Baldwin?

  I wanna mention all three editors, we don't leave somebody out, yeah.

• 37:20Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 37:21Alec Baldwin?

  A beautifully edited film, remarkable. Now, for Sandra, you had a, you interviewed Riefenstahl in what year? How far, it was right before she died?

• 37:30Speaker 03

  Two thousand two, something like that, yeah.

• 37:32Alec Baldwin?

  And she died soon after that, correct?

• 37:34Speaker 03

  Right.

• 37:35Alec Baldwin?

  So my question is, none of the interview you did with her is in the film. Is that right?

• 37:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:41Alec Baldwin?

  Now, why, I'm curious, why is that?

• 37:43Speaker 03

  I didn't like it. You see, when I prepare for an interview with someone, I read everything, I watch everything. I knew in the, in the, in an instant that the answers I was getting was the answers she would tell everybody before. So fifty years of answers she was telling me, it was so boring, I didn't get anywhere. So I did the interview, I left the house and I thought, this is not good enough. And when I then, when we started to do the film, I said, no. You know, you can, we can use the camera work on the house outside, but not the interview itself. It's just not good enough.

• 38:16Alec Baldwin?

  Uh huh. Interesting. Most people would have overlooked the quality of the film to put their interview in the film. That's interesting. Now, for you, Andrus, you've made a lot of films. And you have awards from all kinds of European institutions and festivals and so forth. You, you, you're very, very decorated as a filmmaker, but you haven't spent a lot of time in the US. Riefenstahl was in Telluride, correct?

• 38:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, in Telluride, and then we had the release of the film in September. I was in New York, I was in Ann Arbor in Chicago, in Los Angeles, in San Francisco. And again, I was at the Savannah Festival, I was back in New York. We tried a bit the campaign. In the very end, we didn't make it on the shortlist, but there was some sort of hope.

• 39:03Alec Baldwin?

  Very strange, yeah.

• 39:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, in, in many newspapers, we were listed among the first ten or first fifteen films. Anyway, so I don't mind because I had a lot of great debates and discussions after the screening. And it was really inspiring and you always have the feeling the film helps you to understand the country in this very situation. And Riefenstahl is some sort of safe island. People can refer to her. But at the same time, they can speak about their situation right now.

• 39:39Alec Baldwin?

  Documentary filmmakers Andrus Vial and Sandra Maischberger. If you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend. And be sure to follow Here's the Thing on the iHeart Radio app, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Andrus discusses his concerns for public broadcasting in both the United States and Germany. And why he takes what is happening in the United States as a warning for Germany.

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• 43:09Alec Baldwin?

  I'm Alec Baldwin, and this is Here's the Thing. In August 2024, Andress Weil and Sandra Maischberger's documentary film, Riefenstahl, premiered at the prestigious Venice International Film Festival. The film went on to have its North American premiere at the Telluride Film Festival. The film has won numerous awards from festivals in Venice, Dublin, and the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival. It can be streamed on Amazon, Apple TV, and YouTube. I was curious if Sandra or Andress noticed a difference in how German, European, or American audiences received the film while screening at film festivals around the world.

• 43:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, there is a difference because of the current situation. People after the screening, they told me about their personal experience. There's somebody who has a girlfriend from Venezuela, and they're afraid to marry because the ICE troops are waiting at the office. And so then there's a doctor, he told me, I'm a specialist with Judging breast cancer, I don't get any money anymore because it's just a women issue. And so, story by story, people told me about the experience in the PBS, in universities. Suddenly, they don't get funding, everything is insecure. And the main question always was, what has to happen that something will happen?

• 44:32Speaker 06

  And that people do something. And it was interesting when I spoke to people, they said, listen, it's just the issue what you experience here. And this people, in this group of people of nine or 10 spectators in the audience, everybody is obsessed with something which could happen, which already happened. It's such a quick shift of changes. Nobody is really able to look left or right because everybody is busy and engaged with what could happen and intimidating him or her. And so, that's the system. It's not by chance.

• 45:13Speaker 06

  These quick shifts of government declarations or executive orders, 10 per day. And so, this is disruptive politics. And that was very interesting because, of course, it's something which will happen here too. We can wait, maybe it takes five years, but then we will have a very similar situation, maybe even in Germany. So, what I experienced in the US is just a warning. What will happen here very, very soon. And I am deeply concerned, I tell you frankly. And we have a public radio system, still, and it's jeopardized. It's in danger, yeah? Because we have a financing, still, independent of taxes.

• 45:55Speaker 06

  But people in some parties, they want to shift it. So, if it's based on taxes, you can say, tomorrow we don't ask for taxes anymore and then we dry out the whole system. And that's the idea. So, what happens now to PBS will happen, or could happen, in five to six to seven years here in Germany too. So, if, for me, when you ask what is the difference, it's a story out of the future, still. But it's very current at the same time, and it's threatening.

• 46:25Alec Baldwin?

  Well, Americans are, at least my experience has been that Americans are kind of blithe about a lot of things until they're taken away. The moment you tell them the public television is going to go away, they're like, "Oh, no! Don't do that." You know, they probably have watched maybe one PBS program in the last three years, but when you tell them there's a threat that it's going to be taken away, they're like, "Oh, I don't want that to happen." Saving public television in this country can only be done by getting rid of Trump once Trump is gone, and assuming he isn't succeeded by somebody who's of his stripe, and that's going to be an issue. Now, Sandra, you're most well-known, or you were most well-known throughout your career

• 47:06Alec Baldwin?

  as a journalist and a television host and an author, but you had made movies during that time as well, or was this one of your first film projects?

• 47:15Speaker 03

  No, no, no. I'm a producer since 25 years now, and we did a lot of things. We are doing television reporters, documentaries, we're doing greater documentaries, dokudamas. We are even doing some of fiction movies. You know, as a journalist, when I can't really get to the core of a storytelling, there must be some other means, and this is why I'm producing films for a long time. But a project like Riefenstahl is something different because it took a long, long way, a lot of research, a long time. I mean, I started off in 2018, working on this project, which is really long ago, so this is not the normal time span.

• 47:58Speaker 03

  And for example, we are now working with Andres on one next film. It's going to be a feature film. It's about a story, if I might tell a little bit about that, Andres, about the story of one of our presidents, Richard von Weizsäcker, and his father was a diplomat in Hitler's government, part of the Nazi regime, if you want to put it this way. He was in trial. And the young Richard von Weizsäcker, who became our president later, he was one One of his in court, one of his attorneys, so he defended the father. And it was a way for him to get to know a father he never really had met before. Because that was a father having a career and he was not at home a lot.

• 48:42Speaker 03

  So this is the first, the next thing we are working together with Andres. Besides other projects with other directors and other documentary and authors.

• 48:52Speaker 06

  And it's also a very present story because the third protagonist is, or was it a Jewish state attorney who left Germany in nineteen thirty four? And he was very close to Weizsäcker and he was also studied law. And he came back in nineteen forty five with the American troops. And he experienced such an antisemitism. Nineteen forty seven, nineteen forty eight, during the trial. They told him stories like even in the press and like you're an insect. We have to get rid, go home. And what does it mean to go home for a Jewish migrant, immigrant?

• 49:35Speaker 06

  So it's a very interesting triangle. And again, I think the necessity to do it, it's in on many layers. It's very, very current.

• 49:45Alec Baldwin?

  What are you working on next, Andres?

• 49:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's the feature film. That's one. And the other one is just the story of my family. Because talking about lies and myths. I grew up with a lot of lies and myths in my family. And it took decades to confront myself. I learned always, my grandfather was part of the resistance movement against Hitler. And now I learned, I got all the files from the archives. Now I had to learn, no, he was very close to Himmler, to the Reichsführer SS. So he was telling the public, Himmler, that my grandfather did a very good job and was always cooperative.

• 50:30Speaker 06

  And then you think cooperation, what does it mean in the Russian war with SS, you know? SS was responsible for the killing of millions of Jews and people from Politik, from the Communist Party, etc. And what does it mean, cooperation? So I have to deal now not only with the lies and myths of Leni Riefenstahl, but also with the lies and myths in my own family. And this will be a book and maybe one day also a film. But first of all, I have to take care about the mud under my feet.

• 51:07Alec Baldwin?

  So for you, Andres, you made a film, The Echo Side, the German culture in terms of climate change. How does that play in Germany? Climate change, global warming, efforts to try to arrest that. Is it as serious as I hope it is?

• 51:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, it was very serious. We had a lot of, well, there was money in the government, which was invested for a green economy. And now after Ukraine and war and the crisis, there was a shift. And also the shift in the public TV. People said we are fed up because we can't do anything against the climate catastrophe. So people want to repress the idea of a crisis. And so it's not only politics. It's really a challenge at the moment. People are fed up, no apocalyptic storytelling. We need hope, we want to escape somehow.

• 52:05Speaker 06

  So it's a worldwide phenomenon of, well, repression the issue, repression the subject. And I actually, I wanted to make a film on it, but at the moment, it's not possible.

• 52:16Speaker 03

  You know, I wanted to say on the subject before, you know that Donald Trump is a really huge role model for everybody in the world who wants to get rid of all the other subjects. You know, if it's the climate change, if it's the international rules, if it's, you know, the international health system. There are so many politic forces here in Germany who look up to this man because finally someone is there who denies all of it. And they can rely on this American president now and see and get their interests finally through German politics. It's a destroy of the the whole idea of the Western Hemisphere which we're watching now.

• 53:00Speaker 03

  Not even talking about Greenland and all the things which are happening now.

• 53:04Speaker 06

  And I tell you, this is something, I won't compare it to nineteen thirty three, but even then it went so quickly and was so well prepared. Everything was prepared in really each part of the life, of the private lives. So the Nazi ideology, it went everywhere. And also with some sort of gifts, people were seduced, some people were threatened, put in prison. The same what we experience now with ICE, so people are a lot, some have a lot of fear, some people benefit from the system. And we just have to be aware and the question is, what is our part in it? What do, can we do without, yeah, what can we do with a film like Riefenstahl?

• 53:45Speaker 06

  And I still believe in the power, in the strength of art, bringing people together in the cinema. So I'm very old fashioned, I believe in cinema because it's a place where people can meet, can discuss things. And afterwards, it's like an energy, like a battery. And they can take some energy in the next couple of days and some oxygen in the brain, and that's what we need.

• 54:11Alec Baldwin?

  You look at Riefenstahl and you wonder, here's a woman who was a beautiful woman, a dynamic woman. She had so many things going for her where you wonder, did she have to? I guess, I guess in her mind, she had to knuckle under and acquiesce to the Nazis. She had to play ball with the Nazis to have the career she had.

• 54:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, you know, that was my, one of my points because from a female perspective, that would have been a role model for me. Because Riefenstahl invented herself in the twenties, she, she got to be an actress, she got to, you know, without any education on that. She, she was a dancer before against the will of the father. So she was, she was a woman in a man's world twice. Before in the, in the Alpine filming and then at the Nazi party, there are not so many women were there. So she was so unique, but she, she, she didn't, she was not seduced by the Nazis. That's the wrong tale. She went to Hitler because she didn't want to have the most powerful man.

• 55:15Alec Baldwin?

  She seduced them.

• 55:16Speaker 03

  She seduced them in a way, but she just shared her ideals with Hitler. They were so much same. They wanted to be more than just a human being. They wanted to be superior. They wanted to dominate others. So that was the fascistic gene in, you know, the DNA in both of them. And this is why they came together. They found themselves. And, you know, sometimes when I watch television with politicians back in the White House, for example, I see Marco Rubio, for example. He stands behind someone who just is saying the most impossible things concerning international rules of law, politics and whatsoever.

• 55:59Speaker 03

  And I just always think, you know, there will be a time, dear Marco Rubio, where this man in front is gone. And then it's going to be you we are looking at and what you did in this time.

• 56:13Alec Baldwin?

  Right. And you try to pull a Riefenstahl and deny all the things that you said in allegiance with him. Riefenstahl is a role model for everybody who wants to deny their past. What I love about the film also is that when you want to show young Riefenstahl, young Riefenstahl in her career. A lot of other filmmakers might have had somebody in an interview. They'd show a couple of quick photographs and they'd mention it very briskly. And say, well, yeah, yeah, she was an actress and she was this and she started this. You do something in this film which I love. I love when filmmakers say to the audience, we're going to take our time here and we're going to really look at this. And you have this extended period of the film examining her youth

• 56:54Alec Baldwin?

  and looking at her through that lens of her acting and her dancing and her filmmaking. And it really goes on for a while and you go, you insist that the audience see this.

• 57:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, and it's a question I tell you from the very beginning. There was an expression, a term, ambivalence. We have to accept or even admire, she was a talent also regarding editing, regarding directing. She was a very poor writer, but she had talents and she was beautiful. And for an abivalent approach, we have to also celebrate her abilities.

• 57:32Alec Baldwin?

  She's becoming the woman that then presents herself to Hitler.

• 57:35Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 57:36Alec Baldwin?

  And says to Hitler, I want to chronicle, I'm your Boswell. I want to chronicle this time of our history. And it could have been somebody else and they might not have succeeded because she was, she was a force.

• 57:47Speaker 03

  And she was a force when she was a hundred years old. She was impressive.

• 57:52Alec Baldwin?

  I'll take your word for that. This is a remarkable film. And then the topic just happens to be, it's extraordinarily inscrutable woman. Ultimately, she's inscrutable. I wish you both the great success with the film and it's, and thank you so much for doing the show. It meant the world to me. Thank you.

• 58:08Speaker 06

  Yeah. Thank you, Alec, for inviting us. It was a real pleasure. Thanks for everything.

• 58:17Alec Baldwin?

  My thanks to filmmakers Andres Weil and Sandra Meischberger. This episode was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City. We're produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach McNeese, and Victoria DeMartin. Our engineer is Isaac Kaplan-Wulner. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio.

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