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Speer Goes to Hollywood director Vanessa Lapa on Albert Speer: “The dissonance, the clash that occurs between what we know and the book and what we hear on the tapes, it’s mind-blowing and very disturbing.” Photo: Walter Frentz Collection, Berlin

In 2014, I met Vanessa Lapa at Film Forum in New York with her co-producer Felix Breisach for a conversation on The Decent One (Der Anständige), based on previously unseen family diaries, photographs and private letters found in Heinrich Himmler's home. We spoke about Marlene Dietrich singing as a marker of time in her documentary, if Hannah Arendt's Banality Of Evil works here and how the writings were obtained, transcribed and put on film. Now in the fall of 2021, Vanessa joined me on Zoom to discuss Speer Goes To Hollywood, co-written with Joëlle Alexis, and her take on the interviews done by Andrew Birkin with Albert Speer...

A rather pedestrian presentation of a potentially fascinating story, Vanessa Lapa’s “Speer Goes to Hollywood” expands on a little-known footnote to the Hydra-headed history of the post-war fates of top Nazi lieutenants. It is based on the 1972 recordings of conversations between Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect, friend and wartime munitions minister, and screenwriter Andrew Birkin (the Kubrick protegé who co-wrote “The Name of the Rose” and directed “The Cement Garden”) as they collaborate on a screenplay based on Speer’s memoir “Inside the Third Reich.” But Lapa’s embellished archival doc falls some way short of the cinephile/history lover’s catnip that tantalizing summation promises.

For one thing, here Speer does not, in fact, go to Hollywood. The conversations were recorded in the Heidelberg home where he lived following his release from prison after serving the 20-year sentence handed down at the Nuremberg trials. That Speer did not...