Screenwriter Andrew Birkin ‘appalled’ by use of his tapes in ‘Speer Goes to Hollywood’

Photo: Screenwriter Andrew Birkin with Albert Speer in 1971. Credit: Courtesy Andrew Birkin

Award-winning screenwriter and director Andrew Birkin (“The Name of the Rose,” “The Cement Garden”) said he was “appalled” after seeing Vanessa Lapa’s documentary “Speer Goes to Hollywood,” based on tapes Birkin recorded of Albert Speer in 1971. (See main story here).“I felt angry and betrayed,” Birkin told SoCal Jewish News via telephone from his home in North Wales.

Birkin was just 25 in 1971 when he read a Playboy magazine interview with Speer, Hitler’s chief architect, close friend and minister for armaments and war production, who was culpable for the deaths of one-third of some 12 million slave laborers.

The Playboy interview took place after the release of Speer’s bestselling 1970 memoir, “Inside the Third Reich.” Birkin immediately knew he wanted Speer to become the focus of his next project. “I just thought this could have been me,” he said. “It was the story of a young guy in his 20s, and I was in my 20s. I felt that it was a lesson from history: how easy it is for somebody who is not politically oriented, who is, if you like, selfishly and egotistically pursuing his own career. Leni Riefenstahl (Hitler’s filmmaker and propagandist) had been in a similar situation.”

Producers David Puttnam and Sandy Lieberson optioned the rights to Speer’s book and commissioned Birkin to write a feature film script. Birkin recorded 44 hours of interviews on cassette tapes with Speer. Eventually, Birkin digitized the tapes, but by December 1972, the project fell through after Speer’s publishers refused to renew the film rights.

However, in 2016, Lieberson called Birkin and asked if he would meet with Israeli documentarian Vanessa Lapa, who was contemplating making a documentary about Speer. Lieberson would serve as producer. “I trusted Sandy, so I agreed to [see] her,” Birkin said. After that meeting, Birkin sent Lapa copies of his tapes, photographs and scripts, so she could discover “what kind of film she wanted to make, but she never would tell me.”

Birkin later met Lapa in Tel Aviv, where she video recorded 15 hours of conversations with him, which he said he assumed would become part of her documentary. However, he said later that year Lapa “told me she would not use [my] interviews and instead would let Speer tell his own story.”

“Speer never made a single anti-Semitic remark during his conversations with me. He was far too clever to do that. He knew almost everyone involved in [the project] was Jewish.” — Andrew Birkin

In 2020, Lapa’s attorney Guido Hettinger called Birkin and told him Lapa had completed a rough-cut and planned to show it at the Berlin International Film Festival. Would he like to see it?

Birkin flew to London to watch a screening with Hettinger. “It started well enough,” Birkin recalled, but after seeing Lapa had used actors to read transcripts of his interviews with Speer, many of which Birkin said were inaccurate, “my jaw had dropped to the ground.”

He cited one instance when the actor portraying him asks what Speer’s feelings are about Jews. Speer responds that he found Polish Jewish immigrants to Germany who had quicky become nouveau riche “disgusting.” Birkin denied Speer ever said these words, and if he had, Birkin would have challenged him. “Speer never made a single anti-Semitic remark during his conversations with me,” Birkin said. “He was far too clever to do that. He knew almost everyone involved in [the project] was Jewish.” (Birkin is not Jewish but said he has some distant Jewish ancestry and that his ex-partner and his son are both Jewish.)

Birkin also alleged Lapa showed up unexpectedly to that London screening room and “burst into tears” when he told her he was mortified by her film. He said Lapa’s documentary “mixes fact with fiction” and includes dialogue that is sometimes verbatim from his tapes, sometimes out of context or “totally fabricated.”

In response to Birkin’s allegations in this interview, Lapa and Eliav issued a statement via email stating: “We spent countless hours trying to restore [Birkin’s] cassette recordings, but this proved to be technically inaudible. … The film is about Speer and only Speer. And so the choice to have voice actors read our transcripts [of Birkin’s tapes] was the only technically feasible option. … That Andrew Birkin would have possibly preferred a film focusing on him personally is possible, but again, for us only Speer was historically relevant.”

Birkin said he thinks the film has “given the impression that I was Speer’s dupe. … It was portrayed that I was whitewashing him.” So in March 2020, Birkin released a statement on the World Socialist Web Site, highlighting what he believed were Lapa’s inaccuracies. He then received “cease and desist-type letters,” from Lapa’s attorneys.  “I thought, ‘To hell with it.  I’m defending my reputation.’ ”

Moving forward, Birkin said he wants the public to know of his objections to Lapa’s movie and intends to upload his own original tapes online and may contact journalists and reviewers should the film open in Britain, France or elsewhere. “This whole thing has been a nightmare,” he said, “for myself and my family.”