Russell Crowe warns of repeating history as new film tackles Nazi ideology
Russell Crowe's transformation into Nazi war criminal Hermann Göring for his next film couldn't be more timely, as Australia grapples with its own extremist awakening.
When Russell Crowe signed on for his latest film project in 2019 he had now idea just how prescient the story would be.
Crowe plays war criminal Hermann Göring in the upcoming film Nuremberg, which explores the relationship between the Nazi and his psychiatrist in the lead-up to the Nuremberg Trials.
The question at the centre of the film is whether the atrocities committed by the Nazis in World War II were the acts of deranged individuals or whether young men could be seduced by the ideology the Nazis had created.
With the rise of Neo-Nazism in Australia, the explosion in anti-Semitism and the National Socialist Network – which has hung its hat on Nazi ideology, anti-immigration and anti-Jewish sentiment – attempting to form itself into a bona fide political party, Crowe said this question is even more important.
“The National Socialists were a democratically elected government and then incrementally, piece by piece, they break that democracy down and start changing the way society works and they start making the decisions about who is a valid member of the society and who is somebody who is lesser,” he said.
“I think that kind of language and that kind of attitude is still around us today.”
The Nuremberg Trials, which the film take a place around, were set up with the multi-pronged intention of punishing those who had committed atrocities, establishing how those heinous crimes happened and to ensure the world understood the full gravity of what had occurred to ensure it never happened again.
“Right at the end of the movie, there’s a quote and it says something along the lines of’ if you want to understand what humans are capable of in the future, have a look at what they’ve done’,” Crowe said.
“We seem to get ourselves into recurring cycles where we accept words of division and words of war, but these processes get us nowhere good.”
He said the current environment where loud voices with niche arguments are given a platform on social media is particularly vexing.
“These words of division and this ridiculous social media-driven angry response that (makes people think) they have a license to express themselves with words of anger in public forums, it’s not healthy and it’s not smart,” he said.
“I think, at the moment, we give a lot of air to marginal points of view that we should examine because, if you’re talking about the percentage of people that think in the way that you were discussing before, it’s so very tiny.”
Crowe, who shares two sons, Tennyson and Charles with ex-wife Danielle Spencer, also endorses the federal government’s move to ban children from social media. That came after News Corp’s Let Them Be Kids campaign.
“I think instead of other people complaining about it being more difficult for them to use the internet … think about what the point is, think about what the goal is – and the goal is a good goal,” he said.
Nuremberg is one of six projects Crowe shot between December and August and is the first to be released.
He goes from playing a Nazi war criminal to fight trainer in The Beast to an Albanian money-launderer in Bear Country opposite Theresa Palmer, to a Russian selling state secrets to the Americans in Billion Dollar Spy, to a Harvard professor teaching a young Ted Kaczynski in Unabomb, to a prison warden in The Weight.
“This year was extremely busy, man. I went from set to set and got myself into a position around about August where I really fried my brain,” he said. “I’m back a little bit more in a comfortable position now. I’m back in the bush and sleeping better, it’s all good.”
Not one to rest on his laurels, Crowe has reassembled his band for his music project Indoor Garden Party and will play a one-off gig.
Following the success of its 2024 release Prose And Cons, he will also have some guests with him who feature on the album, including Troy Cassar-Daley and Marcia Hines.
“Once we had a date and a venue, Troy sent me a text going: ‘You know, I might be in Sydney around then what do you reckon?’ then a couple of weeks later Marcia Hines called and said: ‘My brother I’m part of your plans’.”
Prose and Cons is a departure from Indoor Garden Party’s debut album, which Crowe says was created with the ambition of trying to write the perfect pop song.
While still grounded in pop sounds the sophomore effort leans into the gravel in his voice for a more blues and roots flavour, favouring gritty guitars, gospel‑tinged harmonies and a looser, live‑in‑the‑room feel.
“Everybody that’s in Indoor Garden Party now are people that I’ve had a long musical history with,” he says.
“Some of those relationships go back 30 years and we’ve all grown and matured together.
“It’s a very comfortable place for me with this group of musicians and I think that really comes out on the record when you listen to it.”
Russell Crowe’s Indoor Garden Party plays the Enmore Theatre on December 20, Nuremberg opens December 4.
Originally published as Russell Crowe warns of repeating history as new film tackles Nazi ideology
