Rachel Weisz
On adopting Deborah Lipstadt’s thick Queens accent
“I think it’s very liberating. Deborah is really very not English at all. The Queens part of her — she says what she thinks and she doesn’t use a lot of subtext. She lays it out. Something about her accent is part of who she is, and adopting it was very transformational in being her.”
On filming on location at Auschwitz
“It was the first time anyone was allowed to film there. It’s very hard to put into words, and I had never been there before, but seeing the level of industrialization, the efficiency, the cold, clinical organization of a death factory is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.”
On her responsibility not just to Deborah Lipstadt, but to all of those interned and killed in Nazi concentration camps
“Deborah, she’s a historian of the Holocaust, so for her, to be arguing whether or not it happened was sacrilege … but the film is not just about 6 million dead. It’s about all historical truth and truth, in general, and the fact that there are objective truths. There are unassailable truths. She mentions in the press-conference (scene), ‘The ice caps are melting.’ We live today in a climate where opinion seems to be just as valid as facts. People frown upon facts as if they are somehow elitist. There’s a disregard for facts and truth, and so the movie is about that.”
On being an Englishwoman who understands the English court system very well playing an American completely flummoxed by it
“That was like the delicious game I got to play as an actor, which was really, really fun. I’m from London, and it was delicious to imagine being from Queens and being a fish out of water, not knowing the ways of these posh British people, who are patriarchal and patronizing to this American that doesn’t seem to have great manners.”