Mick Jackson on Why he Directed Denial and Working with Rachel Weisz

Rachel Weisz in Denial.

On Tuesday, September 27, the KCET Cinema Series screened Denial at the historic Aero Theatre in Santa Monica. The much-anticipated film is based on the true story of Deborah Lipstadt, an author and college professor who had to fight a libel case against her to prove that the Holocaust happened. Rachel Weisz stars as Lipstadt. The film also features Timothy Spall as Holocaust denier David Irving and Tom Wilkinson as Richard Rampton, the barrister who argues on behalf of Lipstadt.

Following the film, director Mick Jackson (The Bodyguard, Temple Grandin) joined KCET Cinema Series host Pete Hammond for a lively Q&A session about the film and denial of historical facts. A portion of the interview, edited for length and clarity, appears below.

The KCET Cinema Series is generously sponsored by the James and Paula Coburn Foundation. The fall season continues weekly through October 10 at the Aero Theatre.

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Mick Jackson on why he directed Denial.

The reason I did this movie - three reasons. I had just done Temple Grandin and that went quite well. I thought, Ill take a break for a bit and Ill only do a movie that I really want to do and not anything else. This plopped onto my map. It said, Denial by David Hare. When anything written by David Hare comes across your doorstep, you read it immediately. I put my beer down even.

Im sure you know all his movies: The Reader.

Pete Hammond: The Hours.

MJ: And its about something important. As youll gather from the stuff Ive done, I really like to do movies that have some meat to them, some social content where theres a nuclear war or Iraq or autism or whatever. I saw this was about something that was really, really important, which was the big lie. Ninety years ago, practically, Adolf Hitler coined this term - gro e l ge - when he was writing Mein Kampf. The big lie. The lie thats so outrageous, so colossal that people believe it because no one could possibly make it up... The finessing of that was repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. The internet does that now with big lies too. It becomes part of the culture very quickly. You repeat the same thing on cable news, on the internet and on talk radio.

Holocaust denial is the biggest lie of all. That was one reason. The second reason, I really thought that Deborahs story was interesting. Interesting for a paradoxical reason. Shes a wonderful person. I spent a lot of time with her. She is very feisty, just like Rachel Weisz who plays her in the movie, very impassioned, very bright. When you have a movie like Erin Brockovich, where you start with somebody who is really nobody and suddenly all kinds of stuff is visited on them, injustice or evil and they fight to achieve a voice and by the end of the movie, they do this amazing, articulate speech in act three and it brings the house down. Everybody applauds. This was the reverse of that. She started out as that. Shes a very ferociously intelligent, really passionate, very self-sufficient woman with a voice. What happens to her, you see in this movie, is that she is asked to subdue that voice. The irony is that its a movie about denial. That was the act of self-denial that was forced on her. That seems to be a really unusual structure for a movie too.

The final reason - long answer to a question you didnt even ask - I went to Auschwitz 40 years ago for the first time. I was a young documentary-maker for the BBC. It affected me profoundly. When this script 40 years later landed on my desk, I thought, Ive been there. I was appalled by it, deeply moved by it and then, seeing the script, angered that somebody should deny something so fundamental and say it didnt happen.

Denial director Mick Jackson at the KCET Cinema Series. | Photo: Michele Garza

On British libel laws and proving the Holocaust.

I think they changed now, but, at the time, you had to prove; if you were accused of libel, you had to prove that what you said was true, which is the opposite of the American system, where the presumption of innocence is required. She essentially had to prove that the Holocaust existed, which is harder to do than you might think because the Germans tried, the Nazis tried to cover as many traces as they could. They moved buildings out. They destroyed documents. Everything they could. So, there isnt a lot of forensic evidence.

If, as with her legal team, you take the decision, we dont want you to testify because it will make the trial about you. We dont want to bring in survival witness because it will make the trial about them and their faulty memories, anything to keep the focus on him. The only thing we could do is to keep you silent and that was an act of great torture inflicted upon her, a woman who has this powerful Queens accented voice. A Bette Midler voice.

It was taking a fish out of water, taking this woman from the safe haven of sunny, warm Atlanta, where shes a professor and has some status, and plopping her down in wet, gray, cold, unfriendly, arcane, centuries-old legal tradition where men where wigs still.

On Rachel Weisz.

Not every actor wants to do this... wants to meet the real person. Some find that it gets in the way of their imagining the person. I usually try and say to actors, if you want to meet the real person thats still alive, please do. On Temple Grandin, Claire Danes did the same thing that Rachel did with Deborah Lipstadt. They hung out together. They made coffee together. The went out in the evening together to try and get a bond between the too. Anyone here read the New Yorker? Next issue, its on the stands tomorrow, theres a lovely article by Tad Friend having coffee with Rachel Weisz and Deborah Lipstadt at a cafe in New York and you get some idea of the chemistry between the two.

Its great for me. On Temple Grandin, I used a dialect coach for Claire Danes. Used the same dialect coach to

LINK:	https://www.kcet.org/kcet-cinema-series/director-mick-jackson-talks-de...
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