by SARAH ROWLAND

"Didn't you realize they were taking Jews away? Where did you think they were brought? What did you think they were doing at the concentration camps, and how is it possible that average honest family men transformed into monstrous killing machines, having no pity for their victims at all?"

Oliver Hirschbiegel says these are some of the questions that plagued him throughout his childhood. He's the director of Downfall, a disturbingly powerful film that chronicles Hitler's final 12 days in his Berlin bunker. The Hamburg-born Hirschbiegel never did get the answers he was looking for, even though as a kid he grilled family members incessantly about WWII. Like most of the authority figures he pestered, his mother, who was barely a teen during the Holocaust, was of little use. The only information she could offer was snippets of her own limited experience as a star-struck 14-year-old girl.

"Hitler was like a pop star to her," says the impeccably groomed filmmaker. He's talking in a hotel lobby at the Toronto film fest, clutching a notebook of key English words. "She now realizes the extent of what he did. But back then, when the Americans came and were destroying photos of Hitler, she and her friends were crying. It was their Führer."

Still understandably curious about what kind of a man could wrap a whole nation around his finger, including Hirschbiegel's own mother, the young German began reading - a lot.

"There are more than 32,000 books published about Adolf Hitler and I couldn't find a sufficient description of this man in any of them. It's ridiculous. I couldn't understand it."

Patriotism vs. self-preservation

But what really used to grate him, and still does, is knowing that the leader of the Third Reich didn't act alone when he set out to exterminate a whole race of people.

"That's when it gets painful," Hirschbiegel admits. "Millions of people in some way were supporting the system, and of course they knew what was going on. As a German, I know those were my ancestors and the blood of these people still pulses in my veins so I couldn't just ignore that fact."

However, when producer Bernd Eichinger approached him with a script based on Joachim Fest's novel Inside Hitler's Bunker and the memoirs of Hitler's naive personal secretary Traudl Junge (Until the Final Hour), Hirschbiegel took almost six months to deliberate with his wife, who was adamantly against it.

"At that point, I had already dealt with it for such a long time," he says. "And I knew I would have to dive deep into this mud of a primitive ideology that stands for everything I detest. We all know what National Socialism led to, and dealing with that world means you're dealing with evil. Who wants to deal with evil?"

But in the end, he saw it as his patriotic duty.

"If we didn't do it, very soon another country would get a hold of the books and would probably have Hitler speaking in English, French or whatever," he says. "I had seen other films and they didn't work out, they didn't convince me at all. So as a German director, I started seeing this as a German task."

Kinder gentler genocidal maniac

Yet it's in his native land where the film is sparking the most controversy. Many criticize Hirschbiegel for showing the genocidal maniac's softer side. Odd, when you consider that the meticulous director basically follows Junge's account, as seen in André Heller's 2002 documentary Blind Spot. True, Downfall might depict a man who likes dogs, but it never forgets who he is. And, Bruno Ganz's portrayal as an apocalyptic tyrant who, in the end, didn't even give a fuck about his precious Aryan race, is hardly heartwarming nor sympathetic. In fact, the only remotely warm characteristic we see is the fatherly tone he uses when he addresses Junge as "my child." A celebrated humanitarian? No. A three-dimensional character? Yes.

"I think in general there has been a very simplistic way of looking at this person," says Hirschbiegel. "He's always been depicted as a madman, a monster, almost a cartoon character. And I think that's kind of dangerous because it plays down his part and it gives the impression that he wasn't really fully responsible.

"So seeing him as a person is a lot scarier to me because as a human being, he had a lot of tools at hand to seduce, lure and manipulate people to do or think whatever he wanted them to."

Underground and insane

As depicted in Downfall, the doomed dictator still had a sprinkling of delusional disciples left hanging around the shelter, waiting for instructions from their beloved leader. Hirschbiegel masterfully recreates this surreal and claustrophobic subterranean world, which had 11 metres of concrete separating the Führer's lair and the encroaching Russian army. It's also where Hitler's most devoted proved their undying loyalty, including Magda Goebbels (played by Corinna Harfouch). The most disturbing scene in the film comes when she systematically kills her six sleeping children with cyanide because she doesn't want them to grow up in a world without National Socialism. Hirschbiegel turns up the unnerving sound effects as the stone-faced mommy dearest clamps their mouths shut until she hears the loud crunch of the poisonous capsules bursting. You can almost smell the rancid almonds.

Another noteworthy nutjob is Hitler's old lady. Never one to let a falling empire bring her down, Eva Braun (Juliane Köhler) throws a party in his honour at her above ground digs. The dizzying camera angles as she maniacally dances on tables to the beat of Ruskie grenades is a credit to Hirschbiegel as a masterful filmmaker.

Genius of Ganz

But perhaps his greatest achievement was casting Ganz, whose performance is largely responsible for Downfall's nomination for best foreign film at this year's Oscars. His physical likeness (despite being about 10 years longer in the tooth than the feral fascist was at the time), combined with his perfect delivery of Hitler's language, a strange mix of upper Austrian, Bavarian and eastern German, even blew Hirschbiegel away during shooting.

"It was pretty shocking," he says, recalling the first time he heard Ganz speak in character. "Bruno doesn't really like to go full force in rehearsal, so sometimes I'd be so mesmerized by his on-camera performance that I'd forget to say cut. He would just look at me when he was finished and I'd be, ‘Uh, yeah, yeah cut.'"

In fact, the German stage legend was so immersed in his part that the director felt an added responsibility to make sure his lead's mental health was in check during production.

"It's one thing to dive into the world of Hannibal Lector, because that's a kind of fiction. We know there are mass murders and disturbed psychopaths,'" says Hirschbiegel. "But in this case, Bruno was dealing with a person who was fully conscious in doing what he was doing. So as an actor, he really had to reach down and find a certain pattern of thinking that somehow matched what might have made this man tick. And I think that can be a very dangerous task, so I kept a close eye on him."

It wasn't long into production before the 63-year-old thespian did start to show signs of anxiety.

"He was exhausted, very exhausted," says Hirschbiegel. "It was very tough for him. Usually actors try to escape the stress of demanding roles by telling jokes or being silly, but I think it's hard to do that when you're dealing with this issue. So I really don't know how Bruno dealt with it. All I know is he's fine now."

Downfall opens at Cinéma du Parc on Friday, March 11

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