By Travis Johnson
For director Mick Jackson (Threads, The Bodyguard), his latest film, Denial, flies in the face of conventional Hollywood courtroom dramas.
“If you think of a movie like Erin Brockovich with Julia Roberts and Albert Finney,” the veteran filmmaker says thoughtfully. “That starts with a classic pattern from any Henry Fonda or Jimmy Stewart movie: someone who is not well known, someone meek, not given to making public speeches, and they suffer some kind of injustice or witness some kind of evil, and through the course of the film they find a voice, and in the last act there’s this ringing speech that Jimmy Woods once described to me as The Champion Speech, and everyone applauds and feels good. This is absolute opposite – it’s a woman who starts out as articulate and capable, who is reduced to silence. So we tried to exploit that dynamic and make something unique.”
Based on a true story, and lifting directly from court transcripts, speeches, and interviews, Denial tells the story of American Professor of Holocaust Studies Deborah Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz), who was sued for libel by British historian and Holocaust denier David Irving (Timothy Spall).
“Unlike in an American court where you have the presumption of innocence,” Jackson explains. “If you are accused of something like libel in an English court, you have to prove that what you said was true. So she had to prove him a liar. That thrust the onus on her to prove that the Holocaust had actually happened – one single woman proving that whole enormous fact, with the jeopardy that if she lost the case it would be recorded in an English court as fact that there was never any Holocaust – so, pretty high stakes.”
Such stakes meant that Lipstadt’s legal team, led by Scottish barrister Richard Rampton (Tom Wilkinson), had to plan their campaign very carefully – and that meant keeping a close lid on what the outspoken and confident Lipstadt could and could not say, both in court and in public.
“She believes in the Holocaust,” Jackson continues. “The great tragedy of it, and she sees herself as having a mission, which is to exert enormous compassion for those Holocaust survivors who still cling on to life in a rather fragile way, and to tell their story. She believes that she must stand up and have her voice heard.
“However, when she comes to London all those things that should be winning qualities for her – her pushiness, her voice, her articulacy and everything – all those weapons are taken away from her by her British legal team. They explain their strategy in an early scene in the film – she won’t testify herself. That would make the trial about her and not about him.”
It’s certainly an unusual dramatic structure for a film and, indeed, a difficult project to mount, given both that and the subject matter at hand. “It was 2011 when I was finally done with Temple Grandin [Jackson’s last film], and I was determined to do films now only that I wanted to do, not that I needed to do. About six months later I got this script. I’ve been working on it now for about five or six years and I know David Hare, who is the writer, had been working on it for a year longer than that.
“Why did it take so long, you might ask? Well, it’s not an obvious subject – people are not exactly rushing to put money into a film about Holocaust denial.”
For Jackson, though, the themes of the film are both fundamental and incredibly relevant to the current political climate, and that made the long march to production worth the effort. “It’s about truth and lies,” he says. “You have a pet subject and you get into it and you pursue it over the years, you do draft after draft of the screenplay, you try to get actors interested, you try to get financing, and you get a bit stale, but this one actually got more and more and more topical over the years, because it’s about truth and lies, and telling lies for political and ideological reasons.”
The topicality of the film peaked, Jackson says, with the nomination and eventual election of the current President of the United States, Donald Trump. “And as Donald Trump got bigger and bigger on the media horizon, this film got more and more topical.” he notes. “And as we got up into the final run up, when the movie was financed and we were about to go into production, it seemed inevitable to make comparisons. We never knew it was this timely, but it is. We’re awash now in lies, blatant lies… fake news of all kind, and much of it, as in the David Irving trial, delivered by seemingly respectable people in well-cut suits. And all of it promoting hate and discord and none of it based in facts. So yes, it’s a film about David Irving, but it’s also a film about Donald Trump.”
Denial is available now on DVD and Digital.
