Riefenstahl director Andres Veiel on the lessons we must learn from Hitler's favourite filmmaker

Leni Riefenstahl was one of the most powerful figures of the 20th century. An undeniably brilliant filmmaker, she used her talent to produce compelling works of Nazi propaganda, including Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938). Throughout her 101-year-long life, she remained unapologetic, insisting in public that she was only ever interested in art and would have worked for anyone – while privately mourning the fall of Nazi ideology. In new documentary Riefenstahl, Andres Veiel turns a scrutinising lens on the woman behind the camera.

BIG ISSUE: This is a film about filmmaking – the mechanics of mediation, what is included and what is excluded from the frame. How did you approach the production process?

ANDRES VEIEL: We started, in the beginning, just following up her biography. But then we decided, OK, we should risk some gaps. For example, in the end, we don’t tell very much about the last years of her life, because we thought it was more important to finish the film with topicality. And this topicality we found in the phone calls where she is talking to people who reacted to [her appearance on] the talk show, just saying things that are so current – when these people say, “Well, it will take one or two generations, and then Germany will find back its way to virtue, to decency, to morality.” That current aspect was more important than telling all aspects of her biography.

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• The secret Nazi camps of Finnish Lapland
• Generations on, making peace with the trauma of my past

The film shows how Riefenstahl pioneered fascist aesthetics – a supposed realism that excludes the Other in all its forms. This stands in sharp contrast to your own film, which displays her own frailty towards the end of her life. Was this deliberate?

She was stuck in the ideology. In the last scene, she’s complaining about the light, that her wrinkles shouldn’t be visible – she wanted total control over everything. When you look at the first photos of her from the 1920s, always she wanted to get control over the storytelling, over how she was presented in the media. She produced these home stories, like Instagram today, and she was very, very talented, even in self-staging, from the very beginning. Olympia is similar. It’s always a celebration of the victorious, of the superiority of the strong, healthy body, but at the same time – and this is something she was not accepting of in the interpretation of Olympia – it was about contempt of weakness, of unhealthiness. And it was this contempt that produced a prototype of fascism.

You have a background in theatre. Do you recognise this in Riefenstahl’s attempts to shape her self-image?

She was so charming and so polite. If, in an interview, a critical question comes up: “Please, take another cup of coffee. Relax. Take it. Yes, of course. Get a second one.” But suddenly she turns, and she’s shouting, she’s crying, and she’s using her tears. She would victimise herself. It’s a perfect excuse: “I was the real victim, not the Jews.” In 1972, at the Olympic games in Munich, she wanted to show Olympia, and the Jewish community here in Berlin said, “no way”, and so it was not shown. And then she writes to a friend, “I had to leave the country. I was very happy to get the last flight. The Jews will pursue me ’til my death.” So she’s the victim of the Jews, and she just had to escape like the Jews in 1938 – she turns the perpetrator and victim roles upside down.

Riefenstahl made her own myths, about herself and about Germany. How do you hope this film will intervene? 

It says something about how easily you can get seduced by power by a simple explanation of how the world functions. On the one side, it’s the greatness, the superiority, the supremacy of a nation, of a specific group of people. And on the other side, you have to exclude people. You have to point at them. They are dirty, they are criminals, they are lunatics, and we have to be safe. It’s a pattern which is used all over at the moment. It’s not the case that 1933 is about to repeat in Austria, in the US. It’s much more complicated, but these patterns are used to process another agenda, the libertarian economic agenda – to undermine state institutions, to undermine international regulations, international law. So it’s more complex, but at the same time, the basic question is, how do we deal with lies and legends?

The really problematic issue is, for me, that people have a longing for lies. They love lies. They need them. Somehow, even if they, of course, recognise that it’s not the truth, somehow there is a necessity to follow these lies, and that’s the disturbing issue. Maybe that’s the reason why Leni Riefenstahl was so successful with her lies, and she’s a prototype. She’s a role model in a negative sense, and we can learn a lot. It’s a warning out of the future.

Riefenstahl is in UK cinemas from 9 May.

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