A Conversation with Loring Mandel

“Conspiracy” is a difficult film to watch, but this can be counted as a success for the film’s screenwriter, Loring Mandel. The film dramatizes the top-secret 1942 Wannsee Conference, where 15 Nazi officials developed the Final Solution, the Nazi plan to annihilate Europe’s Jewish population. The Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club will stage an adaptation of the film written by Mandel on the Loeb Mainstage opening on Friday and running through Nov. 23. The Crimson sat down with Mandel for an interview about the film and the stage adaptation.

The Harvard Crimson: “Conspiracy,” on its surface, seems like an unconventional idea for a film. There’s not much in the way of traditional “action” going on. How did the project come to be?

Loring Mandel: The original film idea came from Frank Pierson and Peter Zinner. Peter was a film editor—he edited one of “The Godfather” films. Peter was an Austrian escapee, and he knew the Wannsee story, and he told it to Pierson. They saw an old German film about it, and then they proposed it to HBO. HBO was interested; Frank had done very well for HBO with “Citizen Cohn.” Frank called me and asked me if I was interested, and he sent me material on the conference. He said that it was the first Holocaust thing that he had seen that didn’t move him to tears, but moved him to anger, and that was the reason that he thought that it should be done. And after I did the research on the material that he had sent me, I agreed, and that was in the fall of 1997.

THC: One of the most interesting things about the film is how you went about researching it. The film is largely based on a single document that survived from the conference, right?

LM: The document that survived was very highly redacted, by three different people: first by Eichmann, then by Müller, then by Heydrich himself. So all that it really contains is the cast of characters and the sequence of events, the agenda. But there’s other information—not much, but there are comments that Eichmann made when he was captured and more comments during his trial. That’s really the only hard material we have. So I spent a couple days in the archives of the Holocaust Museum finding out as much as I could about as many of the participants as I could locate in those files. I also looked at the transcripts of the Eichmann testimony. Then I did research at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York, the museum in the building where the conference took place, and Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. When I had enough of a feel of the background of the participants, plus what I had gotten from the conference itself, I wrote the first draft, and that was finished in January of ’98. That was submitted to HBO, they said they wanted to proceed with it, and they hired a full-time researcher to provide supplementary material, and she was able to find out a great deal more of the background of the characters than I had been able to get. We ended up with tremendous amounts of research.

THC: One of the concerns with a film like this is that it is very easy to vilify every man at that conference in a way that is one-dimensional, but at the same time it’s not very interesting to watch a film with 15 one-dimensional villains. How were you able to shade-in the characters more fully, as people with distinct character traits and motivations? Where did the character traits come from if they were not written down in historical records?

LM: It’s possible to make certain assumptions from what you read of the background of characters…. In the last analysis, it all comes from how successful my roleplaying is, because that’s really what it is. I don’t go at it didactically. For me, the process is more like trying to become the character and then hearing what the character says and watching what the character does, and the writing is like stenography, making a record of what it is I hear and what it is I say. I can’t think of any other way to do it.

THC: Do you foresee any challenges in adapting this to the stage?

LM: The film is a one-eye process; it’s monocular. Stage is binocular, and it makes a real difference. In film, it’s easy to begin a scene in the middle of a sentence, because you can cut into it. You can’t do that on the stage because the character is there and talking before, unless you do it all with lights, and then it really isn’t an adaptation.

THC: How do you feel about “Conspiracy” being adapted by students here at Harvard?

I think it’s great. The only reason that I did a stage version of it is because I felt it was something that people should be made aware of—young people particularly. I thought it was something that schools could do, and churches and synagogues and so on. That’s why, because I never thought it was a big commercial property. So the fact that it’s been exposed here, I think that’s absolutely wonderful.

—Staff writer Alexander Tang can be reached at alexander.tang@thecrimson.com.