Russell Crowe haunted by Nazi role: what Malta’s filmmakers and war survivors can teach Hollywood

Russell Crowe shaken by Nazi role in ‘Nuremberg’ – and why Malta’s cinema lovers should care

Valletta’s Grand Harbour may be 1,700 km from the ruins of Nuremberg, but when Oscar-winner Russell Crowe admitted last week that portraying a Nazi war criminal in the upcoming film “Nuremberg” left him “shaken to the bone”, the ripple was felt inside Malta’s own cinematheques, history classrooms and even the Sunday lunch arguments that spill onto our limestone balconies.

Crowe, who spent part of 2022 on the island filming “Prizefighter”, told Empire magazine that walking the courtroom set in Sofia, Bulgaria, he was overwhelmed by “the weight of 6 million ghosts”. For a country that only last month marked the 83rd anniversary of the first Luftwaffe bombs on Valletta and Cottonera, the actor’s confession strikes a chord that is both foreign and painfully local. Malta’s wartime generation—still vocal at 90-plus—remembers swastikas overhead, not just on celluloid.

Inside the Malta Film Commission’s vaults, location manager Kevin Casha keeps a folder marked “Nuremberg Interest”. “We’ve had three separate producers scout the island for WWII tribunal stories,” Casha reveals. “Our baroque courthouses double perfectly for 1945 Europe, and the 20% cash rebate doesn’t hurt.” Whether Crowe’s psychological ordeal deters or attracts future projects remains to be seen, but the Commission has already scheduled sensitivity workshops for extras who will wear SS uniforms—something that was never offered when “Das Boot” shot second-unit footage here in 2018.

At University of Malta’s History department, Dr. Marthese Borg lectures on “Memory & Atrocity on Screen”. She argues that Crowe’s vulnerability is a teachable moment. “Our students binge Holocaust dramas on Netflix, yet many don’t know that 2,000 Maltese Jews were rounded up in Rome’s ghetto in 1943, or that the island’s own internment camp at Rabat held Libyan POWs,” Borg says. Next semester her course will include a field trip to the National War Museum in Fort St Elmo, followed by a screening of “Judgment at Nuremberg” (1961) and a Zoom Q&A with Crowe’s dialect coach—an alumnus who still lives in Sliema.

Local filmmakers are reacting too. Luke Cachia, 27, whose short “Kulħadd Isem” won best Maltese film at the 2023 Valletta International Film Festival, is developing “il-Qorti tal-Lwien”, a courtroom drama about a Maltese dockworker tried by British authorities for collaborating with Italian forces. “If Crowe can be traumatised by pretending, imagine the real survivors,” Cachia says. He plans to crowdfund €45,000 and shoot on 16 mm stock to match archive footage housed at PBS. The project has already attracted mentorship from “Nuremberg” cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, who holidayed in Gozo last summer and will Skype into a workshop at Spazju Kreattiv this October.

But not everyone welcomes the trend. In a Facebook group “Malta Parents for Age-Appropriate Education”, administrator Ramona Falzon worries that graphic re-enactments desensitise teenagers. “My 15-year-old came home quoting Himmler because of a TikTok edit,” she posts. The debate mirrors Crowe’s own Instagram warning: “These uniforms are not cosplay.”

Meanwhile, the Malta Jewish Community—numbering roughly 150—has invited Crowe to light a menorah at the historic synagogue in Ta’ Xbiex when “Nuremberg” premieres. President Reuven Azar says the gesture would “bridge the Mediterranean gap between Hollywood spectacle and Mediterranean memory”. No word yet from Crowe’s Sydney agents, but the shul’s 17th-century Torah scrolls are already being restored just in case.

From the cafés of Strait Street—where British sailors once toasted victory—to the new €14 million soundstages in Kalkara, Malta keeps wrestling with how to remember a war that never quite ended on our shores. Crowe’s sleepless nights may have been filmed abroad, yet they invite us to interrogate our own archives, our own grandfathers’ silences, and the uncomfortable truth that the distance between observer and perpetrator is sometimes just a camera lens.

Conclusion: Whether “Nuremberg” wins Oscars or fades on streaming, Crowe’s trembling confession has already accomplished something on this tiny archipelago: it has reminded Maltese audiences that history is not a costume drama but a living wound—one that still aches every time air-raid sirens echo in festa fireworks, and every time a red swastika flag flutters on set just beyond the breakwater. The ghosts, it seems, commute as easily as Ryanair.