The Priest Who Fought the Nazis

While Buddy the Elf, Captain Chesley “Sully”  Sullenberger, and German priest Dietrich Bonhoeffer appear to have little in common, they are just a handful of the characters that Todd Komarnicki has brought to multiplex screens during his two decades in the movie business. 

Komarnicki kickstarted his movie career in 2003 producing Elf and making his directorial debut with the WWII drama Resistance starring Bill Paxton and Julia Ormond within the span of a few months. Though he’s largely spent the intervening years writing for movie legends like Clint Eastwood and Mel Gibson, Komarnicki harbored a desire to return to the terrain of WWII for his passion project: a biopic of German priest Dietrich Bonhoeffer, author of over thirty books, thorn in the Nazis’ side, and eventual martyr in the wake of a failed attempt to assassinate Hitler.

On the eve of Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin’s nationwide theatrical release next week, Komarnicki sat down with The Pamphleteer to talk about adapting true stories, overcoming Nazi cliches, and standing up for faith in the face of groupthink.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I wanted to start off by asking about the process of adapting true stories. You’ve had Sully and now Bonhoeffer. You're dealing with real people in situations with strong political undercurrents. What’s that process like? 

When writing a true story, I never think about the political side. I just think about the truth. And the job is to be true to the human being and be true to the facts. It's a feature film, so it can't be just a series of things that occurred without connective tissue, without storytelling. The main thing that changes in these biopics is the timeline. So I will move things, if necessary, a year, six months. You need the fluidity of time in order to pull off the page-turning aspect of storytelling. 

With Sully, the NTSB [National Transportation Safety Board] investigation lasted for 15 months. If I had made a movie about a 15-month investigation, we would have had Tom Hanks mowing the lawn every 15 minutes up in the Bay Area, applying sunscreen, and all sorts of other uncinematic moments. So, those 15 months became four days. Everything in the movie is true and happened. It just happened over a longer period of time. 

The other thing is the sacred trust of putting dialogue in the mouths of characters who have never said those words. I take this very seriously, and this is what goes through the most drafts–the dialogue–to ensure that if they'd been around, they could have said it, or they would have said it, or they might have said it based on everything else in their life that they said. It’s important to keep them connected to the person that they've been and never let them be the voice of the screenwriter.

A project like Sully, where you could pick up the phone and call somebody, seems like a much different situation than Bonhoeffer, where just about everyone involved has passed away. How did accessibility change the way you were writing?

It's a mix. Yes, I can call Sully. But I also had 34 books written by Bonhoeffer. He had left such a trail of his thought, of wrestling with his faith, of his commitments and of what mattered to him. Everything from a letter to Gandhi, where he asked Gandhi for help with sorting out what he thought was a faltering German Christianity to what he said about opposing Hitler. There are all these letters from prison that showed his deep humanity. And his poems. There was just so much to draw on. It was actually easier because, in Sully, I had the man, but there's only so much the man will tell you, because people are private. And I had the one book that Sully wrote. But Bonhoeffer actually gave me a much bigger treasure trove.

What I appreciate most about your filmography is that you have your hands in the writing, producing and directing of a vast array of films. You don't just do one thing. What was it about Bonhoeffer that made you say, “I'm going to go for the trifecta and produce, write, and direct this thing all on my own”?

It had nothing to do with me. It was totally God's choice. I said no to writing it. Then, once I came on and wrote it, I said no to directing it for 15 months while they were raising the rest of the budget. And it was actually my wife who said we should move to Europe and go do this movie. It was the tenth day of shooting. I was in a cathedral in Belgium, and everyone's whizzing around with their props and we're getting set for the shot. And, as I looked around, I said, “Oh, okay, I'll direct this movie.” That's how slow on the uptake I was. There are some events in all of our lives that seem to just steamroll you, and you think, “How in the world did I get here?” And that's exactly what this Bonhoeffer experience has been. I'm thrilled, but it was never planned.

Your movie reverses the trend of us being desensitized to people being called Nazis. I think sometimes we forget exactly what the Nazis did, and it's become a cliche not just in film, but also in the general discourse. Was that something you felt you needed to pay attention to?

It used to be a word that couldn't be uttered, and in Germany, you couldn't say it for decades. And now it becomes just a basic sort of soft profanity. Really, it lost its meaning years ago. If you remember from Seinfeld, the Soup Nazi, like it was just equated with sort of being bossy or something. So it's terrible. Yes, I was cognizant of it. I thought it was very important to show that even on the smallest levels, the lowest level soldiers, there was cruelty to the bullying. And as you see in the scene where his church youth have been turned into the Hitler Youth, there's a joy in participating in the darkness for these soldiers. People that followed Hitler luxuriated in the darkness, and that is something that's not uncommon today.

The film makes the perfect companion piece to The Zone of Interest. Did the cultural impact of that movie have any effect on what you were doing? 

That's so interesting. And a terrific film. No, I finished the movie in 2023, so I hadn't seen The Zone of Interest. I knew that it had won at Cannes and was getting some love from critics. And then I finished the movie in October, and Angel Studios bought it in November, and then they waited a year to put it out. 

I love the thought that they could interact. I love Jonathan Glazer, but he and I, in storytelling temperament, are opposites. He is, I think, delectably slow and a chilling kind of storyteller. It's not ironic, but it's removed, and it's a steady gaze on some really dark, scary stuff in pretty much all his movies. I'm the opposite. I'm looking for the heart. I'm looking for the emotion. I'm looking for the humanity constantly, even in the darkest corners. So I think we're both aiming at the dark. I'm just prying for more light. 

This year, there's been a WWII and Holocaust movie renaissance that the genre hasn’t experienced since Quentin Tarantino made Inglourous Basterds. 

We have to talk about these things, because they keep happening again and again. The freshness of it has to do with the repetitive nature of evil, and sadly, that's what makes it so current.

What’s deeply impressive about your work on Bonheoffer is that people could read it as an allegory regardless of their politics. I could see a conservative audience going into this and projecting their views on it. I could see a liberal audience doing the same thing. And I really love that about the movie. I've been in some press conferences for other films in the awards race since last Tuesday, and everyone is ranting abot how, “We made this to directly deal with these times!” I feel like there's a depth to your work that a lot of those movies don't have. How did contemporary politics fit into the writing process? 

I definitely was writing about what it looks like when someone becomes famous and beloved and listened to. Where some people see a true leader, other people see a charlatan. So, I definitely was leaning into that. I wanted to talk about that, but I was not trying to make a political film. And what I love about this whole process is that both sides of the aisle cling to Bonhoeffer, and so that actually gives me hope, because if we don't start talking about the things we share as opposed to the things we differ on, we're doomed. 

I mean this, “I'm over here, you're over there, go away. You're wrong about everything.” That's not the way a society works. We're not supposed to agree about everything, but we certainly can be violent or isolating about everything. If we can find common ground in someone like Bonhoeffer and start talking about what he did. He was fiercely brave. He thought of others. 

First, he followed his faith all the way to the cross. Okay, so how does that look in your life? How can you be brave and loving and fearless? Well, how can you do it apart from the grace of God? You can't. We have a mirror that Bonhoeffer holds up, that both sides should be looking closely at, and not, as they say, proof texting and finding the one verse in the Bible that wins your point, as opposed to the 75 other verses that tell you that you're wrong.

I wanted to talk about the casting of this movie given your previous experience on Sully with Tom Hanks. That's the actor you want to play Sully. I don’t want to see an A-list actor in this role. What was your approach to casting your Bonhoeffer? You need someone that’s a cypher so audiences aren’t bringing a lot of other baggage to the performance. Not Iron Man as Bonhoeffer or Forrest Gump as Bonhoeffer.

I wanted someone young, and I wanted someone German. But I wasn't well versed in German actors. I have one German filmmaker friend named Emily Atef, who's made several films. She's a terrific artist, and I asked her to give me a list of the best 10 actors, who are 25-35 years old. She wrote back, Jonas Dassler. I wrote back to Emily and told her I need a list. And Emily wrote back, “He is the list.” So her confidence in him really drove me towards Jonas. And it's been a great fit. He's extraordinary. He was a dream to work with, and I now agree with Emily. Jonas is the list.

How did the language barrier situation work? I'm always fascinated by the way that some of your previous collaborators like Mel Gibson just go full-on Aramaic and then others have the accented English. You're working with a European crew, you're working with German actors, but the film is in standardized English. What did that conversation look like, and what was that thought process like as you were dealing with the reality of this story?

I don't speak German, so there was no question about whether it was going to be English or not. I wanted to make a movie for the whole world. And English is the language to give it the broadest audience. To tell you a funny story, Jonas wrote to me pretty close to production and asked, “When do I get to see the German script?” And I told him that we were shooting this in English. And he was like, “Oh, no.” So six days before we started shooting, he thought we were shooting in German, which makes his performance even more amazing, because he did this in a second language. 

I feel like people are so well versed in English that the communication about acting and choices and all the directing I was doing with them were seamless. I never ran into a problem where I couldn't get my point across. The crew wasn't German; the crew was Belgian. Then we moved to Ireland, and the crew was Irish. I may have understood the Belgians more than I understood the Irish.

What do you hope that audiences in cities like Nashville get from the movie?

I want young people to come see this movie, because I want them to see that they can be brave. I found Bonhoeffer so relatable. I found his wrestling between total faith and aching doubt, from absolute certainty about what's right to frustration and disappointment that it was going so badly. Yet, he always ultimately turned back to his faith. I found that so relatable, and I think young people will too. To see that, at 27, he got up and put a target on his chest and spent the last 12 years of his life being chased by Hitler, that he made that bold choice so young. 

We can make choices to be brave every day. What kind of friend we are, what kind of work we're aiming to do. We can be brave entrepreneurs. We can be brave in our generosity, in where we give money and how we give money. There's all sorts of ways every day to be what I would call Bonhoeffer brave. And I really hope young people come to this movie and find out how connected they could be to this hero from long ago who actually is very much a man of our time.

Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin. opens in theaters nationwide on Wednesday.