I have put part of a 1994 interview with Ralph Fiennes in which he discusses elements of his performance as Amon Goeth. You may find it helpful in understanding the representation of Goeth in the film. The interview comes from Entertainment Weekly.
“In Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg’s masterful contemplation of the Holocaust, the face of evil has gentle eyes and a runny nose, cherubic cheeks and a quiet voice. And though the movie is at heart a story of unlikely heroism, it is that improbable-looking villain, Nazi commandant Amon Goeth, who follows you home after the credits roll and the audience files silently from the theatre. For Goeth could give even Lucifer pause. This was a man who would stand on his balcony, bare-chested and bloated, aiming his rifle at children; a man responsible for the murder of 4,000 Jews his first month as a commander of the Plaszow labour camp.
Like the Holocaust itself, he is unfathomable. Yet in Schindler’s List, Amon Goeth is rendered human by Ralph Fiennes, a heretofore obscure British actor who has emerged from the London fog to become the most talked-about thing in the most talked-about movie of this year’s Oscar race. Reviewers have been fraying their thesauruses to praise him, and so far, Fiennes’ performance has earned him a prize from the New York Film Critics Circle and an Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actor.
“Spielberg emphasised that he didn’t want any obvious Nazi stuff,” says Fiennes, 31. “I do not want to excuse Goeth, but ultimately he was human… He was a kid in diapers at one point, and he had all this potential to be something, and he went the wrong way. That, to me, is tragic.” Says Schindler’s Embeth Davidtz, who plays Goeth’s battered maid, Helen Hirsch: ” Ralph didn’t make [Goeth] a monster. He found this little boy squashed inside this Nazi overcoat.”
Steven Spielberg was moved to audition Fiennes for the part of Goeth after watching his performances in Wuthering Heights and the ITV production A Dangerous Man: Lawrence After Arabia. “I think that Steven saw what I was attempting in Wuthering Heights,” says Fiennes, “a much brutal, very unsympathetic portrait of Heathcliff. I think he probably saw in that elements that could work for Amon Goeth.”
Several weeks in Los Angeles promoting Schindler’s have baked Fiennes’ nose to a bright red, and his fair British skin has turned splotchy. Except for his ice-blue eyes, all those elements of Amon Goeth have melted away – including roughly 25 pounds he gained by way of alcohol, cake, and weight-gain powders. “That seems to be a thing,” says Fiennes. “At some point [every] actor has to put on his weight… I think that having the sense of going to seed, as well as being accurate to Goeth, just felt right. It gave me a whole new sense of how to move. When you carry around a bit of a tummy on you, it just changes you.”
Before and during the shooting in Poland, Fiennes spent months searching for signs of Goeth’s humanity. He watched a documentary interview with Goeth’s former mistress and read Tom Segev’s 1987 study of SS officers, Soldiers of Evil, which included details of Goeth’s privileged but neglected childhood. His inhumanity, however, was easier to find; one of the Schindler Jews who had worked as Goeth’s secretary at Krakow recalled that Goeth once nonchalantly interrupted his dictation of a get-well note to his father to shoot a prisoner from his window. “It may sound glib,” says Fiennes, “but I think the killing of human beings that capriciously is like the [grown-up] version of the little boy with the air rifle who is blasting at sparrows or smashing wasps with a fly swatter. And obviously, it was something that turned him on.”
It is, in fact, Fiennes’ dark and unexpected sensuality that ignites many of his scenes. “I think he’s sexy [in the film],” says Davidtz, who had to soothe her face with ice after the beatings she took during their brutal scenes together. “There’s something about anyone in conflict that’s exciting.”
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