Hi, my name is Joel Schumacher, and I, with a sturdy bunch of brave people, went out to fields of Romania and made this movie, and I soon, if you're listening and interested, will tell how we made it.

One of the reasons we went to Romania is because of cast-factor: they have brilliant crews there! Wonderful art departments, great artists and, as you can see, this is a beautiful country side in Romania. The black and white photography – because the film starts in the 30s, before people really understood what was growing in Germany at that time, a lot of this is the inspiration from the Grapes of Wrath, the incredible 1939 film, so we studied a lot of great black and white photography and also the German films...

One of the great things about working in Romania it's what we were able to put together the terrific international cast, I can't say enough about production designer and art department, but I'll get back to it later... No pigs were harmed in the shooting of this film, fortunately, no animals were harmed – we have a lot of animal actors in it... This was a slaughtered pig, that pig farmer, who brought us the pigs, was generous to loan us. And, of course, it makes a very unusual image.

The terrific actors here represent many of the families who came at the US from a difficult time in the countries, they were from, in this particular case, a German farming family and they have no idea, they are quite innocent, because their life is a basically learning English, so they can sell their wares and pulling great distress in their live, as with all farmers, which is the weather, especially in those days when there was very little technical support...

So they receive a letter from the famous Reichsfuhrer Himmler,



who if you are in any way interested in the Third Reich of the Rise of Hitler, you know that Himmler was an extraordinary part of it... And Dave Kajganich wrote the script, and, of course, invented this family...

It is based, however, on a lot of historic information about Hitler's obsession with the Occult... I learned a little bit about this from Misha in Prague, because if you've ever been to Prague and Czech Republic it's such a beautiful cities, you wonder why it wasn.t bombed during the war, because it.s such a fragile small city... and I was told that Hitler had heard that the spear that had pierced Christ's body was there. He was fascinated with Relicts and collected them. He also along with Himmler, Goebbels and Hess, they had a strong believe that they were descendent from the Nordic Viking Gods and the Germanic race had been so bastardised by immigrants, of course, the Jewish people that if they could just create a master race and purify the Germans that they would return to the Era of the Nordic Gods. This went into incredible consequences because they exterminated at least six million people, not all of them were Jews, the majority, of course, but they were also the Gypsies, homosexuals, the handicapped people who considered military ill, anyone that made their race impure... and then they were enlist "baby factories", where the youth of Germany was expected to produce the master race. If you're interested in this...

I wanna stop for a minute and pull out the great Michael Fassbender, he is a young actor who... you may have seen him in "Inglourious Basterds"... And we were very lucky to have him, he did a great job and you gonna see a lot more of his films later…

But I want to get back to the bases of David Kajganich's fiction...

to be continued...