'Beyond the cult of Churchill': New Netflix film Munich shows Chamberlain in 'sympathetic light'

Sir Winston Churchill is firmly established in the nation’s consciousness as Britain’s great wartime leader.

But a new Netflix film aims to move beyond the “cult” of Churchill and restore the reputation of Neville Chamberlain.

Munich: The Edge of War, based on the best-selling novel by Robert Harris, stars Jeremy Irons as Chamberlain and revisits the Munich Agreement of 1938.

The film’s producer, Andrew Eaton, said: “I certainly think we’ve had enough Churchill stories to last us a lifetime.”

Harris said that Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement towards Nazi Germany “has had a great overhang in this country… to call someone an ‘appeaser’ is still a deadly insult.”

'Chamberlain got a rather rough deal'

“Chamberlain got a rather rough deal, because he died and the histories were all written by Winston Churchill and all the blame was heaped on Chamberlain. So I wanted to try and show what a dynamic figure he was, actually.

“It was a daring scheme he came up with, which is rather different from the elderly man image, the fool with the umbrella - it wasn’t like that at all.

“He was no saint - I think he got caught up in his own PR, and he was quite vain. The whole policy failed so there’s no excusing that; he misjudged it. But his impulses were noble.”

Harris said: “It’s great to see an actor of Jeremy Irons’s stature playing Neville Chamberlain. This will be the first time a major movie has gone beyond the cult of Winston Churchill and tried to show Chamberlain in a more sympathetic light.”

Munich will tell the story largely through two fictional characters: Hugh Legat (George MacKay), a British civil servant travelling with Chamberlain to Germany, and Paul von Hartmann, a German diplomat in Hitler’s employ. The two young men were students together at Oxford, but now find themselves on opposite sides of the divide.

Casting an actor to play Hitler was a problem, because it is a role few Germans want. The film’s German director, Christian Schwochow, explained: “It was really difficult to find an actor, because once you’ve played Hitler you stay Hitler until the end of your life.”

In the end the role went to Ulrich Matthes, an actor who previously played Joseph Goebbels in the 2004 film Downfall.

Filming in Germany was also problematic. The producers were granted special dispensation to transform areas of Berlin and Munich into Nazi-era cities, as usually it is illegal to display swastikas.

'We were hanging gigantic swastikas and they were obviously very sensitive about it'

They also managed to film inside the Fuhrerbau building where the Munich Agreement was signed. It is now a music school, and Netflix sent a 20-strong delegation to persuade the headmaster to let them film there.

“We were hanging gigantic swastikas and they were obviously very sensitive about it,” said Eaton. “[The school] actually put out a press release saying, ‘We just want to make it really clear we don’t support the idea of Nazism.’ I would have thought that was fairly obvious, but that just shows how sensitive it is even today.”

Eaton, Harris and Schwochow were speaking at the ES/Netflix Stories Festival in London. Netflix intends to give the film a theatrical release in the New Year before it moves to the streaming service, making it eligible for awards season.

Harris believes that the adaptation will appeal to young millennials. “Talking to my own children, I think this is an anxious generation - about climate change, about right wing nationalism and so on. You don’t have to know anything about the Munich Agreement - it’s this idea of standing up and getting involved and taking risks that does cross boundaries and borders.”

The film will be partly subtitled, as the British actors will speak in English and the German actors in their native language. “It is one of the glories of the Netflix/Amazon era that we all watch many more foreign films now, and people find it quite easy to go between languages. It just gives it that authenticity.

“When you have English actors putting on a heavy German accent, it’s just cringe-making. And German faces are different to how an English actor looks,” said Harris.

Whether German audiences will flock to the film remains to be seen: neither Schwochow nor any of the German crew had heard of Chamberlain before starting work on the film.