Tom Cruise is in cruise control once more. Somehow he always has his way and this time he has threaded his way to a historical shrine in Germany. In a sudden and almost unanticipated change of heart, the German government has given the green signal to the filming of the movie Valkyrie at Bendlerblock, the original site where a group of conspirators led by the German Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg attempted to assassinate the Nazi leader Fuhrer Adolf Hitler but failed and were executed.
The Finance Department of Germany first declined to grant permission for the shooting of the Bryan Singer-directed World War II thriller at the national German shrine stating bad experience with past film crews. They had also added that the memorial ought to be treated as a ‘place of remembrance and mourning’ which would ‘lose dignity if we are to exploit it as a film set’. But now the Ministry’s spokesman, Thorsten Albig, says that things have changed and the project has been granted permission to go ahead.
Albig told the German newspaper Bild:
The latest request by the film team was given a positive answer. There was a different feeling about the project. We will take a closer look with director Bryan Singer at the location and, while ensuring that the dignity of the shrine is protected, see what’s possible and what’s not.
The movie revolves around the German Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg and his plot to assassinate Hitler during the Second World War. His group fails in its objective and gets executed in 1944. Tom Cruise stars as Stauffenberg and his casting in the movie as the central character also played a good role in the controversy. German politicians were outraged that Cruise was playing the role of Stauffenberg and saw his belief in Scientology as a sign of decimating the value of the German national hero. The initial refual to let the crew shoot at Bendlerblock raised a wave of criticisms from leading German newspapers and filmmakers including Wolfgang Petersen who remarked that refusing to allow the shooting at the site was in fact not allowing this great historical moment to be shared with a global audience.
But now that the German government has granted permission for the shooting to go ahead, such controversies can be buried.
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Source: Aceshowbiz
