Parliament building stood in as Vatican in film about Nuremberg trials

"This is the first time in recent memory that the building of the parliament has been the location of such a large-scale filming project," the Parliament's Press Office wrote to Telex, in response to our inquiry about how the filming of certain scenes for the historical film Nuremberg, currently showing in cinemas took place.

The film tells the story of the Nuremberg trials held after the end of World War II, in which several Nazi leaders were sentenced to death and then executed. According to the website of the film's Hungarian distributor, Vertigo Media, the plot of Nuremberg centers on Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe), often described as the second-in-command of the Third Reich, and the American psychiatrist examining him, Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek). The psychiatrist is tasked with determining whether the Nazi leaders are fit to stand trial before an international court for their war crimes.

According to the IMDb, Nuremberg was filmed entirely in Hungary. Although not specifically mentioned here, one of the filming locations was the Parliament building, with one of its corridors serving as the Vatican.

It is not every day that such a high-budget film is shot in the Parliament, so we sent questions about this to the Parliament's Press Office. Although we also asked how much the filmmakers had to pay to shoot at this location, we did not receive an answer to this. The Press Office only revealed that “the sum was included in the budget of the Parliament's Office.”

We learned that although a film shoot comparable in scale to Nuremberg hadn't taken place in Parliament in the recent past, “on average, there are 12-14 tourism-related film shoots” in the building each year “each lasting between 1-2 hours”. The press office wrote that with these kinds of inquiries, the leadership of the Parliament's Office makes a case-by-case decision, weighing "all relevant circumstances" before granting permission for filming in the Parliament.

Since this is the building that houses the supreme legislative and executive body of Hungary, we also wanted to know whether the filmmakers had disrupted the work of Parliament. As it turns out, the scenes in question were shot on weekends, so "there was no disruption to the legislative process."