Dave Davies

That's your character, right?

So let's talk about Nuremberg.

You play Robert Jackson, a Supreme Court justice who is the lead prosecutor in this trial, trying former Nazi leaders for their crimes.

People of a younger generation might not be as aware of this as you and I. But he also really kind of organized the whole thing.

And I thought we'd hear a clip here.

You in this clip are speaking with the army psychiatrist who has been sent to the prison –

where these captured Nazis are being held.

His job is to keep them from committing suicide, for one, and then to pursue some combination of therapy and also building psychological profiles to assist in the prosecution.

And in this scene, this is well before the trial gets underway.

You're telling the psychiatrist you want him to get information from Hermann Goering, the highest-ranking Nazi, about their defense strategy.

And the psychiatrist is resisting.

The psychiatrist, he's played by Rami Malek, speaks first.

And that's our guest Michael Shannon with Rami Malek in the new film Nuremberg.

Give us your sense of your character here, Robert Jackson, the Supreme Court justice on this historic mission, how you got into his head.

Yeah, we just finished a dreadful, catastrophic war, yeah.

Right, but there really weren't these international laws before that.

Oh, no.

They were improvising a lot of it.

Michael Shannon stars as President James Garfield in the new Netflix series Death by Lightning, and he plays a prosecutor trying Nazi leaders for war crimes in the new film Nuremberg.

We'll hear more of our conversation after a break.