Drawing on the real-life WWII heroics of Pinchas Tibor Rosenbaum, Walking with the Enemy tells the story of Elek (Jonas Armstrong), a young Hungarian Jew who, in the final months of the war, donned an SS uniform and posed as a German officer in order to save hundreds of Jews in Budapest.

Working from his and Kenny Golde’s script, first-time director Mark Schmidt has woven an epic historical action-drama, expanding on the story of Elek (the Pinchas character) to include the larger efforts of the Budapest Jewish community and the Hungarian government (led by Ben Kingsley’s Regent Horthy) to resist the Nazi’s final genocidal attempts in the face of the approaching Soviet army.

In addition to the Irish Armstrong, Walking with the Enemy also stars English actor Simon Dutton as Miklos Schoen, a Jewish leader who worked with the Swiss government to get many Jews out of Budapest on Swiss passports.

I sat down with both Armstrong and Dutton in Chicago a few weeks ago to talk about the film and how they both approached playing real-life individuals caught up in the Holocaust.

Walking with the Enemy opens today in theaters in select cities.

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It’s such a big film about a big subject. It seems like the film makers really did a lot with a relatively small budget for a film of this size and scope.

Simon Dutton: And then they started doing more and more. The whole shoot was quite a long process—we started in 2009, then I went back with Jonas a year later to shoot more scenes, and a couple years later they shot even more scenes. The whole political side of it with Ben Kingsley was added much later—it wasn’t in the original script.

Simon, your character of Miklos seems to act as a pivot between Elek’s individual efforts and the larger efforts of the community. He seems more bureaucratic, trying to work within the legal (and illegal) system.

Dutton: He’s a fulcrum – he’s trying to do what he can, but he sees that Elik is getting a little out of control with his zeal. My character is more in between.

Miklos was a real person. We did quite a lot of research before we started shooting, and I knew quite a bit about the Second World War, but I didn’t know about what happened in Hungary toward the end of the war. I don’t think a lot of people do. Geography plays a big part—Hungary is the last country before you get to Russia.

People who knew Pinchas, the real Elek, say he was a bit crazy as a young man. You can imagine what it was like, living on the edge like that, the adrenaline-fueled madness. The bravado to dress up like an SS officer! He was taking incredible risks, but maybe getting a bit of buzz off it. After all, he was 19!

As actors, how do you approach playing a real figure?

Dutton: It’s tricky. Of course, you’re playing someone from history, someone who’s real, but at the end of the day, as with any job, you’re trying to make him a believable character while keeping a sense of the period.

We spent a lot of time choosing what clothes we wear, getting that right look. Jonas tried on 50 shirts before they settled on one.

I didn’t set out thinking, “How can I recreate Miklos?” At the end of the day it is a movie—it’s obviously based on true facts, but you take some leeway in order to make the story entertaining.

Jonas Armstrong: You have to honor their story, but our story is not 100-percent historically accurate. They took artistic licenses for dramatic purposes. But there is added pressure – you know that this happened, and of course it’s a very important and delicate subject.

Do you prepare differently for a historical film than a contemporary one?

Armstrong: Not really. When you’re given a script, you go through it, you dissect it, you have ideas, but if you make too many choices before filming, you’re sort of screwed. It’s like any piece of drama, film, TV, a play. It’s a process, you can’t formulate it ahead of time because things will inform you, it comes down to interaction on the set or stage.

Dutton: Directors work in lots of different ways, as well. There are directors, especially in the theater, who don’t want you to invest any emotion at all for ages during the process–you just go through “actioning.” Otherwise people are forced to make decisions too quickly about the part.

There’s an interesting contrast between your characters. Jonas, your Elek is young and full of passion and some recklessness.

Armstrong: Miklos is the voice of reason, but when you’re young and you have almost no fear like Elek did, you don’t think about the consequences, you just do.

But to be honest, I didn’t think about his youthfulness. When I think of myself as a 19-year-old, I think of myself as a boy, not a man. But Pinchas/Elek showed great maturity—you think this person who pulled this thing off must have been a lot older.

Earlier films about the Holocaust tended to be about the larger, horrific story of it, the scope and scale of the genocide.

But in the years since Schindler’s List, most Holocaust films lean toward focusing on a specific individual or small group that pulled off some sort of heroic defiance or survival.

Armstrong: As time progresses, more of these stories come out. You don’t learn about them for a long time, for 20, 30, 40 years. By all accounts, the real Pinchas hated talking about it–he was very much a private individual and never said, “I did this or that.”