Max

Audio commentaries on DVD are so master and commander that when someone from a different discipline comes along, it is as if the rules have been changed.

Menno Meyjes doesn't sound like a Hollywood insider; he sounds like an art historian, certainly an academic, one of the less pedantic.

As writer/director, he has lived with Max for five years. He storyboarded it 12 months before bringing his actors to Budapest.

He introduces you to the ex-locomotive factory, which becomes Max's gallery. It is so vast, he commissioned bigger paintings, reproductions of the originals, but four times the size. "We generated 400 works of art throughout the filming."

He's good on detail, such as Max's Du Pont lighter, which cost a fortune to buy, because "it has a special ping," and is extremely generous towards his cast. "I think Molly Parker is an acting goddess," he says, while pointing out moments when John Cusack's subtlety is sublime.

Noah Taylor didn't trust him, at first. "Look, mate," he said. "Just tell me, 'More Fuhrer' or 'Less Fuhrer'." He tells the story against himself, because he admits Noah was right. Taylor captures Hitler's "sombre, self-pitying, completely self-obsessed nature" perfectly. Meyjes's theory on the man: "He could not embrace the notion of loss."

"Now we talk about art ironically; we don't mean it. These guys meant it." He is very good on the mood of the moment. "People forget that the National Socialists were an anti-bourgeois party."

His cinematographer thought that the most important line in the movie was, "He's a nothing. Perhaps this is the age of the nothing."

As commentaries go, this one goes far.