West Hollywood, California (November 30, 2009) - Meeting filmmaker Philippe Mora at his home in WeHo is in itself like walking into Golden Era Hollywood - he and his wife Pamela reside in the same digs once dug by Cary Grant.

Pamela and Philippe Mora hearthside at their West Hollywood home. Photo by WeHo News.

"You know," Mr. Mora says, passing along the building's lore, "Randolph Scott kept a separate apartment here across the hall, but seldom answered that door. It was all for appearances' sake."

WeHo News sat down with him after his return from Germany, where his 1973 film "Swastika" premiered after a 36 year ban (see "Swastika" To Show In Germany ) and where he witnessed the Berlin Wall's Fall Twentieth Anniversary celebrations.

We even found time to discuss the release on DVD of the two-disc director's cut of his 1975 Australian classic film, "Mad Dog Morgan" starring Dennis Hopper.

"Having lived here since 1978, before it was a officially a city," he said he found West Hollywood "so comfortable, such a nice place to live in, that I didn't realize how great it was because I was just living in freedom," na�ve as a child.

He travelled the world, and he said as the world paid more and more attention to West Hollywood and what is was up to, people would remark positively on it when he mentioned where he lived.

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He said the inquisitive foreigners helped him to understand what makes West Hollywood the envy of and model for the world.

"This sounds corny, but it's freedom," Mr. Mora said. "It's a very free city. Of course that's a very American concept at its heart."

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Philippe Mora strikes a pose for his documentary, "Swastika's," release in 1974. WeHo News.

He pointed to California cities' recent clamor to ban cat declawing and its WeHo genesis as proof of his theorem.

"The first reaction from around the world was ridicule," he said, "for the little gray haired ladies in West Hollywood who want to do this crazy thing. But once you think about it, it's really about basic human decency toward creatures, and you've got to start by being kind to animals if you're going to be kind to humans."

That kindness to humans seems to him to spring in part from WeHo's crucible, the AIDS crisis, in which the newborn municipality found itself at ground zero during the mid-1980s.

"The experience left so many grief-stricken people in its wake," he said, himself included, "and we lost so many creative people.

"But I think that going through it did help to foster a kinder attitude toward one's fellow in West Hollywood - and that rippled outward from here."

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He said that great art often comes out of such trauma, a concept that can be extended to the art of governance in WeHo's case.

"Politicians can get easily distracted with all that it takes to remain in office," he pointed out, "and that gets in the way of doing good [legislation that gives people freedom to pursue their lives].

"[In John Heilman, Abbe Land and the late Sal Guarriello,] WeHo has politicians who can stay on track and focus," on progressive, forward thinking legislation, he observes.

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Philippe Mora with his painting 'Popeye and Olive's Expulsion from Paradise' which was used in the Beatles Illustrated Lyrics, the cartoon couple standing in for John and Yoko. Photographed at the Pheasantry, London, by Angus Forbes in 1970. WeHo News.

"Even more than that," he said, "They have evolved as time has gone on; they have been very responsive to the community, but also I think they're responsive to the times."

Noting that "yesterday's radical is today's establishment," he said, "a friend of mine, Robert Hughes, wrote a book called 'The Shock of the New,'" in which Mr. Hughes describes peoples ridicule, anger and eventual begrudging acceptance of rapid change in modernity.

"Well," continued Mr. Mora, "West Hollywood is many peoples 'Shock of The New,' a healthy shock."

Speaking of the shock of the new, our conversation turned toward his recent trip, the premier of "Swastika" in Germany and the Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

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On the screening in Munich at the Biberach Film Festival, championed by German documentary maker Ilona Ziok, he said, "I was scared to death."

His documentary "Swastika" shows in dispassionate footage the rise of Nazis to popularity and power, and in using Hitler's own home movies (shot often by Eva Braun) humanized the dictator.

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Adolf Hitler's image playing with children caused a near riot at its first showing in Cannes. WeHo News.

"As you know," he said, "at the premier screening at Cannes in 1973 a riot broke out, [which led to the film's 36 yr-old ban in Germany], so I didn't know what to expect" at Munich's Biberach Film Festival.

"After the screening, you could hear a pin drop," he said, such was the effect of a German audience one or two generations removed from the war.

Soon applause erupted, followed by a Q&A, but what struck Mr. Mora was that "20 or 30 people came up to me after thanking me, saying, 'All of my family were in the Nazi party, we've never been told anything about this and now we understand,' how their parents or grandparents got sucked into the Nazi Party."

Actually, he gave as an aside, "I was relieved that nothing bad had happened."

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He said that the film filled a void left because no Nazis of that generation wanted to discuss the war. "You recall that between 1/3 and 1/2 of all Germans were still Nazis at the end of the war, and when news of the concentration camps made its way out - well, what a huge disgrace that was for everyone.

"No one, if they were Nazi, wanted to tell their children what they did in the war, which only increased suspicion."

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WeHo News.

He posited that, in many ways, the fall of that wall was to the German people the real fall of Hitler.

"[German Premier] Angela Merckl spoke at Brandenburg Gate on the anniversary," he said, "and she reminded the crowd that Germany must never forget that the anniversary of the fall happened to fall on the same date - Nov. 9 - as Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass, an anti-Jewish pogrom in Nazi Germany)."

"In fact, he said, "'Swastika' screened in the very same screening room where Joseph Goebbels screened Nazi propaganda films," in Berlin's famous "West Hollywood in West Berlin," the 1960s commune, ufaFabrik International Center for Culture and Ecology.

That, for him, was high irony, especially given what he's discovered about his father's past since the trip.

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"The German government at all levels has been helping me find traces of my father's life," he said. His father, once named Morawski and now living in Australia, was a Leipzig native high up in the French Resistance with Mr. Mora's godfather, the French mime Marcel Marceau, who also fought as a Jewish resistance fighter.

Adrian Kutter, founder of the Biberach Film Festival, with Philippe Mora at the premier screening in Germany of "Swastika." Photo by WeHo News.

Papers recently unearthed in Leipzig and Berlin show that Nazi authorities marked Mr. Mora's father as a dangerous political radical at the tender age of 19 for suggesting Germany join the British Empire in a classroom.

Other papers place him attending Berlin University when Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels burned that world-renowned university library's books in the now-famous Nazi-book burning - Mr. Mora senior left for Paris just days afterward.

For his first feature film, made after 'Swastika," Mr. Mora wrote and directed a film about Australia's most famous, or infamous, criminal.

Mr. Mora's 1975 Australian film classic "Mad Dog Morgan" starring Dennis Hopper was just released in an "uncut" version on DVD last week.

The film, which depicts the true story of a 19th-century Australian gold-digger who is pressed into a life of crime and terrorizes the land.

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See the trailer below, and order the film by clicking here.

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