Triumph of the Will

The following comes from Maureen Dowd's profile of Tina Fey in the January 2009 issue of Vanity Fair:

Steve Higgins, an S.N.L. producer, observes, “When she got here she was kind of goofy-looking, but everyone had a crush on her because she was so funny and bitingly mean. How did she go from ugly duckling into swan? It’s the Leni Riefenstahl in her. She has such a German work ethic even though she’s half Greek. It’s superhuman, the German thing of ‘This will happen and I am going to make this happen.’ It’s just sheer force of will.”

As it turns out, the 669-page autobiography of Leni Riefenstahl—chronicling her time as Hitler’s favorite filmmaker and the creation of the propaganda movie Triumph of the Will—is one of Fey’s favorite (cautionary) books. “If she hadn’t been so brilliant at what she did, she wouldn’t have been so evil,” Fey says. “She was like, in the book, ‘He was the leader of the country. Who was I not to go?’ And it’s like, Note to self: Think through the invite from the leader of your country.”