Inspired by Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, The Specialist is composed entirely from archival footage from the 1961 Israeli trial of the Nazi SS lieutenant colonel. The trial was filmed by the blacklisted American documentary filmmaker, Leo Hurwitz, and broadcast on TV. While Hurwitz's recordings have been widely used in previous documentaries, those now iconic images were all drawn from the same few hours of footage. For The Specialist, Eyal Sivan examined the entire archive of 350 hours and homed in on the testimony of Eichmann, revealing him as “an appallingly ordinary man.”