For a truly divisive filmmaker, you can’t beat Führer favorite Leni Riefenstahl. A Garbo-eyed young actress and director who caught Hitler’s eye in 1932, Riefenstahl was tapped to helm the Nazi Party’s propaganda flicks. Her Triumph of the Will, a stunning 114-minute chronicle of the 1934 Nuremberg rally, would become known as one of the greatest documentaries ever.

It’s certainly the scariest. As Wagner blares, Riefenstahl’s lens witnesses 100,000 party faithful standing in domino-like rows, eager to thrust their hands skyward for the spit-shrieking dictator. Her groundbreaking techniques created a template for big-screen depictions of fascist empires. Riefenstahl’s crew of more than 170 dug ditches in front of the rally’s speakers to get heroic upward shots, and they ascended ladders to capture the magnitude of the amassed troops. It’s a model that’s been used by filmmakers from Spielberg (the Nazi rally in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was so Triumph-inspired that it originally featured a Leni-like director) to Disney (see the Nurembergian staging of Scar’s “Be Prepared” number in The Lion King). But the Hitler connection means that few directors will actually own up to cribbing from Riefenstahl, who died in 2003. Here are two big names who have.

George Lucas called Riefenstahl “the most modern filmmaker” and borrowed liberally from Triumph. Take Hitler’s climactic speech: The camera surveys the precisely aligned crowd as Hitler, flanked by Viktor Lutze and Heinrich Himmler, walks to the podium []. Lucas echoes this in Return of the Jedi, when Emperor Palpatine arrives at Death Star II, where he’s flanked by Lord Vader [].

Paul Verhoeven once described the opening of his Starship Troopers—in which troops declare, “I’m doing my part” []—as “wink-wink Riefenstahl.” The extreme close-ups and wide crowd shots mirror much of Triumph’s general aesthetic, but the opener is drawn from a segment that has members of the Reich Labor Service announcing where they’re from []. “From Friesland!”