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Before the most dramatic episode of her professional life became a movie, Deborah Lipstadt had some work to do.

Her job: To teach Oscar-winning actress Rachel Weisz how to talk like a Jewish woman from Queens.

Weisz, who grew up in London, portrays Lipstadt, a Holocaust historian, in the forthcoming film “Denial,” which screens Oct. 6 at the Mill Valley Film Festival and opens in Bay Area theaters on Oct. 7.

Rachel Weisz plays Deborah Lipstadt in “Denial.” photo/bleecker street/laurie sparham

The film tells the story of Lipstadt’s dramatic win in British court against a prominent Holocaust denier, David Irving. It was a high-profile case that made the Holocaust front-page news in 2000, and unequivocally refuted Holocaust denial at a time when the tragedy was fading from living memory.

But before Weisz donned a red wig and delivered striking defenses of the Holocaust and free speech, she had to learn to sound just like Lipstadt.

“She would call me and say, ‘Record for me how you say ‘I’ll call you.’ Record for me how you say ‘goodnight,’ ” Lipstadt recalled.

Weisz’s attention to detail paid off.

“She got my accent,” Lipstadt said.

Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish history and Holocaust studies at Emory University, had criticized Irving’s falsification of Holocaust history in her 1993 book “Denying the Holocaust.” In 1996, Irving sued her for libel in British court, where the burden of proof lies with the defendant. The movie depicts how Lipstadt won the case, exposing Irving as an intentional falsifier of Holocaust history.

Lipstadt acknowledged that she had thought about the trial’s cinematic potential. Still, when producers first approached her about “Denial” in 2008, she laughed — the same reaction, she recalled, that she had when she found out Irving was suing her.

Deborah Lipstadt photo/courtesy emory university

“When you sign over a book, you are essentially giving them control over your story,” she said. “You’re not going to be able to say, ‘No, that’s not right, I don’t like that, don’t include this.’ So what I kept querying them about is, this is a movie about truth. Do you understand you have to stick to the truth?”

The finished product, Lipstadt said, hews closely to the truth. It heightens her tension with her lawyers and combines a string of meetings with Holocaust survivors into one encounter. But the courtroom scenes are taken verbatim from the record, and dramatic scenes — from Irving ambushing Lipstadt at a lecture to a tense Shabbat dinner with British Jewish leaders — happened more or less as they play out on screen.

As a child of Holocaust refugees, Weisz had a personal connection to the movie. And because she is Jewish, Lipstadt said, it was easier for Weisz to slip into Hebrew when the script called for it.

The movie’s title refers both to Holocaust denial and to the self-denial Lipstadt had to practice when she refrained from testifying, she said. Standing on the side of a set of a movie about your life, she said, didn’t feel that different.

“Everybody has a job — big, little, it’s all important,” she said. “I didn’t have a job. It was learning how to be to the side, learning to let others speak for you in the trial and act for you.”

The movie keeps the drama alive by focusing much of the plot on Lipstadt’s conflict with her lawyers. Throughout much of the film, Lipstadt attempts to coax her reserved British legal team to allow her and Holocaust survivors to take the stand.

The movie’s central message, she said, is about the need to affirm historical truth, uncomfortable as it may be. And in an age where Lipstadt says anti-Semitism is again rising, she is grateful to have played a role in preserving Holocaust memory.

“I got a chance to fight the good fight, and I know so many people — Jews, African Americans, gays, people who have faced prejudice … who would want the chance to fight the good fight. And I feel very lucky.”

The Taube Foundation for Jewish Life has obtained a number of complimentary tickets for private showings of “Denial”: 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 6 at the Embarcadero Center Cinemas in San Francisco; 7 p.m. Oct.13 at CineArts Palo Alto Square, and 7 p.m. Oct. 18 at the Albany Twin. To reserve tickets, email [email protected]. Seating is limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis.