“The idea of the project was: how can we tell this in
a way that is present tense?” asks The Zone of Interest director
Jonathan Glazer. The filmmaker, speaking during a virtual press conference,
reflects upon the contemporary resonance of The
Zone of Interest. The film tells the story of Auschwitz Commandant
Rudolph Höss, who devised a systematic killing machine that took over a million
lives during the war. Glazer’s film, however, interprets history outside of
Auschwitz’s walls. The Zone of
Interest offers a domestic story of Höss and his wife, Hedwig
(Sandra Hüller), as they enjoy their dream home next door to the camp.
It’s a chilling portrait in which the sense of
normalcy makes the undertone of evil doubly sinister. The film is now an award
season favourite with accolades that include three Golden Globe nominations including
Best Picture and wins for Best Picture and Best Director from the Toronto Film Critics Association. It’s not
the most conventional choice amid studio awards bait, but a testament to
Glazer’s audacious artistic vision.
Glazer says that shifting the drama of Martin Amis’s
book, which features a character inspired by Höss, lets audiences sees
themselves in the story. “We could make a film that talks about something
primordial, something [about] the human capacity for violence that we have as a
species, and the familiarity of these perpetrators,” reflects Glazer. “They
weren’t anomalies. They were normal people who step by step became mass
murderers and became so disassociated from their crimes that they didn’t see
them as crimes. The methods we used to make the film had to serve that idea of
something that was a 21st century lens.”
Adapting Amis
Producer Jim Wilson adds that he and Glazer optioned
Amis’s book in 2014 shortly after they collaborated on Under the Skin. The duo
notes that they were already exploring a Holocaust story through an alternative
lens and stumbled upon a preview of the book in the newspaper.
“What was captured in that preview was this perspective on the life of a concentration camp in the book,” observes Wilson. The producer echoes Glazer that Amis’s fictionalization of the commandant’s work and family life piqued their interest. “That is a 180 from the way that the Holocaust is traditionally narrated in culture, which is stories of its victims and the horror of the victims, and then the triumph of the human spirit.”
Glazer admits that prior to encountering The Zone of Interest, he
struggled to find the framework for a perpetrator-based Holocaust story. “The
novel almost gave me permission to take it on. It’s an extremely uncomfortable
place to put oneself artistically, for obvious reasons, but there was something
very courageous in Amis’s attempt. I think that helped me with mine, really,”
says Glazer. The film adapts Amis’s novel quite radically. Where Amis’s book
offers three storylines—one with the commandant puttering about his work, one
with his protégé seducing his wife, and the other with a member of the
Sonderkommando plotting his death—the film zeroes in on the domestic story. In
stripping it back, though, Glazer gets to the heart of what makes the story’s
exploration of the banality of evil so effective.
“What was captured in that preview was this perspective on the life of a concentration camp in the book,” observes Wilson. The producer echoes Glazer that Amis’s fictionalization of the commandant’s work and family life piqued their interest. “That is a 180 from the way that the Holocaust is traditionally narrated in culture, which is stories of its victims and the horror of the victims, and then the triumph of the human spirit.”
Moreover, the challenge to use natural light injects The Zone of Interest with its most haunting yet hopeful moments. Select sequences depict Alexandra, a young Polish woman who works for Hedwig, escaping into the night to leave food for prisoners. The sequences appear via thermal cinematography with the warmth of the fruit that Alexandra leaves peppering the fields with notes of hope.
Poetry
makes nothing happen, W.H. Auden said in 1939, when words must have seemed
especially impotent; but cinema is another matter. For several decades after
the end of the Second World War, what’s come to be seen as its central
catastrophe — the near-total destruction of the European Jews — was consigned
to the status of a footnote. The neglect was rooted in guilt: Many nations
eagerly collaborated in the killing, while others did nothing to prevent it.
Consumed by their own suffering, most people simply didn’t want to know, and a
conspiracy of silence was established.
What definitively broke it, in the late 1970s, was — of all things — an NBC miniseries starring Meryl Streep. Crude, contrived and overblown, “Holocaust” is not a work of art; by today’s standards, it is barely even a work of television. Nonetheless, the show’s graphic depiction of the death camps, unprecedented at the time, shocked a vast global audience into belated recognition. Fifteen years later, the process of mnemonic restitution was completed by “Schindler’s List.” Released to stratospheric acclaim in 1993 and seen by hundreds of millions of people around the world, Steven Spielberg’s movie triggered a commemorative boom. For members of the newly united, post-Cold War Europe, Holocaust remembrance became an unofficial civic creed, or in the words of the historian Tony Judt, “the very definition and guarantee of the continent’s restored humanity.”
Not everyone took this moral U-turn at face value. The British philosopher Gillian Rose, who advised the Polish government on how to redesign the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum after the fall of Communism, believed that the new regime of memory was mired in bad faith. By framing the Holocaust as an unfathomable evil — “the ultimate event, the ultimate mystery, never to be comprehended or transmitted,” as the writer Elie Wiesel once put it — we were protecting ourselves, Rose argued, from knowledge of our own capacity for barbarism. “Schindler’s List” was a case in point. For her, Spielberg’s black-and-white epic, which sentimentalizes the Jewish victims and keeps the Nazi perpetrators at arm’s length, was really just a piece of misty-eyed evasion.
A richer work, she suggested, would present the Holocaust as something legibly human and goad the viewer into asking an uncomfortable question: Could I have participated in this? In a startling passage from her final book, “Mourning Becomes the Law” (1996), Rose called for a film that would center on “the life story of a member of the SS in all its pathos, so that we empathize with him, identify with his hopes and fears, disappointments and rage, so that when it comes to killing, we put our hands on the trigger with him.” Instead of eliciting “sentimental tears,” like Spielberg’s production, such a film would leave us “with the dry eyes of a deep grief.”
“The Zone of Interest,” the astonishing new film from Jonathan Glazer, one of England’s most talented and unpredictable directors, can feel at times as if it were made to fulfill Rose’s desideratum. The action, such as it is, charts the daily round of what appears to be a normal German family. The paterfamilias, a baby-faced bureaucrat with a high-and-tight hairdo, goes off punctually to work each morning, while his blond and fertile wife — a mother of five — stays home to raise the kids. On weekends, there are parties in their walled garden, with its wading pool and beds of dahlias and roses, or excursions to their nearby lake house. From a distance, they seem to be living a version of the good life, and as the hausfrau insists during a rare moment of disharmony (the prospect of a move has just been raised), “We’re living how we dreamed we would. ... Beyond how we dreamed.” There’s just one catch: Her husband is none other than Rudolf Höss, the long-serving commandant of Auschwitz, and their attractive villa looks out over the camp.
Such a premise may strike some viewers as unsalvageably grotesque, and Glazer himself spent a good part of the nine years it took to make the film wondering if he was doing something he ought not to. His doubts were assuaged only during postproduction, when he discovered Rose’s essay, with its appeal for a cinematic treatment of the Nazi mind. She seemed to be describing the film he’d just shot — or, as he put it, the one he was currently “rewriting” in the edit suite.
“It was incredibly reassuring,” he told me. “It gave me the confidence to believe in my own instincts, the confidence to complete the film.” Glazer, a gangly man in his late 50s with hazel eyes and a mop of graying hair, had met me at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, where he was spending time between appearances at film festivals in Telluride and Toronto in early September. So far, it seems, his instincts have been validated. “The Zone of Interest” won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, where it received a six-minute standing ovation, and the early reviews have been rapturous.
Audaciously, the German-language film invites us to regard its central couple not as calculating monsters, the way we’re used to seeing Nazis depicted onscreen, but as ordinary people acting on recognizable motives. For the most part, the Hösses want the things we want: comfort, security, the occasional treat. In an early scene, we see them chatting in their twin beds. Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) asks Rudolf (Christian Friedel) if he will take her back to the spa they once visited in Italy. “All that pampering,” she says, her head propped up on her hand, beginning to reminisce. “And the walks. And that nice couple we met.” Suddenly she succumbs to laughter as a further, Chekhovian detail bubbles up: “And that man who played the accordion to the cows.” Rudolf replies, “They loved it.” The conversation is so mundane and universal — this could be any wife addressing any husband — that it’s possible to forget, if only for a moment, just whose pillow talk we are listening in on.
What definitively broke it, in the late 1970s, was — of all things — an NBC miniseries starring Meryl Streep. Crude, contrived and overblown, “Holocaust” is not a work of art; by today’s standards, it is barely even a work of television. Nonetheless, the show’s graphic depiction of the death camps, unprecedented at the time, shocked a vast global audience into belated recognition. Fifteen years later, the process of mnemonic restitution was completed by “Schindler’s List.” Released to stratospheric acclaim in 1993 and seen by hundreds of millions of people around the world, Steven Spielberg’s movie triggered a commemorative boom. For members of the newly united, post-Cold War Europe, Holocaust remembrance became an unofficial civic creed, or in the words of the historian Tony Judt, “the very definition and guarantee of the continent’s restored humanity.”
Not everyone took this moral U-turn at face value. The British philosopher Gillian Rose, who advised the Polish government on how to redesign the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum after the fall of Communism, believed that the new regime of memory was mired in bad faith. By framing the Holocaust as an unfathomable evil — “the ultimate event, the ultimate mystery, never to be comprehended or transmitted,” as the writer Elie Wiesel once put it — we were protecting ourselves, Rose argued, from knowledge of our own capacity for barbarism. “Schindler’s List” was a case in point. For her, Spielberg’s black-and-white epic, which sentimentalizes the Jewish victims and keeps the Nazi perpetrators at arm’s length, was really just a piece of misty-eyed evasion.
A richer work, she suggested, would present the Holocaust as something legibly human and goad the viewer into asking an uncomfortable question: Could I have participated in this? In a startling passage from her final book, “Mourning Becomes the Law” (1996), Rose called for a film that would center on “the life story of a member of the SS in all its pathos, so that we empathize with him, identify with his hopes and fears, disappointments and rage, so that when it comes to killing, we put our hands on the trigger with him.” Instead of eliciting “sentimental tears,” like Spielberg’s production, such a film would leave us “with the dry eyes of a deep grief.”
“The Zone of Interest,” the astonishing new film from Jonathan Glazer, one of England’s most talented and unpredictable directors, can feel at times as if it were made to fulfill Rose’s desideratum. The action, such as it is, charts the daily round of what appears to be a normal German family. The paterfamilias, a baby-faced bureaucrat with a high-and-tight hairdo, goes off punctually to work each morning, while his blond and fertile wife — a mother of five — stays home to raise the kids. On weekends, there are parties in their walled garden, with its wading pool and beds of dahlias and roses, or excursions to their nearby lake house. From a distance, they seem to be living a version of the good life, and as the hausfrau insists during a rare moment of disharmony (the prospect of a move has just been raised), “We’re living how we dreamed we would. ... Beyond how we dreamed.” There’s just one catch: Her husband is none other than Rudolf Höss, the long-serving commandant of Auschwitz, and their attractive villa looks out over the camp.
Such a premise may strike some viewers as unsalvageably grotesque, and Glazer himself spent a good part of the nine years it took to make the film wondering if he was doing something he ought not to. His doubts were assuaged only during postproduction, when he discovered Rose’s essay, with its appeal for a cinematic treatment of the Nazi mind. She seemed to be describing the film he’d just shot — or, as he put it, the one he was currently “rewriting” in the edit suite.
“It was incredibly reassuring,” he told me. “It gave me the confidence to believe in my own instincts, the confidence to complete the film.” Glazer, a gangly man in his late 50s with hazel eyes and a mop of graying hair, had met me at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, where he was spending time between appearances at film festivals in Telluride and Toronto in early September. So far, it seems, his instincts have been validated. “The Zone of Interest” won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, where it received a six-minute standing ovation, and the early reviews have been rapturous.
Audaciously, the German-language film invites us to regard its central couple not as calculating monsters, the way we’re used to seeing Nazis depicted onscreen, but as ordinary people acting on recognizable motives. For the most part, the Hösses want the things we want: comfort, security, the occasional treat. In an early scene, we see them chatting in their twin beds. Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) asks Rudolf (Christian Friedel) if he will take her back to the spa they once visited in Italy. “All that pampering,” she says, her head propped up on her hand, beginning to reminisce. “And the walks. And that nice couple we met.” Suddenly she succumbs to laughter as a further, Chekhovian detail bubbles up: “And that man who played the accordion to the cows.” Rudolf replies, “They loved it.” The conversation is so mundane and universal — this could be any wife addressing any husband — that it’s possible to forget, if only for a moment, just whose pillow talk we are listening in on.
“I wanted to humanize them,” Glazer, who is Jewish, said — in the sense, he quickly clarified, of showing the Hösses as only human, all too human. “I wanted to dismantle the idea of them as anomalies, as almost supernatural. You know, the idea that they came from the skies and ran amok, but thank God that’s not us and it’s never going to happen again. I wanted to show that these were crimes committed by Mr. and Mrs. Smith at No. 26.”
In doing so, he is pushing back against an edifice of conventional wisdom. Thinkers as varied as Jewish theologians and postmodern theorists have conceived of the Holocaust as a singular, almost transcendent disaster — Wiesel’s “ultimate mystery.” This impulse to sequester the Nazi Judeocide from the rest of human experience is understandable, but in the words of the historian Robert Jan van Pelt, it inadvertently consigns the death camps “to the realm of myth, distancing us from an all too concrete historical reality.” It is this concrete historical reality that “The Zone of Interest” seeks to recover.
Bracing for a backlash that had yet to transpire, Glazer was surprised at the film’s positive reception. “I suppose to some extent it must be due to the state of the world,” he mused, referring to the fit of racist populism seizing the West. “When I first started on this, I genuinely couldn’t get my head around how a society could have gone along with these hideous ideas. During the time of making the film, it’s become blindingly obvious.”
Whether or not you believe the Holocaust was an exceptional event — different in kind, not just degree, from all genocides before or since — will naturally determine how you think it ought to be portrayed, or whether you think it ought to be portrayed at all. “We see long, endless processions of Jews marching toward Babi-Yar,” Wiesel wrote of NBC’s “Holocaust” in a coruscating piece for The New York Times. “We see the naked bodies covered with ‘blood’ — and it is all make-believe.” Such techniques may be appropriate for other historical films, but when it came to the subject at hand (which was “not just another event”), they amounted to a kind of sacrilege. “Auschwitz cannot be explained,” he insisted, “nor can it be visualized.”
Of course, you don’t have to be an exceptionalist to sense there may be something morally dubious about making entertainment out of mass death, or in the complacent assumption that the means of cinema are commensurable with that task. Claude Lanzmann’s magisterial documentary “Shoah” (1985), which famously abjures archival footage of the camps in favor of oral testimony from survivors, perpetrators and bystanders, can be understood in part as a rebuttal to the guileless verisimilitude of “Holocaust.” At nine and a half hours, it was never going to reach as wide an audience as the American TV show, but the way it foregrounds the limits of its representational powers set a standard of artistic integrity against which all subsequent Holocaust films would be measured.
Most of those films, it must be said, have taken their cues more from the NBC series than from Lanzmann’s documentary. “Schindler’s List,” “Life Is Beautiful” (1997) and “The Pianist” (2002), to name just a few, are unalike in many ways, but they all take for granted that the horrors they portray are accessible to cinema. These films have, to their credit, contributed to the de-erasure of the Holocaust, but they have also produced a distorted and simplistic understanding of history. To center the victims, as most films do, makes both moral and commercial sense, but it leaves us in the dark about the perpetrators. In general, the Nazis are drawn as stock villains: They do evil because they are evil.
Some may say that there is wisdom, and decorum, in leaving it at that. In an addendum to his Auschwitz memoir “The Truce” (1963), the writer Primo Levi tries to answer the question “How can the Nazis’ fanatical hatred of the Jews be explained?” but ends up drawing an eloquent blank. “Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand is almost to justify,” he wrote. To understand someone means, in some sense, to identify with him, but for a normal person to identify with Hitler and the Nazi top brass, Levi continues, is impossible. “This dismays us, and at the same time gives us a sense of relief, because perhaps it is desirable that their words (and also, unfortunately, their deeds) cannot be comprehensible to us. They are nonhuman words and deeds, really counterhuman.”
This timeless-sounding passage, it’s worth remembering, was written at a specific historical moment, some 30 years before the belated boom in Holocaust memory got going. To grant understanding to the perpetrators in the 60s, before their victims had been widely recognized as such, may have struck Levi as improper. It’s instructive to compare his proscription with the words of another great chronicler of Auschwitz, the Hungarian novelist Imre Kertesz, who admired him deeply. “I regard as kitsch any representation of the Holocaust that is incapable of understanding or unwilling to understand the organic connection between our own deformed mode of life ... and the very possibility of the Holocaust,” Kertesz wrote in an essay from 1998, which condemns “Schindler’s List,” among other works, in terms that echo Rose’s critique. He was thinking, he continued, of “those representations that seek to establish the Holocaust once and for all as something foreign to human nature; that seek to drive the Holocaust out of the realm of human experience.”
Glazer, who steeped himself in Holocaust cinema and history, told me that he is not an exceptionalist. “I don’t like getting involved in a genocide-off,” he said. A few days before we met in Los Angeles, he was in Telluride, where the traces of Native American culture reminded him that Hitler had drawn inspiration from Manifest Destiny, an ideology whose death toll, by conservative estimates, numbers in the tens of millions. When I asked why he decided to tackle the Holocaust, he said it was probably rooted in his family history. Glazer’s grandparents were Eastern European Jews who fled the Russian Empire in the early 20th century. Although his parents weren’t religious, they sent him to a Jewish state school in their North London neighborhood. Bricks were sometimes tossed into the playground by local children bleating slurs.
His first knowledge of the Holocaust arrived early, at age 10 or 11, when he came across pictures of Kristallnacht, the Nazi-led pogroms of November 1938, in an old issue of National Geographic. Without understanding what he was looking at, he noticed his physical resemblance to the people in the photos — the ones on their knees, that is, scrubbing sidewalks and sweeping up debris. The expressions on the faces of the bystanders, some of whom seemed exhilarated by what they were seeing, others merely indifferent, left him in a state of bewildered alarm.
Glazer’s work often yields a similar response. His signature dread is present in its rawest form in some of the music videos he made at the start of his career. In the video for Radiohead’s “Karma Police,” a car pursues a fleeing man down a country road at dusk. The camera, which looks out from the driver’s seat over the car’s sharklike hood, seems to take a lingering delight in the man’s flailing limbs and heaving torso — and to tempt us into doing the same. The unnerving suggestion of collusion recurs throughout Glazer’s acclaimed, and utterly dissimilar, feature films: “Sexy Beast” (2000), a gangster movie-cum-surrealist nightmare; “Birth” (2004), a supernatural melodrama; and “Under the Skin” (2013), a work of sci-fi mumblecore with visionary intent. In the latter, Scarlett Johansson, disguised in a black wig, plays a dead-eyed alien who drives the streets of Glasgow in search of eligible men to take home with her. Once she gets them there, things turn deadly, and aggressively surreal. Glazer used hidden cameras and nonprofessional actors, most of whom had no idea they were participating in a film. (Chris Oddy, Glazer’s longtime production designer, described his freewheeling M.O. as one of “jazz filmmaking.”) It sounds like a Situationist prank and, in lesser hands, may well have become one. Instead, Glazer spun his materials into a kind of extraterrestrial docufiction, which bristles with the random poetry of street life.
Shortly after finishing that film, Glazer came across a newspaper preview of a forthcoming Martin Amis novel, “The Zone of Interest.” Another story about an enigmatic predator, the book is narrated in part by a fictional commandant of Auschwitz. The perspective intrigued him, and after reading the novel in galleys he optioned it. To call the film an adaptation would be putting it too strongly, however. Much of the novel, which centers on a love triangle involving the commandant, Paul Doll; his wife, Hannah; and one of Doll’s subordinates, struck Glazer as superfluous, including the love triangle itself. He seems to have been more interested in Amis’s source material than in what Amis did with it. The Dolls were based, loosely, on the Hösses, and Glazer’s first big call was to revert to the originals. Before starting work on the script, he spent two years researching them, during which he came across a staggering data point: The garden of their villa shared a wall with the camp. What feats of denial, he wondered, would it have taken to live in such proximity to the damned?
Glazer found a clue to the answer in the archives of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, which he’d hired a pair of researchers to scour for information on the Hösses, the more quotidian the better. According to the testimony of the family gardener, the couple had a blowout argument one day in the summer of 1943 after Rudolf learned he was about to be transferred to an SS office near Berlin. Hedwig, the gardener recalled, was apoplectic at the idea of leaving their rural hideaway. For the Hösses, who in their youth were members of an idealistic back-to-the-land movement, life in Auschwitz was something of an idyll, Glazer came to grasp. This stunning reality comes through in his imaginative reconstruction of their quarrel. “They’d have to drag me out of here,” Hedwig says after hearing the news. “Everything the führer said about how to live is how we do. Go east. Living space. This is our living space.”
In his book “Black Earth” (2015), the historian Timothy Snyder argues that the concept of living space, or lebensraum, carried two distinct but related meanings: on the one hand, “a living room, the dream of household comfort”; on the other, a “habitat, the realm that must be controlled for physical survival, inhabited perhaps temporarily by people characterized as not quite fully human.” Glazer read the book while working on his script, and his depiction of the Hösses as both creatures of household comfort and pioneers on a grand historical mission clearly chimes with Snyder’s thesis. It’s indicative of just how thoroughly he inhabits their moral universe that neither husband nor wife at any point betray the slightest hint of bad conscience. The idea that they lost sleep over what they were doing, Glazer said, is without foundation, as is the assumption that we are ethically superior to the Germans of the Nazi era. “If states were destroyed, local institutions corrupted and economic incentives directed toward murder,” Snyder writes, “few of us would behave well.”
Lanzmann’s “Shoah” has spawned a slender but vital countertradition in Holocaust cinema, one founded on the principle that formal rigor is inseparable from moral truth. You can see the principle at work in a recent film like “Son of Saul” (2015), by the Hungarian director Laszlo Nemes, which follows a day in the life of an Auschwitz sonderkommando, a member of the group of inmates who were forced to remove the corpses from the gas chambers. The film consists of smothering close-ups of the lead actor, Geza Rohrig. The horrors of the camp remain either out of focus or outside the frame: We read them off Rohrig’s reactions, or more often, his lack of reaction.
The influence of “Shoah” is also palpable in “The Zone of Interest,” which makes a similar formal choice: to keep the camera on the civilian side of the wall. “I don’t think they should be represented,” Glazer said of the film’s unpictured atrocities. “I don’t think they can be represented.” The idea of simulating violence (“extras in striped pajamas being beaten”) struck him not only as distasteful (“and then the extra is there later in the catering tent, eating his apple and custard”) but also as redundant. Forty-five years after NBC’s “Holocaust,” images of the camps have become a cheapened visual currency. The stifling sound design, by Johnnie Burn — an aural froth of gunshots, dog barks and human shouts and screams — is all we need to visualize the horror for ourselves.
Glazer shot most of the film in summer 2021. Drawing on extensive research, Oddy spent the previous few months meticulously converting a derelict home just beyond the camp’s perimeter wall into a replica of the Höss house. (The actual house, a few doors down, which would have been Glazer’s first choice, has been a private residence almost since the end of the war.) Oddy began planting the garden, previously a stretch of wasteland, in early April, so that everything flowered in time for the shoot. When Friedel, Hüller and the rest of the cast and crew arrived, they were taken aback. “It was like walking into 1943,” one of them told me.
The goal was an immersive naturalism, and Glazer went to great lengths pursuing it. By using multiple stationary cameras running simultaneously throughout the house, he gave his actors an extraordinary freedom to improvise; they were often unaware if the cameras were even rolling. Glazer remained outside, holed up in a shipping container decked out with monitors. “Cinema is at odds with atrocity,” he said, explaining his approach. “As soon as you put a camera on someone, as soon as you light them, or make a decision about what lens to use, you’re glamorizing them.” Lukasz Zal, his cinematographer, arrived early to the shoot and made some initial studies of the house. Glazer told him they were “too beautiful.” He wanted the images to seem “authorless.”
Friedel’s first major role came in 2009, when he appeared in “The White Ribbon,” Michael Haneke’s haunting film about a German village on the eve of World War I. He told me that the two directors could not be less alike. “Haneke knows everything from the beginning,” he said. “When I read the script of ‘The White Ribbon,’ I thought, This is perfect. The shooting process was to shoot the script, and there were no surprises.” Glazer, by contrast, is more open to chance. “He wasn’t thinking, OK, this is a great script, let’s do it,” Friedel went on. “He was searching every moment. He was always asking, Is there something I don’t know?”
Often there was. The moment when Rudolf breaks the news to Hedwig that he is being transferred away from Auschwitz comes during a casual get-together in the Höss garden. Glazer’s open-ended instruction to the supporting cast of friends and family was simply, “Have a party.” For the next three hours, they mingled on the lawn and splashed in the pool as Friedel and Hüller moved among them, trying out their lines. Occasionally Glazer stepped in to offer notes, but mostly he allowed them to improvise and experiment. “It’s like children playing,” Friedel said of the director’s hands-off approach. “You forget where you are and just be in the moment.”
So, too, does the audience. Little happens in the film, dramatically speaking. Instead of exposition, conflict and rising action, its rhythms are those of lived domesticity. In a succession of medium-wide shots, which resemble surveillance footage and encourage us to view the Hösses less as characters than as human case studies, we see the family go about its daily business. Here they are gathered around the dinner table. Here they are lounging in the garden. At moments — or rather, for extended stretches — these vignettes sail close to the wind of sheer tedium, but there is method in the drabness. Rather than taking you out of yourself, as most movies do, “The Zone of Interest” provokes a disquieting self-awareness. As the minutes ticked by and little of note occurred, I found myself asking the unwholesome question: When are we going to see behind the wall?
By staging acts of obscene cruelty — a pair of sociopaths breaking a man’s leg with a golf club as his son looks on, a married couple murdering their own daughter before themselves committing suicide — Haneke’s films seek to shock us into an awareness of our conditioned appetite for such spectacles. In “The Zone of Interest,” which Friedel described as a kind of spiritual sequel to “The White Ribbon,” Glazer uses different means to pursue a similar end: It’s by withholding violence that he shocks us into recognizing just how much it fascinates us. The effect, at least on me, was a shaming apprehension of complicity. As you watch the film, you slowly come to realize what Glazer is suggesting: that in its ways, the Höss house, where ordinary life goes unconscionably on, is as much a scene of horror as the camp itself. Unlike the abjection unfolding “over there,” this kind of contented obliviousness has rarely been portrayed onscreen. The average viewer is unlikely to see himself in the figure of a death-camp C.E.O., but a family that sleepwalks through their own lives, heedless of the suffering that surrounds them, may feel closer to home. To a greater or lesser extent, we all ignore and deny the pain of others, including — perhaps especially — when that pain is inflicted by our own governments on designated enemies.
As “The Zone of Interest” receives its theatrical release, the mass murder of Jews is back in the headlines, and many seem indifferent, if not outright thrilled. Glazer was revulsed by Hamas’s killing spree in southern Israel on Oct. 7, which left a body count of roughly 1,200, according to Israeli authorities, including at least one Holocaust survivor; some 240 hostages were also taken. “It makes everything else seem so frivolous by comparison,” he said of the attack a few days later, from his home in central London. “I’ve lost interest in the film and everything surrounding it.”
At the time, he was reluctant to say more, but when we corresponded in late November, he expressed his growing anger at the way that Israel was invoking the specter of the Holocaust to explain what happened and to justify its response. Now in its third month, Israel’s retaliatory assault on Gaza — “a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness,” in the words of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — has so far killed over 18,000 people, most of them civilians, according to local health officials. That assault, accompanied by exterminationist rhetoric — “We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly,” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said, while advocating for electricity, food, water and fuel to be cut off from Gaza — has itself drawn comparisons to earlier campaigns of mass violence.
To identify as victims, in Rose’s words, “turns us into strangers to ourselves as moral agents and social actors.” A vacuum of self-knowledge is soon filled by the desire for violent revenge, especially if you’re convinced your enemies are “counterhuman,” in Levi’s term. By inviting us to consider our resemblance to the culprits, “The Zone of Interest” is an attempt to short-circuit these ingrained responses and to open up space for self-criticism and doubt. Though it’s unlikely to have the same effect on history as “Holocaust” and “Schindler’s List,” it might chip away at the crude binary thinking — the children of light versus the children of darkness, and so on — that those movies have instilled in our culture. “It isn’t a partisan film,” Glazer told me. “It’s about all of us.”
Unlike “Schindler’s List,” which leaves us, Rose says, “piously joining the survivors putting stones on Schindler’s grave in Israel,” “The Zone of Interest” is short on consolation. Though Höss was convicted of war crimes in 1947 and hanged at Auschwitz later the same year, the film ends in early 1944, as he learns he’s being transferred back to the camp and reunited with his family, who had remained there. It is a moment of personal vindication. “I’m pleased as punch,” he tells Hedwig on a long-distance call. In his final months in charge, the deadliest in the camp’s existence, he oversaw the murder of nearly 400,000 Hungarian Jews. The action was named Operation Höss in his honor.
Before the film ends, though, we are finally shown behind the wall. In a disorienting sequence, Glazer cuts to present-day Auschwitz, where we see cleaning ladies at work in the former gas chambers and crematories. Here, at last, are the victims, or what remains of them: piles of shoes and suitcases displayed behind glass panels, a corridor hung with black-and-white mug shots. Is this a bravura instance of jazz filmmaking, an unexpected formal flourish designed to catch the audience off guard? Or is it something humbler than that, an admission of artistic defeat? Glazer has taken great pains to construct an airtight historical realism, but in the end he’s reduced to shooting photos of the dead, to showing us an image of an image. Perhaps, above all, this interpolated footage should be read as a warning. Be vigilant, it seems to say: The door of history can swing open any moment.
During Glazer’s childhood, the Holocaust was rarely discussed. A few years ago, when he first mentioned to his father that he was making a film about Auschwitz, he was met with a blunt response.
“What are you doing that for?” his father asked. “Let it rot.”
“It’s not rotting,” Glazer replied. “It’s not even dead. Read the paper. It’s in the world.”
How Do You Make a Movie About the Holocaust? : With “The Zone of Interest,” Jonathan Glazer is just the latest director to confront the problem.
By Giles Harvey. The New York Times, December. 19, 2023
The
British director’s acclaimed, audacious new film about the family life of
Auschwitz’s commandant was 10 years in the making. He explains how it was made
– and the importance of finding light in the darkness
Jonathan Glazer grew up in Hadley Wood, close to Barnet on the northern outskirts of London, where his family were part of a thriving Jewish community. “There were all these fantastic characters, who were in and out of my house when I was a little boy,” he says. “Many of them were East End Jews who had moved to the suburbs for a better quality of life, not super-intellectual people, but incredible entertainers – vaudeville musicians, writers and the like. As a child, I loved and absorbed the richness of that culture.”
The Holocaust, he says, was never openly talked about in his home, but “it was always present”. When his late father found out years ago that he was making a film about Rudolf Höss, the Nazi commandant of Auschwitz, his reaction was anger mixed with dismay. “He said: ‘I don’t know what you’re doing this for,’” recalls Glazer, “‘Why are you digging it up? Let it rot.’ Those were the three words he used. His feeling was very much that it was gone, that it was in the past. I remember saying to him: ‘I really wish I could let it rot, but, no, Dad, it’s not in the past.’”
It took Glazer almost 10 years to make The Zone of Interest (the characteristically neutral term used by the Nazis to describe the immediate area around the concentration camp), which will be released in UK cinemas in early February and which won the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes film festival. During that time, there must have been moments when his father’s words echoed in his head, when the subject seemed so daunting that giving up and letting it rot may have seemed like the best option.
“I had a very strange relationship with the project right from the off,” he says, as we chat over coffee in a London hotel. “This was the road I was going down and I couldn’t stop myself going down it, but at the same time I was ready to pull back from it at any moment. I almost wanted to hit a brick wall so I could turn around and say: ‘You know what? I tried and I can’t do it.’ I was almost willing that to happen.”
Jonathan Glazer grew up in Hadley Wood, close to Barnet on the northern outskirts of London, where his family were part of a thriving Jewish community. “There were all these fantastic characters, who were in and out of my house when I was a little boy,” he says. “Many of them were East End Jews who had moved to the suburbs for a better quality of life, not super-intellectual people, but incredible entertainers – vaudeville musicians, writers and the like. As a child, I loved and absorbed the richness of that culture.”
The Holocaust, he says, was never openly talked about in his home, but “it was always present”. When his late father found out years ago that he was making a film about Rudolf Höss, the Nazi commandant of Auschwitz, his reaction was anger mixed with dismay. “He said: ‘I don’t know what you’re doing this for,’” recalls Glazer, “‘Why are you digging it up? Let it rot.’ Those were the three words he used. His feeling was very much that it was gone, that it was in the past. I remember saying to him: ‘I really wish I could let it rot, but, no, Dad, it’s not in the past.’”
It took Glazer almost 10 years to make The Zone of Interest (the characteristically neutral term used by the Nazis to describe the immediate area around the concentration camp), which will be released in UK cinemas in early February and which won the Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes film festival. During that time, there must have been moments when his father’s words echoed in his head, when the subject seemed so daunting that giving up and letting it rot may have seemed like the best option.
“I had a very strange relationship with the project right from the off,” he says, as we chat over coffee in a London hotel. “This was the road I was going down and I couldn’t stop myself going down it, but at the same time I was ready to pull back from it at any moment. I almost wanted to hit a brick wall so I could turn around and say: ‘You know what? I tried and I can’t do it.’ I was almost willing that to happen.”
The end result is an audacious film, formally experimental and with an almost clinically detached point of view. Mainly shot on hidden cameras, it concentrates on the domestic life of the Höss family (Rudolf, his wife, Hedwig, and their five children), whose house stood just outside the perimeter of the concentration camp, the horror within suggested in glimpses of smoking chimneys but, more disturbingly, through an almost constant ambient soundscape of industrial noise and human shouts and cries. It is an unsettling film: a study in extreme cognitive dissonance. It stayed with me for weeks after I watched it, so much so that I attended another screening to try to decipher its uneasy merging of almost clinical observation and moments of abrupt and jarring experimentalism – the screen turns blood red at one point. On both occasions, it fulfilled Glazer’s aim “to make it a narrative that you, the viewer, complete, that you are involved in and ask questions of”.
It was shot on location at Auschwitz, where, having gained permission from the trustees of the site’s museum, Glazer’s team took over a vacant house just outside the perimeter of the camp and, using archive photographs and survivors’ testimonies, meticulously recreated the villa that the Höss family lived in for almost four years. Unlike other films about the Holocaust, it focuses on the perpetrators rather than the victims, the camera never straying beyond the wall that separates the commandant’s garden from the camp itself.
Instead, under Glazer’s dispassionate directorial gaze, we witness the myriad ways that the couple’s domestic life adhered to a kind of ordered normality in the literal shadow of Auschwitz’s smoking chimneys. While he oversees the clinical business of mass extermination, she entertains friends, tends to her garden and is waited on by local women who carry out domestic chores at her bidding. In the evenings, he reads bedtime stories to his children and, before he retires to bed himself, makes sure all the house lights are turned off and the doors locked. Together they celebrate birthdays, hold picnics by the garden pool and, across separate beds, reminisce about their past and plan for their future. “To acknowledge the couple as human beings,” says Glazer, shaking his head, “was a big part of the awfulness of this entire journey of the film, but I kept thinking that, if we could do so, we would maybe see ourselves in them. For me, this is not a film about the past. It’s trying to be about now, and about us and our similarity to the perpetrators, not our similarity to the victims.”
He says it is not so much about examining Nazi ideology as something deeper within humanity. “You have to get to a point where you understand [the ideology] to some extent in order to be able to write it, but I was really interested in making a film that went underneath that to the primordial bottom of it all, which I felt was the thing in us that drives it all, the capacity for violence that we all have.”
Since the release of his debut feature, the stylishly edgy British crime thriller Sexy Beast in 2000, Glazer has gained a reputation as the most formally ambitious and obsessively single-minded British director of his generation. He has cited Stanley Kubrick as an influence and said that he feels closer to the Russian and Italian cinema traditions than to the British one. Having studied theatre design at college, his route into film-making came through directing a series of acclaimed advertising campaigns in the 1990s, including the famous Guinness surfer ad in which white horses emerge out of rolling waves, as well as ambitious pop promo videos for the likes of Radiohead and Massive Attack.
In the 23 years since Sexy Beast, he has made just three films (including this new one), each one more ambitious in terms of its subject matter, more formally complex, and more painfully protracted in its journey from idea to fruition. His second feature, Birth (2004), which starred Nicole Kidman as a grieving wife in thrall to a young boy who convinces her he is the reincarnation of her dead husband, took four years to make. Another nine passed before the release of Under the Skin (2013), a noirish sci-fi story based on a Michel Faber novel and starring Scarlett Johansson as a beautiful alien who stalks Scotland in search of impressionable men whom she seduces and then submerges in an amniotic netherworld.
For that film, Glazer hired non-actors for the supporting roles and used hidden cameras to shoot several scenes in which Johansson’s character approaches young men on the street. Its unsettling atmosphere was heightened by disorienting sound design by Johnnie Burn, and an insistently ominous score by the young experimental musician Mica Levi, both of whom have worked closely with Glazer on The Zone of Interest. When I ask Burn about the level of sustained commitment it takes to work on a Jonathan Glazer movie, he says: “Under the Skin almost killed me. I was so sick from overwork by the end of filming from intense 10-hour shifts and lack of sleep. Once you start working with Jonathan, you begin thinking about the film the way that he does. It’s all-consuming.”
In person, Glazer, who, lives in Camden, north London, with his wife and three children, comes across as both affable and quietly intense. When I ask him if, like Kubrick, he is utterly obsessive in his approach to film-making, he answers without hesitation: “Yes, I am.” He first started thinking about The Zone of Interest when he read Martin Amis’s novel of the same name not long after its publication in 2014. Having secured the rights with his producer, Jim Wilson, the pair began what would become several years of intense and meticulous pre-production preparation. “Our reading actually took us away from the book and deep into Amis’s primary sources,” he says, “The more fragments of information we uncovered about Rudolf and Hedwig Höss in the Auschwitz archives, the more I realised that they were working-class people who were upwardly mobile. They aspired to become a bourgeois family in the way that many of us do today. That was what was so grotesque and striking about them – how familiar they were to us.”
Played by German actors Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller, the couple are the embodiment of the Jewish writer Primo Levi’s insistence that it is ordinary people, rather than monsters, who are capable of committing atrocity. “Monsters exist,” wrote Levi, a Holocaust survivor, “but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”
The couple’s ordinariness is conveyed in a series of scenes that were sometimes scripted, sometimes improvised and filmed on small, static cameras concealed throughout the house and garden. The actors were not aware of exactly where the cameras were positioned. Glazer and his crew remained off-set throughout, watching the results on a bank of screens in a separate building. The result is a cinema of ultra-naturalistic candid surveillance that Glazer jokingly describes as “like Big Brother in the Nazi house”.
His aim, he says, was to make the film appear “un-authored”. Given that he is the director and it is his vision that we are watching, I ask him if it is possible to achieve a detached point of view. “Well, no. You can’t retreat to that point, although I wish you could. But the ambition is there. The reason that I was not on set was because I wanted to stand back from the characters and look at them anthropologically. I wasn’t interested in their dramas. I just wanted to watch them in as unimpeded a way as possible to see how they behaved and acted, to see who they were.”
As Glazer acknowledges, the decision to take on the lead roles was a huge one for the two actors, given the subject matter and the fact that that it was shot, as he puts it, “on the soil of Auschwitz”, and required them “to portray people who could have been their grandparents”. Friedel, who played the schoolteacher in Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, a complex allegory about the roots of Nazi ideology, portrays Rudolf Höss as an essentially unknowable individual given to ruminative silences and long stares off into the distance, during which you wonder what exactly he is thinking about.
Hüller, who is receiving rave reviews for her role in Justine Triet’s complex courtroom drama, Anatomy of a Fall, inhabits the role of Hedwig so completely that it was disorienting to see her take the stage a few weeks ago after a New York film festival screening looking glamorous in a geometric designer suit. There, she spoke frankly about her initial revulsion on discovering the film’s subject. “I have to say, it made me feel sick. To me, it was a shock. I never planned to be involved in this kind of narrative or to portray someone like Hedwig Höss.”
It took Hüller, whose background is in leftwing German theatre, a full year to commit to the film, but she is the most compelling presence in it: a ruthlessly narcissistic individual entirely untroubled by conscience and so lacking in empathy or self-awareness that she poses before her bedroom mirror in a fur coat and lipstick taken from a Jewish prisoner and boasts laughingly to her mother: “Rudi calls me the Queen of Auschwitz.” When she receives the news that he is to be transferred to oversee a death factory elsewhere, she becomes frantic with anger at the thought of leaving, shouting: “You can’t do this to me! We’re living as we dreamed we would.”
Hedwig is constantly busy, whether ordering her minions about or fretting about her husband’s status in the ever-shifting loyalties of the Reich’s inner circle. When writing the part, Glazer says, he was constantly thinking of the philosopher Hannah Arendt’s description of the Nazis as essentially non-thinking. “There was the sense that nothing should stop and no one should stop,” he says. “Everyone had to be occupied with activity all the time, because if you stop, you think. And, if you think, you reflect. With Hedwig, there is no reflection, no consideration at all for anything or anyone except herself. She is constantly, relentlessly busy in order not to think.”
The horror that exists beyond her garden wall is suggested though myriad small but telling visual details: a Polish worker washes Rudolf Höss’s leather boots under a tap and the water runs red; a garden labourer spreads ashes from the camp over the soil of Hedwig Höss’s lovingly tended flower beds; the couple’s daughter sleepwalks. At one point, their eldest son bullies his younger brother, locking him in the greenhouse and mimicking the hiss of gas. Even the family dog seems on high alert at all times, racing through the garden and sniffing at the earth beneath the wall.
When he first visited Auschwitz, Glazer went to the Hösses’ house and, to his surprise, found it inhabited by a Polish family who had lived there since the end of the war. “I saw the remnants of the garden, and its proximity to the camp, and the wall, and it was chilling,” he says quietly. “Afterwards I entered the camp and looked at the wall from the other side, trying to imagine what the prisoners must have heard. There is no doubt that they would have heard happiness and gaiety as the Höss children laughed and splashed around in the pool. The film became about the proximity of the horror and the happiness, how one person’s paradise is another’s hell.”
In a film haunted by absences, the suffering of the victims is powerfully evoked by Burn’s soundscape: the constant hum of machinery, the barked orders of SS guards and the cries and screams of prisoners herded towards the gas chambers. “There are, in effect, two films,” elaborates Glazer. “The one you see, and the one you hear, and the second is just as important as the first, arguably more so. We already know the imagery of the camps from actual archive footage. There is no need to attempt to recreate it, but I felt that if we could hear it, we could somehow see it in our heads.”
To this end, Burn spent a year researching and amassing a vast sound archive. “It was essentially a document of every single sound that would have emanated from the camp,” which, he says “was a place of heavy industry as well as human suffering.” The task was “incredibly difficult”. “I remember saying to my wife after just a few weeks that it was starting to get to me. And, even though you don’t ever see the horror, it is by far the most violent film I have ever worked on.”
The Zone of Interest begins disorientingly with two minutes of darkness as Levi’s ascending electronic overture fills the cinema then retreats slowly to the screen, where the sound of wild songbirds accompanies a long shot of the Höss family picnicking in bright sunshine by the shores of a Polish lake. “The music, like the dark screen, is a way of preparing you for what follows as you enter another reality,” Levi tells me. “It slowly descends in pitch as it takes you down into the story. All through the film, the music is taking you to a place below or beyond what you are seeing, almost a nowhere place beyond logical comprehension.”
The film’s release was foreshadowed by horror. The New York screening I attended was held just days after the Hamas attack on Israel on 7 October in which 1,200 people were killed and 240 hostages taken. One could sense a feeling of uncertain anticipation as the film began and a palpable nervousness emanating from the stage in the short Q&A hosted by the film festival curator that followed the screening. I spoke to Glazer a week later when the Israeli assault on Gaza that, as I write, has claimed 15,000 lives, was in its early stages. It is, I suggest, a heightened moment in which to release the film. He nods. “Yes, and it’s weighing on all of us. The sickening thing about this film is it’s timely and it’s always going to be timely until we can somehow evolve out of this cycle of violence that we perpetuate as human beings. And when will that happen? Not in our lifetime. Right now, it seems to be reversing and I’m mindful of that, too, in terms of the film and its complexity.”
I ask Glazer if he is prepared for a degree of negative criticism centring on the ethics of holocaust representation? “I am prepared, yes, but I’m also interested to hear what the arguments are. I believe you absolutely should tackle the subject, but the essential question is not should you do it, but how? Personally, I think the story has to be told and retold and, to do so, you have to find new paradigms to retell it, to restate it generation after generation particularly as the survivors diminish in numbers and it shifts from living memory and becomes history.”
The Zone of Interest’s single moments of hope occur at night and were shot on a thermal imaging camera of the kind used by the conceptual photographer Richard Mosse for his ambitious refugee film, Incoming. A young woman, rendered almost ghostlike by the camera, clandestinely moves through a construction site beneath a railway that runs into the camp. She places apples in the earth for the starving prisoners on work duty to find the following day. While doing so, she finds a scroll of music notation in a tin buried in the earth.
The scene came about as a result of Glazer meeting a 90-year-old woman called Alexandria, who had worked for the Polish resistance when she was just 12. She recounted how she had cycled to the camp to leave apples, and how she had found the mysterious piece of written music, which, it turned out, had been composed by an Auschwitz prisoner called Thomas Wolf, who survived the war. “She lived in the house we shot in,” says Glazer. “It was her bike we used, and the dress the actor wears was her dress. Sadly, she died a few weeks after we spoke.”
He pauses for a long moment. “That small act of resistance, the simple, almost holy act of leaving food, is crucial because it is the one point of light. I really thought I couldn’t make the film at that point. I kept ringing my producer, Jim, and saying: ‘I’m getting out. I can’t do this. It’s just too dark.’ It felt impossible to just show the utter darkness, so I was looking for the light somewhere and I found it in her. She is the force for good.”
I ask Glazer what made him persevere with the project each time he felt the urge to give up and walk away. “I don’t know for sure. My heritage, maybe. Inter-generational trauma. Fear. Anger. All of that stuff. Most Jewish families have a history with the event because it was so enormous. Just looking through the archives of Auschwitz and going though my family names, I discovered there are a lot of them. So, I think it’s just in you.”
He pauses again. “The reason I made this film is to try to restate our close proximity to this terrible event that we think of as in the past. For me, it is not ever in the past, and right now, I think something in me is aware – and fearful – that these things are on the rise again with the growth of rightwing populism everywhere. The road that so many people took is a few steps away. It is always just a few steps away.”
Jonathan Glazer on his holocaust film The Zone of Interest: ‘This is not about the past, it’s about now’. By Sean O’Hagan. The Guardian, December 10, 2023.
With
only his fourth feature in more than two decades, Jonathan Glazer explores the
banality of evil in The Zone Of Interest, set right at the edge of the
Auschwitz concentration camp. Screen reports on what propelled him to tell this
story.
As both Jewish and a visual artist, Jonathan Glazer had long considered tackling the Holocaust in his work. But even now, having written and directed The Zone Of Interest — a film set in Auschwitz, home to the most infamous extermination camp of all where more than 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, were murdered by the Nazis in the Second World War — Glazer is still struggling to understand his interest in such bleak subject matter.
“I genuinely don’t know why it’s in me,” the UK writer/director reflects, the morning after The Zone Of Interest received its UK premiere at the BFI London Film Festival. “I’ve thought about it, a lot, since I started making the film. People said to me, ‘Why do you want to spend time with this imagery and this darkness?’ I’m still processing that. I’m Jewish and it’s sort of in you anyway. I don’t know why you take something on, really. I started to feel, was there something I could contribute, a corner that hadn’t been explored? I was already thinking about the perpetrator perspective but couldn’t figure out how.”
Then, in 2014, Glazer read Martin Amis’s recently published The Zone Of Interest, which told a fictionalised account of a camp commandant and his family. (The term ‘zone of interest’ was used by the Nazis to describe the 40-square kilometres surrounding Auschwitz in German-annexed Poland.) “Amis had done it in a way I hadn’t come across, and it became the kernel of it,” he says. “[But] I didn’t read the book and think, ‘I want to make that.’ I also didn’t read the book and think, ‘I didn’t want to make that.’”
Together with his longtime producer Jim Wilson, Glazer optioned Amis’s novel using their own funds. “We try not to connect ourselves to anything or anyone else at that stage, because we want to stay completely free with it, because I don’t know what it’s going to end up being,” says Glazer, who made his name in the 1990s with ingenious music videos — his promo for Jamiroquai’s ‘Virtual Insanity’ won video of the year at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards — and stylish commercials (Guinness, Levi’s), before moving into features with 2000’s gangster thriller Sexy Beast. “It may end up being a 10-minute film. It may end up being a sound installation.”
Initial steps
Glazer began by making the first of many trips to Auschwitz and researching the archives, quickly realising that Amis had based the book on the camp’s commandant Rudolf Höss and his family, who lived onsite. “It became more and more fascinating how grotesquely familiar these people were, so I veered towards the history of it.”
At Auschwitz, Glazer visited the Höss family home, which he would later recreate on film, 50 metres from the real thing. “Saw the garden, saw the wall that divided the garden from the camp, then started looking at these pictures he had taken of his family in their golden summer days together, with a pool and everything.”
The photos were key. “I realised we were going to put ourselves on the perpetrator side of the wall and tell a story from there. And we were going to hear the atrocities being committed in the camp, but not see them.” But Glazer still did not have a story to tell. “I knew that, domestically, there’d be something so interesting about nothing going on; the more nothing it was, the better it was. Nonetheless, I needed something to propel on some level.”
Glazer and Wilson commissioned two archivists to search for any mention of the Höss family, from people who had worked in their house or camp survivors. “There were three lines here, a paragraph there, it was extraordinary every time we received this stuff,” he says. In the testimony of Stanislav Dubel — a gardener who was present the day Höss told his wife, Hedwig, he was being transferred to another camp and his family would have to leave with him — Glazer learned how Hedwig “hit the roof”. She refused to leave, saying she would have to be dragged out of Auschwitz. “That felt like that was going to be the axiom of it all,” he explains. “The idea that her home life, her bliss, her garden, her house, was just too wonderful to give up. The disassociation was so extraordinary.”
Once Glazer finished writing his script, he and Wilson approached several interested financiers, eventually going with A24, which had distributed their previous film Under The Skin in the US, and will release The Zone Of Interest in both the US and UK/Ireland; the UK’s Film4, which had financed Sexy Beast as well as Under The Skin; and the British Film Institute.
“It wasn’t necessarily the most money, but it felt like the right money,” notes Glazer. “We went with the people we knew, and people who knew us. I felt they would trust me enough to let me go on this journey until I got to a point where I could give them something that made sense of their trust. Because the way I film is very much a gathering of stuff. I don’t have all the answers until I finish. And even then, there are many questions.”
As both Jewish and a visual artist, Jonathan Glazer had long considered tackling the Holocaust in his work. But even now, having written and directed The Zone Of Interest — a film set in Auschwitz, home to the most infamous extermination camp of all where more than 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, were murdered by the Nazis in the Second World War — Glazer is still struggling to understand his interest in such bleak subject matter.
“I genuinely don’t know why it’s in me,” the UK writer/director reflects, the morning after The Zone Of Interest received its UK premiere at the BFI London Film Festival. “I’ve thought about it, a lot, since I started making the film. People said to me, ‘Why do you want to spend time with this imagery and this darkness?’ I’m still processing that. I’m Jewish and it’s sort of in you anyway. I don’t know why you take something on, really. I started to feel, was there something I could contribute, a corner that hadn’t been explored? I was already thinking about the perpetrator perspective but couldn’t figure out how.”
Then, in 2014, Glazer read Martin Amis’s recently published The Zone Of Interest, which told a fictionalised account of a camp commandant and his family. (The term ‘zone of interest’ was used by the Nazis to describe the 40-square kilometres surrounding Auschwitz in German-annexed Poland.) “Amis had done it in a way I hadn’t come across, and it became the kernel of it,” he says. “[But] I didn’t read the book and think, ‘I want to make that.’ I also didn’t read the book and think, ‘I didn’t want to make that.’”
Together with his longtime producer Jim Wilson, Glazer optioned Amis’s novel using their own funds. “We try not to connect ourselves to anything or anyone else at that stage, because we want to stay completely free with it, because I don’t know what it’s going to end up being,” says Glazer, who made his name in the 1990s with ingenious music videos — his promo for Jamiroquai’s ‘Virtual Insanity’ won video of the year at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards — and stylish commercials (Guinness, Levi’s), before moving into features with 2000’s gangster thriller Sexy Beast. “It may end up being a 10-minute film. It may end up being a sound installation.”
Initial steps
Glazer began by making the first of many trips to Auschwitz and researching the archives, quickly realising that Amis had based the book on the camp’s commandant Rudolf Höss and his family, who lived onsite. “It became more and more fascinating how grotesquely familiar these people were, so I veered towards the history of it.”
At Auschwitz, Glazer visited the Höss family home, which he would later recreate on film, 50 metres from the real thing. “Saw the garden, saw the wall that divided the garden from the camp, then started looking at these pictures he had taken of his family in their golden summer days together, with a pool and everything.”
The photos were key. “I realised we were going to put ourselves on the perpetrator side of the wall and tell a story from there. And we were going to hear the atrocities being committed in the camp, but not see them.” But Glazer still did not have a story to tell. “I knew that, domestically, there’d be something so interesting about nothing going on; the more nothing it was, the better it was. Nonetheless, I needed something to propel on some level.”
Glazer and Wilson commissioned two archivists to search for any mention of the Höss family, from people who had worked in their house or camp survivors. “There were three lines here, a paragraph there, it was extraordinary every time we received this stuff,” he says. In the testimony of Stanislav Dubel — a gardener who was present the day Höss told his wife, Hedwig, he was being transferred to another camp and his family would have to leave with him — Glazer learned how Hedwig “hit the roof”. She refused to leave, saying she would have to be dragged out of Auschwitz. “That felt like that was going to be the axiom of it all,” he explains. “The idea that her home life, her bliss, her garden, her house, was just too wonderful to give up. The disassociation was so extraordinary.”
Once Glazer finished writing his script, he and Wilson approached several interested financiers, eventually going with A24, which had distributed their previous film Under The Skin in the US, and will release The Zone Of Interest in both the US and UK/Ireland; the UK’s Film4, which had financed Sexy Beast as well as Under The Skin; and the British Film Institute.
“It wasn’t necessarily the most money, but it felt like the right money,” notes Glazer. “We went with the people we knew, and people who knew us. I felt they would trust me enough to let me go on this journey until I got to a point where I could give them something that made sense of their trust. Because the way I film is very much a gathering of stuff. I don’t have all the answers until I finish. And even then, there are many questions.”
The shoot
The production filmed for 55 days across 18 months at Auschwitz (aka Oswiecim in Polish), in both summer and winter months. “It was awful,” says Glazer of filming at such an emotionally charged location. “There were days when you’re absolutely flattened by it, others where you just do your job. Where do I put the camera? Does that dress look good? You busy yourself with practice.
“I didn’t take this on lightly,” he continues. “I’m still in its grip. It’s still a very palpable and profound set of feelings I am uneasy with, but I tried to do everything I could to make a film that would remind us of our capacity for violence, how similar the perpetrator is to us, and how frightening that is. At the same time, honouring the memory of the people who perished there.”
Glazer’s directing approach was “to stand back and look at their actions, anthropologically, factually”. To achieve this, he and Polish cinematographer Lukasz Zal positioned up to 10 cameras inside and outside production designer Chris Oddy’s reconstruction of the Höss house and garden. They then filmed the actors — who included Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller as Rudolf and Hedwig — in long, unbroken takes, to capture a reality rather than create drama, often shooting several scenes at once, which he dubbed “Big Brother in the Nazi house”.
“I wanted to remove as much of the artifice of filmmaking as possible,” says Glazer. “I wanted to put the viewer in the house with these people in real time; to feel this was happening now. That we were in the present tense. And it wasn’t fetishised in the way it’s very easy to do with the tools of cinema — close-ups and beautiful lighting. So we’d block very carefully, work out where those 10 cameras could go, and all the microphones.”
Once action was called, he would watch the scenes play out on a bank of monitors housed in a separate building. “I let them get on with it, then go in, talk to whoever I needed to talk to, adjust whatever we needed to adjust, retreat. Do the next. The great thing about filming this way is they’re not playing to any one camera, so there’s no self-consciousness, no performance, it’s just an existence,” says Glazer, who did something similar with the driving scenes in Under The Skin, in which Scarlett Johansson’s alien rode around Glasgow in a van fitted out with hidden cameras, picking up real people. “I didn’t want to dramatise. I was making every effort to avoid drama.”
But for a director as exacting as Glazer, it was a method that could be frustrating. “You would have this incredible scene where everything’s working and it’s miraculous, then something goes wrong and you would have to do it again,” he admits. “You couldn’t use the first part that went brilliantly because it’s trapped in the same real time as the rest of it that didn’t, because the light’s different, the movement’s different.”
Language barrier
Filming was complicated further by the fact his actors spoke German, and Glazer did not. “I couldn’t try to recreate this as accurately as possible and have English or American actors play these roles, so they had to be German. I started trying to learn German early on and failed miserably. To understand the nuance of a language, it must be your language, and I knew I could never get to that point.”
It helped that most of his cast spoke English. “So communication with them was no problem,” he says. “My first, naive thought was as long as they stay true to the script, and I’ve got my translator standing next to me to give me a thumbs up or thumbs down, we’ll be fine. But, within an hour, they were improvising. And I was encouraging them. We deviated from the script very quickly. When we started editing, I had to pick through it all with my editor and sound editor to see what I’d got.”
For Glazer, sound is as important as the visuals. With The Zone Of Interest, there is the film that is seen, and the film that is heard.
“They are different, intentionally,” he says. “The foreground film, the one we see, is largely uneventful, largely undramatic. But it is imbued by everything you hear. And what you hear bears down on every frame. The atrocities committed in the camps are perpetual, so there’s no quiet moment. There are certain scenes which are all about the sound. In other scenes the sound is ambient. A writer used the term ‘ambient genocide’, which I thought was very appropriate to this and what we protect ourselves from, what we disassociate from, to have our comfortable lives. The sound was a huge part, the sound is the other film, and, arguably, the film, for me.”
The Zone Of Interest — which won the grand prix at Cannes, and is the UK’s submission for the best international feature Oscar — took Glazer almost nine years to make, and is only his fourth feature in 23 years. “I can’t do it casually,” he explains of his slow and measured approach to filmmaking. “I have to be compelled to do it. There must be something in it that’s driving me forward. And often I’m not even sure what that is.
“I also don’t think I would be good at doing something I didn’t feel that way about,” he adds. “I genuinely don’t know where I would put the camera, or what I would say to the actor, or how I would put it together. To some extent I could do it, but I wouldn’t be engaged enough to do a good job. So, I guess I’m just on my path, whatever that is.”
Jonathan Glazer on ‘The Zone Of Interest’: "I wanted to remove the artifice of filmmaking". By Mark Salisbury. Screen Daily, November 27, 2023.
In a
way, The Zone of Interest has been a lifetime in the making for Jonathan
Glazer. Descended from Bessarabia Jews who fled the Kishinev pogrom and settled
in the U.K., the filmmaker has said the subject matter was "something that
I was always going to take on at some point in my life."
His journey on The Zone of Interest began in earnest a decade ago, once Glazer had completed Under the Skin in 2013. At the time, a preview of Martin Amis' novel of the same name, about a Nazi officer who falls in love with the Auschwitz commandant's wife, was published in a magazine, and the unconventional perspective on the Holocaust spoke to Glazer. The British filmmaker shared the book with his producer, James Wilson, and they optioned it that same year.
"He's always trying to be in a place that feels unprecedented, a place that feels fresh and not like it's repeating something that's been done," Wilson illuminates. "With this one in particular, you're talking about a subject matter where there is a pantheon of films and books, art of all sorts. But certainly films, from Schindler's List to Son of Saul to Night and Fog and The Pianist and Sophie's Choice — all shades of Holocaust films that have cast a giant shadow. And so, what to do in that? We didn't want to restage things that had been done in other films, so there was a very strong filter of what it could be."
Glazer is a notoriously exacting filmmaker — The Zone of Interest is only his fourth feature film in more than 20 years — so the adaptation process was not a simple case of translating Amis' novel into a screenplay. In fact, Glazer's film bares little resemblance to the author's fictionalized account of the Shoah; the most obvious connection is that both tell their story from the point of view of the perpetrators, not the victims.
The Zone of Interest, as adapted by Glazer, forgoes the fictionalization and centers the story on Rudolph Höss, the real-life commandant at Auschwitz, and his wife, Hedwig — played by Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller — as they build a life for their family at a home next to the camp, at willful odds with the genocide occurring just over the garden wall. The film is a portrait of the banality of evil, and the audience is made to pay witness.
At the 96th Oscars, The Zone of Interest is nominated for five Oscars: Best Picture, Best International Feature Film, Best Directing and Best Adapted Screenplay for Glazer, and Best Sound for Johnnie Burn and Tarn Willers. In conversation with A.frame, newly-Oscar nominated producer James Wilson reflects on the making of The Zone of Interest.
A.frame: Do you remember the first time that Jonathan mentioned The Zone of Interest to you, or his interest in making a film about the Holocaust?
James Wilson : I remember when he mentioned The Zone of Interest very clearly. We'd been talking for a while about making a film with the subject of, I suppose you might say, the Holocaust. You might say the Nazi project. It was something we were both interested in in our lives, before even we met and before we were working in film. It had always been a big thing for the both of us, especially for Jon, of what to say, of what to do that was singular. What jumped out to him from this preview was the idea of a Nazi death camp, but you are looking at it through the point of view of the commandant. There was a light bulb with that. That point of view was the spark. It was the doorway that Jon pushed through, and it became the film. I do remember that point very well, and then there was this huge journey.
Jon decided what was in the story — what was in the Amis novel — was not what he wanted to adapt, almost fundamentally. Because the story is like a marital triangle and Auschwitz is a backdrop for that, and almost immediately, Jon was like, 'I don't want to do a film in which the conceit of the film is an A story, but we're in Auschwitz.' So, we started researching what Amis' novel was based on, because it's fictional. It's not named as Auschwitz. It's not Rudolf Höss. Nothing that happens in the book is in the film. There's the title and one line in the book is transformed into a line in the film. But in researching Auschwitz, we discovered the Hösses, the real family. We saw pictures of the Höss garden: The kids in the paddling pool and playing with toys on the lawn, Hedwig standing with them by a water slide, and the greenhouse in the background. That was the epiphany. Over that wall that the pool and the water slide is in front of is the first gas chamber at Auschwitz, 100 meters away. Jon was like, 'I want to do that. I don't know what that is. I don't know what the story is. I don't know what that is at all, but I want to do a film about them and that idea.' At that point, we put the book in a drawer and then we were into this world of research to create that world.
A: What is the one line that remained from the book?
JW : It's repurposed but the line is in the last part of the film, when Rudolf moves from Auschwitz to Oranienburg, where the concentration camp headquarters was. He gets the call that they want him back to supervise the extermination of the Hungarian Jews, because he is the only man for the job who knows how to do that. He calls Hedwig and says, 'Good news, I'm coming back,' and then he goes to a party. He calls Hedwig late that night to excitedly say that he's found out they're naming the operation after him, which is true. They called it Action Höss. It ended up being the murder of about 450,000 people in three months. It was Auschwitz at its most obscenely, violently horrific. And it was called Action Höss.
He says, 'They're naming it after me,' they have a little chat, and she says, 'Who was at the party?' He says, 'To tell you the truth, I can't remember. I was too busy thinking how I'd gas everyone in the room. It would be pretty difficult because of the high ceilings.' That's a line from Amis' novel, where the commandant character, Paul Doll, has gone to an opera in Kraków. He's bored in the opera, and Amis writes that he distracts himself by thinking about how much Zyklon B it would take to gas everyone in the theater. That's the line. I genuinely don't want to downgrade the importance of the book, because the book was the spark. The book was the doorway. The core was this point of view, and all the questions the film is trying to pose, we think, are about that point of view. To put you in that perspective and ask the viewer, ask us — including me — are we closer to that perpetrator perspective? To look for the similarities rather than the differences in that perpetrator, rather than the perspective of the victim. Which, of course, should be an uncomfortable and a dangerous question.
His journey on The Zone of Interest began in earnest a decade ago, once Glazer had completed Under the Skin in 2013. At the time, a preview of Martin Amis' novel of the same name, about a Nazi officer who falls in love with the Auschwitz commandant's wife, was published in a magazine, and the unconventional perspective on the Holocaust spoke to Glazer. The British filmmaker shared the book with his producer, James Wilson, and they optioned it that same year.
"He's always trying to be in a place that feels unprecedented, a place that feels fresh and not like it's repeating something that's been done," Wilson illuminates. "With this one in particular, you're talking about a subject matter where there is a pantheon of films and books, art of all sorts. But certainly films, from Schindler's List to Son of Saul to Night and Fog and The Pianist and Sophie's Choice — all shades of Holocaust films that have cast a giant shadow. And so, what to do in that? We didn't want to restage things that had been done in other films, so there was a very strong filter of what it could be."
Glazer is a notoriously exacting filmmaker — The Zone of Interest is only his fourth feature film in more than 20 years — so the adaptation process was not a simple case of translating Amis' novel into a screenplay. In fact, Glazer's film bares little resemblance to the author's fictionalized account of the Shoah; the most obvious connection is that both tell their story from the point of view of the perpetrators, not the victims.
The Zone of Interest, as adapted by Glazer, forgoes the fictionalization and centers the story on Rudolph Höss, the real-life commandant at Auschwitz, and his wife, Hedwig — played by Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller — as they build a life for their family at a home next to the camp, at willful odds with the genocide occurring just over the garden wall. The film is a portrait of the banality of evil, and the audience is made to pay witness.
At the 96th Oscars, The Zone of Interest is nominated for five Oscars: Best Picture, Best International Feature Film, Best Directing and Best Adapted Screenplay for Glazer, and Best Sound for Johnnie Burn and Tarn Willers. In conversation with A.frame, newly-Oscar nominated producer James Wilson reflects on the making of The Zone of Interest.
A.frame: Do you remember the first time that Jonathan mentioned The Zone of Interest to you, or his interest in making a film about the Holocaust?
James Wilson : I remember when he mentioned The Zone of Interest very clearly. We'd been talking for a while about making a film with the subject of, I suppose you might say, the Holocaust. You might say the Nazi project. It was something we were both interested in in our lives, before even we met and before we were working in film. It had always been a big thing for the both of us, especially for Jon, of what to say, of what to do that was singular. What jumped out to him from this preview was the idea of a Nazi death camp, but you are looking at it through the point of view of the commandant. There was a light bulb with that. That point of view was the spark. It was the doorway that Jon pushed through, and it became the film. I do remember that point very well, and then there was this huge journey.
Jon decided what was in the story — what was in the Amis novel — was not what he wanted to adapt, almost fundamentally. Because the story is like a marital triangle and Auschwitz is a backdrop for that, and almost immediately, Jon was like, 'I don't want to do a film in which the conceit of the film is an A story, but we're in Auschwitz.' So, we started researching what Amis' novel was based on, because it's fictional. It's not named as Auschwitz. It's not Rudolf Höss. Nothing that happens in the book is in the film. There's the title and one line in the book is transformed into a line in the film. But in researching Auschwitz, we discovered the Hösses, the real family. We saw pictures of the Höss garden: The kids in the paddling pool and playing with toys on the lawn, Hedwig standing with them by a water slide, and the greenhouse in the background. That was the epiphany. Over that wall that the pool and the water slide is in front of is the first gas chamber at Auschwitz, 100 meters away. Jon was like, 'I want to do that. I don't know what that is. I don't know what the story is. I don't know what that is at all, but I want to do a film about them and that idea.' At that point, we put the book in a drawer and then we were into this world of research to create that world.
A: What is the one line that remained from the book?
JW : It's repurposed but the line is in the last part of the film, when Rudolf moves from Auschwitz to Oranienburg, where the concentration camp headquarters was. He gets the call that they want him back to supervise the extermination of the Hungarian Jews, because he is the only man for the job who knows how to do that. He calls Hedwig and says, 'Good news, I'm coming back,' and then he goes to a party. He calls Hedwig late that night to excitedly say that he's found out they're naming the operation after him, which is true. They called it Action Höss. It ended up being the murder of about 450,000 people in three months. It was Auschwitz at its most obscenely, violently horrific. And it was called Action Höss.
He says, 'They're naming it after me,' they have a little chat, and she says, 'Who was at the party?' He says, 'To tell you the truth, I can't remember. I was too busy thinking how I'd gas everyone in the room. It would be pretty difficult because of the high ceilings.' That's a line from Amis' novel, where the commandant character, Paul Doll, has gone to an opera in Kraków. He's bored in the opera, and Amis writes that he distracts himself by thinking about how much Zyklon B it would take to gas everyone in the theater. That's the line. I genuinely don't want to downgrade the importance of the book, because the book was the spark. The book was the doorway. The core was this point of view, and all the questions the film is trying to pose, we think, are about that point of view. To put you in that perspective and ask the viewer, ask us — including me — are we closer to that perpetrator perspective? To look for the similarities rather than the differences in that perpetrator, rather than the perspective of the victim. Which, of course, should be an uncomfortable and a dangerous question.
A: Was Jon's vision for how he wanted to shoot it based on how the sound design would work in the film? Was that there from early on? Or was that something that was discovered in the adaptation process?
JW : Visually, it wasn't fully formed, no. The way that it was made, which was quite an unusual shooting method, we arrived there after Jon had written the script. In fact, I remember, as a producer, I got the first draft budgeted, and Jon budgeted for a conventional shoot, which is one or two cameras. It definitely wasn't budgeted for a 10-camera multi-camera thing; that was an experiment that he'd started in Under the Skin — we used eight cameras in the van with Scarlett Johansson, to shoot her continually in perfect continuity. No, there were visual ideas early on that were completely different from this kind of 'Big Brother in the Nazi house' idea. Some of them were actually really heightened and expressionistic and you'd be quite surprised, because it was not this hyper present-tense realism. They were quite theatrical. But in a way, that is a snapshot Jon's process, which is that everything is always open.
With the sound design, I would say it was always a given that the sound would be the core part of the DNA of the film. There was always this idea that you were staying on this side of the wall. Earlier versions of the script actually did go into the camp a bit, and then, there was a real decision to make it all be in the house, in the garden. Therefore, by definition, you were not seeing the crime. There is no act of violence depicted visually in the film. But you hear it. As Jon has said many times, there is the film you see, and the film you hear. And the film you hear is the crime, is the horror, is the systematic violence, is at the core of the film. Which is, what do we tune out? What do we occlude? What do we turn a blind eye to? The prominence of the sound design was always there, because without the film that you hear that dramatizes the gargantuan crime, The Zone of Interest doesn't work.
A : From a production point of view, when you think back on making The Zone of Interest, what was the biggest challenge that you overcame?
JW : Wow. The biggest single challenge? I feel like I'm breaking the rules, because I've got to break it into two. Number one would be how to make the physical place — how and where to make that house and make that garden — to film what Jon had written. We started by thinking we would do it in the real Höss house, and I don't know if people know this, there is one scene in the film where you are in the actual house of the Hösses, which is a private house next to Auschwitz. It's still there. People are sometimes shocked that it's not part of the museum. But the scene in the basement, where he scrubs his genitals after he had this assignation with this woman in the camp, you're in the basement of the real Höss house. The tunnels he walks through are real tunnels that Rudolph had built so he could go into and out of the camp. Then we thought about completely building the house somewhere else in Poland, but we realized that we had to be next to Auschwitz. We had to make it where it happened. We found this derelict house right next to Auschwitz, there was no garden, and I sometimes think the production design in The Zone of Interest is almost too good, especially for an independent film. I've never seen a set like it. The entire garden was built and grown out of nothing; trees, plants, beehives. That was extraordinarily challenging, navigating all the complexities of doing that in Poland. We were extraordinarily helped and backed, and the Auschwitz Museum allowed us to be there, but I would say that was the single most difficult physical production challenge.
The biggest creative challenge, but it was a good one, was that long period I described from 2014, from reading the book and optioning it on our own, to having a script that we thought was worth making, and then our amazing partners, Film4 and A24 and Access saying, 'We'd like to make this film,' which was in 2019. And actually, I realize I'm editing out the scary parts of it. Because there were times in that where it was like, 'Are we going to do it?' Jon was in and out of faith, losing his religion on it sometimes and getting back into it. As a producer, because I'd invested a lot of time in it and my own money, to put it bluntly, that was very challenging, too. I think I've forgotten that actually. You've made me remember it.
A : The film received five Oscar nominations, including your first nomination for Best Picture. What has it meant for you, personally, and for the film?
JW : I hope it doesn't sound too cute, but what it means to me personally is what it means for the film — I think Jon and I both feel that — which is this attention and visibility and recognition that is, again, without sounding clichéd, beyond what we ever would've thought of for the kind of films we have worked on. The part of the ecosystem that we are in of cinema, and this film particularly, in terms of what type of film it is — formally, the feeling of it, the idea of it — in some ways, we probably didn't think it was the type of film that normally would be recognized by the Academy. Credit to them. So, it was a real sense of both huge surprise and a thrill, and a slightly, almost thrilling bewilderment at this recognition. But certainly, we're experiencing what that does for the film in terms of that awareness of it. Because it's a film not in English.
It hasn't got famous people in it, although Sandra Hüller is now famous for being in these all-extraordinary films through this year. It hasn't really got a story. It hasn't really got characters in a traditional sense. It's not a biopic. It's a film about an idea and a set of questions. It's not emotionally, cathartically pleasing, and structurally, it's odd in terms of what happens. It ends in a series of documentary shots about workers in the Auschwitz Museum. So, we're just blown away by the recognition.
Personally, I can't pretend I'm not tickled. I'm absolutely thrilled and tickled to be the producer of a nominated Best Picture. I want to mention that I have a producing partner in Poland, Ewa Puszczyńska, whom I produced the film with, and I couldn't have done it without her there. It was a really hard and long and challenging process for all of us. On a personal level, it feels like an amazing validation of all of our work, after spending nine years on a film.
A : As you mentioned, this is a film by an English filmmaker, produced by an English and a Polish producer, and shot in Poland with a German cast. It is multinational. What does it mean for The Zone of Interest to be representing the U.K. for Best International Feature Film?
JW : You're right, it was British and Germans and Poles, those were the nationalities coming together in a collaboration. We brought our work and our ideas across borders and across languages and came together. There was a real spirit and esprit de corps there. I felt that in Poland. Sometimes I've thought, 'Will it count against the film that it's in German, but we're British?' Jon and I talked a lot early on, actually, about when the film came out, would there be any effrontery at the idea of a British writer-director making a film in German, but not being a German speaker — which neither of us are. We were actually dreading that, always thinking that would be the first question at the first press conference. Like, 'Who do you think you are?' But actually, it hasn't come up, and I don't know if it's a testament to the quality of the film, but it feels like there's something in it that transcends the idea of foreign language. It sounds too corny, but the common language was cinema and the idea of this film.
'The Zone of Interest': Inside the Making of Jonathan Glazer's 'Singular' Holocaust Film. By John Boone. A.Frame, February 9, 2024.
The
German actors play Hedwig and Rudolf Höss in Jonathan Glazer’s brilliant new
film about the Auschwitz commandant and his wife. They discuss the challenging
shoot, ancestral guilt – and what persuaded them to take on the roles in the
first place
Can you put a face to the banality of evil? How about two? On a bright London morning, Sandra Hüller and Christian Friedel are back from having their picture taken. The German actors are here to discuss The Zone of Interest, the film they have made with the director Jonathan Glazer (Under the Skin), loosely inspired by Martin Amis’s 2014 novel of the same name. But for a moment, we talk instead about Friedel’s liking for porridge; how Hüller, by contrast, doesn’t eat this early. And they smile and pause, aware of what comes next.
In The Zone of Interest, Hüller and Friedel play a couple exhumed from history: Hedwig and Rudolf Höss, who, during the second world war, raised five children in a sturdy villa with a pretty flower garden. It stood over a wall from the death camp at Auschwitz, where Rudolf was commandant. So the chit-chat ends.
The pair are dressed for the photograph: Friedel, 44, cherubic in a polo neck, Hüller, 45, self-contained in black, a veteran of the circuit since her recent bravura performance as a writer accused of murder in the thriller Anatomy of a Fall. “I try to flow through it like water,” she says of the attention. “Like Bruce Lee.”
Both are brilliant in a film that would overwhelm most actors. On screen, we never see the gas chambers or anything else of the camp, although we always hear it. Instead, Rudolf frets about the state of his career and Hedwig tends the azaleas.
Hüller didn’t want to play her, she says. When approached, she recoiled. She had seen too many German actors dressed as Nazis in banal period dramas. “Also I feel no urge to investigate this sort of character. Cruelty and violence don’t interest me.”
As heard in Anatomy of a Fall, Hüller speaks fluent English. Friedel is more hesitant. His voice is gentle. He says later he has never drunk alcohol “or taken a drug”. His first film was Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, set before the first world war. Casting him as a kindly teacher, Haneke told him he had a “historical face”. He first met Glazer and the producer Jim Wilson in London in 2019. He felt daunted by the film they described, but compelled, too.
“Even in kindergarten, I loved to bring ideas to life for others with singing, dancing, hand puppets. This was part of that same journey. Even though the idea is unbearable – a killer of millions who plays catch with his children.” He asked if they had yet cast Hedwig. “Because it had to be someone so good, but who wouldn’t think” – he gives a diva-ish flourish: “‘Here I will do something spectacular.’ So I said: ‘Do you want Sandra?’”
“You never told me this,” Hüller says. “How sweet.”
The pair first met in 2013, acting together in the deadpan 19th-century romance Amour Fou. They stayed friends. They had much in common. Both grew up in the former East Germany: Hüller in small town Freidrichroda, Friedel in Magdeburg. As adults, each embraced the rigour of German theatre. (Both still perform on stage.) They are also talented singers. Friedel fronts art-rock band Woods of Birnam; 2016 absurdist comedy Toni Erdmann gave us Hüller’s remarkable version of Whitney Houston’s The Greatest Love of All.
And yet. “They’re so different, aren’t they?” Wilson says. “Christian is pure sweetness. Unmediated. And Sandra is complex. She can be so funny, but she roils with inner life.” Despite Hüller’s reluctance, Wilson says there was no real Plan B if she or Friedel passed. They were the only actors he or Glazer wanted.
Hüller changed her mind on learning what the film wouldn’t be. “Meeting Jonathan, I realised it wasn’t actually about the Hösses. It was about people ignoring terrible things right where they live. A film to make us unsafe in the cinema. As we should be. We should ask: is this also us? Do we do this, too? Do we do this every single day?” Hüller’s speech has taken on the pulse of a monologue. “So yeah,” she says, abruptly. “This made it interesting.”
I say the film made me confront the Holocaust and other inhumanities: even the climate crisis. “My daughter told me she doesn’t want children because the world is dying,” Hüller says. (She is the mother of a 12-year-old.) How did she reply? “I said I took her seriously, though her age means it is not a decision for now. But there is smartness in her thought. Even a certain beauty. Maybe it should all fall apart.” Friedel looks a little sad.
The Zone of Interest was filmed during the summer of 2021. Preparation was not so different from any historical drama; Friedel learned to ride horses. But the location underscored the movie’s singularity: not the Höss villa, now decrepit, but another house on the Auschwitz site that also adjoined the camp.
Inside, 10 hidden cameras filled the building in lieu of a crew, so Friedel and Hüller could perform without the artifice of film-making. (Glazer has called the setup “Big Brother in a Nazi house.”) Creatively, they say it was fascinating.
It was also hard. Some pressures were professional; others personal. The abyss gazed back. “There was a cocktail of darkness,” Friedel says. “We were so close to the camp. We felt responsibility to the victims. My subconscious rose up.” He suffered nightmares. The Friedel who Hüller says “just cannot be an asshole” strove to find inside himself a man who could administer the Holocaust.
Hüller was tested, too. On Anatomy of a Fall, she implored the director Justine Triet to tell her if her character was guilty. Historical evidence makes clear Hedwig Höss knew exactly what was happening beyond her garden. Usually, Hüller builds her characters from empathy. “But I gave her nothing.” Hedwig, she believes, never looked inward herself. You sense this is among the worst things Hüller could say of anyone.
The shoot, they say, was “lonely” and “uncomfortable”. Friedel watched Money Heist for distraction. Each evening, he and Hüller ate together. “It was important to have a colleague.” That winter, however, he shot further scenes without her. “I was in that uniform again, and now it was just me.” He broke down in tears.
I ask how they felt finishing the shoot. Disappointed to end a unique exploration? “I was so happy it was over,” Friedel says. Actually, he beams.
Hüller nods. “And I’d love to work with Jonathan again, in 15 years.” Only joking. Sort of.
But nothing is over, really. There are still the interviews. For Hüller, the spotlight has already been cranked by Anatomy of a Fall: Vanity Fair snapped her in Los Angeles in lilac Prada. The next time we meet is over video call. She is back home in Leipzig, where she lives with her daughter and a dog. Now she wears a baggy T-shirt that says, from what I can see: God Loves Me.
Awards buzz surrounds both her recent performances. I think of her at film industry parties and recall her remark about channelling Bruce Lee.
“I can own the conversation at a party. I can talk about whatever I like. But no, it doesn’t feel like home. And it shouldn’t. It’s work. Like now. My ego is flattered you want to know about me, but soon you will want to know about another person.”
Yet work and life can blur for actors. Despite her revulsion at Hedwig, Hüller’s dog doubles as the family pet in The Zone of Interest. And the credits of Anatomy of a Fall featured her own teenage years, glimpsed in personal photographs. Triet, she says, first asked for them as detail for set dressing. Hüller only learned the plan had changed much later.
“So it was a shock. But I love Justine, and I’m fine with it.” And she makes a face that makes me laugh. “Anyway, it is important to accept your 14-year-old self.”
She talks about her routine in Leipzig: time spent with her daughter, and time alone. She speaks highly of both. She enjoys the city’s energy; likes watching people in supermarkets. She says she was able to shake off the Hösses, but the shoot stayed with her: a reminder of German “ancestral guilt”. She was moved, too, by the kindness of staff at the Auschwitz site, and that of the wider local community.
I wonder out loud about her T-shirt. God loves me? She bursts out laughing, then reads the slogan in full: “God Loves Me – And There Is Nothing I Can Do About It.” She stands to show me the rest. A teddy bear stares out, stuck in a hideous Halloween pumpkin. “Yes. I saw this T-shirt on the internet. And I found it very funny. So I bought it.” She is still laughing when she sits back down. She might also be blushing.
Friedel is also in Germany when we speak again, at home in Dresden. He was up late rehearsing with his band. No drink or drugs, of course. “No, my drug is ice-cream. Less dangerous for my mind. Just my body.”
He admits he is still haunted by The Zone of Interest. “The emptiness hasn’t left me completely. I still need time to check it out of myself.” He tells me now he had a panic attack while shooting. But he likes to discuss the film, he says. “It helps.”
He has found others keen to talk about it, too. One was the actor Josh O’Connor, who met him after seeing the movie, failed to recognise him and urged him to see it. Inevitably, after screenings, there have also been questions about Israel and Gaza. “It makes me even more aware the film is about right now,” Friedel says. “The message is timeless and universal. A darkness is inside us all. And history repeats.”
The film comes out in Germany next month. Hüller is curious to see the response. Across the country, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland are having startling electoral success.
“They are a fascist party. We should just say fascist. And now fascists no longer encourage Germans to simply forget the past. They justify it. They say, again, ‘It is good to clean this country up.’ So the rest of us must talk of humanity instead.”
To Hüller, you sometimes simply draw a line. In Leipzig, she tells me, she was walking her dog when three boys of about 17 began shouting insults. Had they recognised her? She smiles. “Nooo. Anyway, I showed them the middle finger. Because I thought: ‘This is not how you talk to me.’” Her manner is tickled now. “They told me to – well, let’s say, they cursed at me. Then they threw something! And then they said something bad about my mother. Who they don’t even know! So I laughed at them. I thought: ‘Do you really think this is how you walk through the world? Well. You will not.’”
She makes it sound simple. Was she not scared things might turn violent? She grins. “Oh yeah. But I just thought: ‘No. Their way is not going to work.’ And I had a moment of faith it would all turn out good.”
Can you put a face to the banality of evil? How about two? On a bright London morning, Sandra Hüller and Christian Friedel are back from having their picture taken. The German actors are here to discuss The Zone of Interest, the film they have made with the director Jonathan Glazer (Under the Skin), loosely inspired by Martin Amis’s 2014 novel of the same name. But for a moment, we talk instead about Friedel’s liking for porridge; how Hüller, by contrast, doesn’t eat this early. And they smile and pause, aware of what comes next.
In The Zone of Interest, Hüller and Friedel play a couple exhumed from history: Hedwig and Rudolf Höss, who, during the second world war, raised five children in a sturdy villa with a pretty flower garden. It stood over a wall from the death camp at Auschwitz, where Rudolf was commandant. So the chit-chat ends.
The pair are dressed for the photograph: Friedel, 44, cherubic in a polo neck, Hüller, 45, self-contained in black, a veteran of the circuit since her recent bravura performance as a writer accused of murder in the thriller Anatomy of a Fall. “I try to flow through it like water,” she says of the attention. “Like Bruce Lee.”
Both are brilliant in a film that would overwhelm most actors. On screen, we never see the gas chambers or anything else of the camp, although we always hear it. Instead, Rudolf frets about the state of his career and Hedwig tends the azaleas.
Hüller didn’t want to play her, she says. When approached, she recoiled. She had seen too many German actors dressed as Nazis in banal period dramas. “Also I feel no urge to investigate this sort of character. Cruelty and violence don’t interest me.”
As heard in Anatomy of a Fall, Hüller speaks fluent English. Friedel is more hesitant. His voice is gentle. He says later he has never drunk alcohol “or taken a drug”. His first film was Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, set before the first world war. Casting him as a kindly teacher, Haneke told him he had a “historical face”. He first met Glazer and the producer Jim Wilson in London in 2019. He felt daunted by the film they described, but compelled, too.
“Even in kindergarten, I loved to bring ideas to life for others with singing, dancing, hand puppets. This was part of that same journey. Even though the idea is unbearable – a killer of millions who plays catch with his children.” He asked if they had yet cast Hedwig. “Because it had to be someone so good, but who wouldn’t think” – he gives a diva-ish flourish: “‘Here I will do something spectacular.’ So I said: ‘Do you want Sandra?’”
“You never told me this,” Hüller says. “How sweet.”
The pair first met in 2013, acting together in the deadpan 19th-century romance Amour Fou. They stayed friends. They had much in common. Both grew up in the former East Germany: Hüller in small town Freidrichroda, Friedel in Magdeburg. As adults, each embraced the rigour of German theatre. (Both still perform on stage.) They are also talented singers. Friedel fronts art-rock band Woods of Birnam; 2016 absurdist comedy Toni Erdmann gave us Hüller’s remarkable version of Whitney Houston’s The Greatest Love of All.
And yet. “They’re so different, aren’t they?” Wilson says. “Christian is pure sweetness. Unmediated. And Sandra is complex. She can be so funny, but she roils with inner life.” Despite Hüller’s reluctance, Wilson says there was no real Plan B if she or Friedel passed. They were the only actors he or Glazer wanted.
Hüller changed her mind on learning what the film wouldn’t be. “Meeting Jonathan, I realised it wasn’t actually about the Hösses. It was about people ignoring terrible things right where they live. A film to make us unsafe in the cinema. As we should be. We should ask: is this also us? Do we do this, too? Do we do this every single day?” Hüller’s speech has taken on the pulse of a monologue. “So yeah,” she says, abruptly. “This made it interesting.”
I say the film made me confront the Holocaust and other inhumanities: even the climate crisis. “My daughter told me she doesn’t want children because the world is dying,” Hüller says. (She is the mother of a 12-year-old.) How did she reply? “I said I took her seriously, though her age means it is not a decision for now. But there is smartness in her thought. Even a certain beauty. Maybe it should all fall apart.” Friedel looks a little sad.
The Zone of Interest was filmed during the summer of 2021. Preparation was not so different from any historical drama; Friedel learned to ride horses. But the location underscored the movie’s singularity: not the Höss villa, now decrepit, but another house on the Auschwitz site that also adjoined the camp.
Inside, 10 hidden cameras filled the building in lieu of a crew, so Friedel and Hüller could perform without the artifice of film-making. (Glazer has called the setup “Big Brother in a Nazi house.”) Creatively, they say it was fascinating.
It was also hard. Some pressures were professional; others personal. The abyss gazed back. “There was a cocktail of darkness,” Friedel says. “We were so close to the camp. We felt responsibility to the victims. My subconscious rose up.” He suffered nightmares. The Friedel who Hüller says “just cannot be an asshole” strove to find inside himself a man who could administer the Holocaust.
Hüller was tested, too. On Anatomy of a Fall, she implored the director Justine Triet to tell her if her character was guilty. Historical evidence makes clear Hedwig Höss knew exactly what was happening beyond her garden. Usually, Hüller builds her characters from empathy. “But I gave her nothing.” Hedwig, she believes, never looked inward herself. You sense this is among the worst things Hüller could say of anyone.
The shoot, they say, was “lonely” and “uncomfortable”. Friedel watched Money Heist for distraction. Each evening, he and Hüller ate together. “It was important to have a colleague.” That winter, however, he shot further scenes without her. “I was in that uniform again, and now it was just me.” He broke down in tears.
I ask how they felt finishing the shoot. Disappointed to end a unique exploration? “I was so happy it was over,” Friedel says. Actually, he beams.
Hüller nods. “And I’d love to work with Jonathan again, in 15 years.” Only joking. Sort of.
But nothing is over, really. There are still the interviews. For Hüller, the spotlight has already been cranked by Anatomy of a Fall: Vanity Fair snapped her in Los Angeles in lilac Prada. The next time we meet is over video call. She is back home in Leipzig, where she lives with her daughter and a dog. Now she wears a baggy T-shirt that says, from what I can see: God Loves Me.
Awards buzz surrounds both her recent performances. I think of her at film industry parties and recall her remark about channelling Bruce Lee.
“I can own the conversation at a party. I can talk about whatever I like. But no, it doesn’t feel like home. And it shouldn’t. It’s work. Like now. My ego is flattered you want to know about me, but soon you will want to know about another person.”
Yet work and life can blur for actors. Despite her revulsion at Hedwig, Hüller’s dog doubles as the family pet in The Zone of Interest. And the credits of Anatomy of a Fall featured her own teenage years, glimpsed in personal photographs. Triet, she says, first asked for them as detail for set dressing. Hüller only learned the plan had changed much later.
“So it was a shock. But I love Justine, and I’m fine with it.” And she makes a face that makes me laugh. “Anyway, it is important to accept your 14-year-old self.”
She talks about her routine in Leipzig: time spent with her daughter, and time alone. She speaks highly of both. She enjoys the city’s energy; likes watching people in supermarkets. She says she was able to shake off the Hösses, but the shoot stayed with her: a reminder of German “ancestral guilt”. She was moved, too, by the kindness of staff at the Auschwitz site, and that of the wider local community.
I wonder out loud about her T-shirt. God loves me? She bursts out laughing, then reads the slogan in full: “God Loves Me – And There Is Nothing I Can Do About It.” She stands to show me the rest. A teddy bear stares out, stuck in a hideous Halloween pumpkin. “Yes. I saw this T-shirt on the internet. And I found it very funny. So I bought it.” She is still laughing when she sits back down. She might also be blushing.
Friedel is also in Germany when we speak again, at home in Dresden. He was up late rehearsing with his band. No drink or drugs, of course. “No, my drug is ice-cream. Less dangerous for my mind. Just my body.”
He admits he is still haunted by The Zone of Interest. “The emptiness hasn’t left me completely. I still need time to check it out of myself.” He tells me now he had a panic attack while shooting. But he likes to discuss the film, he says. “It helps.”
He has found others keen to talk about it, too. One was the actor Josh O’Connor, who met him after seeing the movie, failed to recognise him and urged him to see it. Inevitably, after screenings, there have also been questions about Israel and Gaza. “It makes me even more aware the film is about right now,” Friedel says. “The message is timeless and universal. A darkness is inside us all. And history repeats.”
The film comes out in Germany next month. Hüller is curious to see the response. Across the country, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland are having startling electoral success.
“They are a fascist party. We should just say fascist. And now fascists no longer encourage Germans to simply forget the past. They justify it. They say, again, ‘It is good to clean this country up.’ So the rest of us must talk of humanity instead.”
To Hüller, you sometimes simply draw a line. In Leipzig, she tells me, she was walking her dog when three boys of about 17 began shouting insults. Had they recognised her? She smiles. “Nooo. Anyway, I showed them the middle finger. Because I thought: ‘This is not how you talk to me.’” Her manner is tickled now. “They told me to – well, let’s say, they cursed at me. Then they threw something! And then they said something bad about my mother. Who they don’t even know! So I laughed at them. I thought: ‘Do you really think this is how you walk through the world? Well. You will not.’”
She makes it sound simple. Was she not scared things might turn violent? She grins. “Oh yeah. But I just thought: ‘No. Their way is not going to work.’ And I had a moment of faith it would all turn out good.”
‘This is a film to make us unsafe in the cinema. As we should be’: Sandra Hüller and Christian Friedel on The Zone of Interest. By Danny Leigh. The Guardian, January 19, 2024.
No comments:
Post a Comment