ENGHow The Zone of Interest conveys the horrors of the Holocaust without ever showing them
Director Jonathan Glazer on his decision to focus on a family living next to Auschwitz instead of the concentration camp itself
The Zone of Interest will be released in Ukrainian cinemas on 22 February. It’s a film about the family of an Auschwitz superintendent and their life in the house located next to the concentration camp, the site of one of the Holocaust’s greatest horrors.
The film won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival. Its director Jonathan Glazer is famous for Under the Skin with Scarlett Johansson, and Birth with Nicole Kidman. The Village Ukraine editor-in-chief Yaroslav Druziuk spoke to Glazer about The Zone of Interest, the most difficult project in his entire career, and his decision to convey the horrors of the Holocaust without ever showing them directly.
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What is The Zone of Interest about?
The film tells the story of Rudolf and Hedwig Höss. He is the superintendent at Auschwitz, one of the largest Nazi concentration camps during World War 2. She is his wife, a self-fashioned “Queen of Auschwitz” preoccupied with their family’s life in the German-occupied Polish town of Oswiecim. The couple build an ordinary life in the zone of interest, the area immediately adjacent to the concentration camp; a life as ordinary as the horrors unfolding just outside their doorstep are extraordinary.
This contrast is at the crux of Glazer’s film. Glazer chose not to show the atrocities committed by Nazis during the Holocaust directly, instead focusing on the detached portrayal of the everyday life of the Auschwitz kings: a birthday celebration, a grandmother’s visit, and a picnic by the river with their children, which opens the film.
The Zone of Interest trailer
In several interviews about the film, Glazer said that it was the hardest thing he had done in his entire career. He told The Guardian that on several occasions he tried to abandon the film, but eventually always returned to it: “It’s a very delicate balance, the whole project was very delicate. [...] At the time it was a difficult journey for me to be on. Because you’re not making a normal film, it’s not about a normal subject, it’s certainly not a normal place.”
Glazer says that he wanted the film to be realistic: “I felt compelled, if I was going to do it, I wanted to be as close to truth as possible.” He admits that this involved a number of challenges. “I’ve thought a lot about this, it’s really about what I feel I should show and what I should not,” he says. “I, certainly, for my part, did not want to reenact these atrocities visually, I didn’t want to see these images. I feel we’ve seen these images, we understand them, they’re in our head, we bring them with us.”
Despite his decision to not show what was happening in Auschwitz, Glazer deeply engages with its towering presence in the Hösses’ life: the crematorium’s exhaust pipes can be seen just beyond the fence, and the family’s daily life is accompanied by the blood-chilling cries of prisoners.
“[W]hat I was serving in my script was how those sounds could come across the wall and permeate every frame of the film, bare down on this mundanity that we're witnessing day to day. And it sort of felt like that was the second film we were making. We always talked about there are two films: the one you see and the one you hear. And I think in many ways, the one you hear was the most important one to me,” Glazer told Dolby, a company that was involved in sound production. The score by Mica Levi, whose career as film composer started with Glazer’s Under the Skin, only underscores the eerie soundscape accompanying the Hösses’ daily life. “And when we hear the sounds of these images, we see them again. I did not need to reenact them,” Glazer explains the thinking behind his decisions regarding the film’s images and sounds. Incidentally, he has also directed music videos, including Radiohead’s Karma Police.
Filming in Oswiecim
The Höss family home, with its pool and garden, is only separated from the concentration camp by a wall. At first this may seem like an overwrought metaphor, but this fact is based on real life. Glazer’s screenplay is an adaptation of a novel by Martin Amis (also called The Zone of Interest), but instead of fictional characters Glazer’s protagonists are real-life figures. His work was rooted in research undertaken by Auschwitz archivists.
Moreover, Glazer chose to film in Oswiecim. The setting was created only 50 meters away from where the Hösses’ house was located. “I felt it was essential, to shoot the film there. I knew that it was about this place. And I needed to be at that place to be able to make a film about that place. The weight of it, the awfulnes of it and the proximity to it was essential for me, filming it,” Glazer says.
The Zone of Interest
Glazer says that the film’s setting had a profound effect on several levels: “They say, fascism starts in your family, which, I believe, is true, of course. So to show a family at this point, luxuriating in an achievement, their success, at this colossal human cost, that they have no qualms about it, it felt that the power of that, the awfulness of what we hear and what we see, is the film, I suppose. The space between what we hear and what we see. [...] You know, I wanted the experience of victims of these atrocities to be out of sight, in a way that they would be for a perpetrator, but they would not be out of mind for us, they would be out of mind for them. So if we have an emotional response to what we hear, what we see are these people who have no emotional response to what we hear.”
Watching The Zone of Interest, you hear the sounds of mass murders unfolding in the background – though it seems that the film’s protagonists don’t. The drama of their personal life is not the genocide they are implicated in committing just beyond the walls of their house, but the fact that they would have to leave Auschwitz in light of Rudolf’s new job as the overseer of all Nazi concentration camp – a promotion he obtained for being an expert in his lethal work.
Glazer, who both directed the film and wrote the script, says that at first he wasn’t sure how to make this film. “I did not want to make this film, using a conventional film language. I did not want to glamourize these people. Cinema by definition will glamourize, the way we beautify when we film something. I wanted to strip all the drama off it, I wasn’t interested in their drama. I certainly did not want to get caught up in their drama. Their drama [basically is] he’s getting transferred, she doesn’t want to leave. But I did not want that, I wasn’t interested in that. I was interested in watching them getting caught up in that,” he says.
Glazer relied on a cinematic technique that involved using concealed cameras and producing static images. “I wanted to somehow find a critical distance between what I was filming, the people I was filming and the subject [of the film], to be able to get far enough to watch it, how they are and what they do, but be far away enough not to get sucked into some screen psychology. Rather, to be able to project myself as a viewer onto them, so I could see myself, you know? My similarities to them, not watching actors getting dramatic. I wanted to sort of create a world that we could drop in to, and see that there’s very little going on, in a traditional sense of story. But to be in those spaces, to feel trapped in those spaces with these people, to be uncomfortable in their company.”
In previous interviews, Glazer mentioned that he decided to stay away from the set in order to better achieve this effect; he largely remained in a separate building, observing the filming process at a remove. When I ask him why that was important for him as a director, Glazer says “That distance allows me to look at them anthropologically, I could watch them more like beetles under a microscope. It allowed me to look at them dispassionately.”
Still, he acknowledges that this distancing also had an obverse effect: “It’s uncomfortable to admit, but they were not monsters who fell from the sky, they were human beings, who step by step committed these atrocities. [...] Because the perspective of the people in the film is one of perpetrators, we’re looking at perpetrators. The film is trying to look for the similarities in perpetrators, rather than the similarities of victims.” Glazer sees this as an opportunity to pose a question to the audience: “So I wanted for the audience to be able to project ourselves to these people. And the ambition, the status, the petty bourgeois social ambition, property, health, space, all of these things are common to all people. And see how grotesquely familiar they are to us. Then [the viewers] are projecting it on themselves, not watching actors getting dramatic.”
Glazer adds that this context affected both the filming process and everyone involved: “And all of the unspoken fears and feelings that everybody had in the cast and crew, fed into the result. In other words, the contradiction of being excited to be making a film that you have as a filmmaker, with the people we wanted to do it, with what it’s about and where you’re doing it, was on everybody’s mind. [...] You’re not just filming the object and subject in front of you, you’re filming the air that they’re breathing, you’re filming that place.”
The banality of evil embodied by Hedwig Höss
“I think the film is trying to talk to a human impulse, the human capacity for violence, the awfulness of that and where that leads, and how ordinary people can go down that road with enthusiasm. That’s the horror of it all for me,” Glazer continues. He often evokes Hannah Arendt, a German Jew who fled the Holocaust to the US in 1941 and later offered the concept of the “banality of evil” to explain Nazi crimes. “We talked about [the banality of evil concept] a lot in the process, yeah. It seems to be, certainly, a key area of discussion for us, throughout the making of the film,” Glazer says.
“Going back to Hannah Arendt, one of the interesting things she said, was that [the Nazis] were non-thinking people. She talked about how to think, one has to stop first. Sandra and I felt felt that the right way to portray Hedwig was to never see her stop. So when you see what Sandra’s done, she’s constantly busying herself with trivial acts – with the food, the maids, the garden, this and that. In order not to think, in order not to reflect. It was a way of how she must’ve been able to live, to simply no to stop to think,” Glazer says about his work with Sandra Hüller, who played Hedwig Höss in The Zone of Interest.
Sandra Hüller, photo Raph_PH
Hüller was nominated for Best Actress in 2023 by the European Film Academy. She is one of the best contemporary German actresses and has recently starred in the comedy Toni Erdmann, and this year she received several awards for her lead role in Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall. Glazer has plenty of experience working with top talent: Scarlett Johansson, Nikole Kidman and Lauren Bacall. “Of course, with these sorts of things you begin to shape a character. So Sandra’s approach was a physical one, which I think was absolutely right,” Glazer explains.
He adds that he had the help of the researchers of the Holocaust when developing Hedwig’s character. On his cooperation with two Auschwitz museum researchers he says: “The other line that came from the archives, that I didn’t write, that she said, was when she was angry at her maid at breakfast: “If I wanted to, my husband would spread your ashes across the fields”. That’s her line, she said that. So in those moments you begin to see who this person might’ve been. You begin to make this person.”
Another example of Glazer’s collaboration with the researchers is the Hösses’ conversation when Hedwig finds out that Rudolf might be transferred to another concentration camp: “One of them was a testimony by a gardener who survived the war, he overheard the conversation between Rudolf and his wife, when he told her the news that he was about to be transferred, that they were about to leave. And how she reacted, how she said that she would be dragged out of there kicking and screaming, because she was living her dream life. She actually said that she wants to die there. And so that tells you a lot about her as a person, of course, the pathology that was in that fragment for me.”
At the end of our conversation, Glazer stresses that the film was not only about the past. “Obviously, the themes of the film predate the current situation. The fact that this film is being released now, when we are watching the atrocities on our television screens, hopefully, speaks to the urgency,” he says.