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Ladybbird · 11-12-23, 06:56

Jonathan Glazer on His Holocaust Film The Zone of Interest: ‘This is NOT About The Past, It’s About NOW’

The British directors’ acclaimed, audacious new film about the family life of Auschwitz’s commandant was 10 years in the making.

The Guardian 11 DEC 2023

Jonathan Glazer 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.”

A Höss family garden party in The Zone of Interest.

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.

Nicole Kidman in Birth (2004)

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 Zone of Interest Releases;

US - The Zone of Interest -15 DEC 2023 in SOME US theaters, with a limited run first on that date before expanding to more cities and regions in the following weeks

UK - The Zone of Interest 3 FEB 2024

The Zone of Interest (2023) - IMDb

11-12-23, 06:56	#1
Ladybbird Join Date: Feb 2011 Posts: 47,647 Thanks: 27,646 Thanked 14,458 Times in 10,262 Posts Awards Showcase Total Awards: 8	Holocaust Film 'The Zone of Interest': 'It’s About NOW-NOT The Past' Jonathan Glazer on His Holocaust Film The Zone of Interest: ‘This is NOT About The Past, It’s About NOW’ The British directors’ acclaimed, audacious new film about the family life of Auschwitz’s commandant was 10 years in the making. The Guardian 11 DEC 2023 Jonathan Glazer 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.” A Höss family garden party in The Zone of Interest. 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. Nicole Kidman in Birth (2004) 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 Zone of Interest Releases; US - The Zone of Interest -15 DEC 2023 in SOME US theaters, with a limited run first on that date before expanding to more cities and regions in the following weeks UK - The Zone of Interest 3 FEB 2024 The Zone of Interest (2023) - IMDb

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