Jonathan Glazer Says “Events Of The Last Couple Of Days Have Been Quite Difficult For Everybody” As His Holocaust Film ‘The Zone Of Interest’ Screens At New York Film Festival

Jill Goldsmith
·3 min read
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.

“The events of the last couple of days have been quite difficult for everybody,” said filmmaker Jonathan Glazer as his film about a Nazi commander at Auschwitz screened Sunday at the New York Film Festival.

‘Zone of Interest,’ Glazer’s first appearance on the NYFF main slate, played after the worst assault on Israel in decades. Rocket and ground attacks from Gaza over the weekend have killed some 700 Israelis. Retaliation has resulted in over 400 Palestinian casualties so far. Israel has declared war against Hamas.

More from Deadline

The Zone of Interest, which won the Cannes Grand Prix Award then screened at Telluride and Toronto,” is about “a subject that I’ve been drawn to and thinking about for many years, actually, before I read the book,” said Glazer (Sexy Beast, Birth, Under The Skin) at a Q&A following the screening — referring to the book by the late Martin Amis on which the film is loosely based. “It felt like it was important to somehow dive into.”

Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller star as Rudolf Höss, head Commandant of Auschwitz, and his wife Hedwig. The couple lead an idyllic life in a handsome villa, cavorting with their numerous children at a nearby lake and in their pool and large garden that abuts the wall of the concentration camp.

It was like “Big Brother in the Nazi house,” Glazer said. “We were all about dropping in and joining…what was happening in that house.” Muted clanking, screaming, barking guard dogs and gunshots sound only in the background. Höss rose in the ranks by perfecting the processing and selection of prisoners, speeding up the camp’s crematoriums. At home, he celebrates his birthday and reads his children bedtimes stories. “It was watching from a forensic, sort of anthropological, perspective.”

Glazer’s intention was to make a film that didn’t feel “set safely in the past.” That showed “something which happened 80 years ago, and which we [think] could somehow feel a safe distance from, that, actually, was something…that should leave us feeling unsafe. And to see our similarities with the perpetrators, rather than similarities with the victims.”

He was joined by the two stars and sound designer Johnny Burn, who described the “stark contrast between what you see and what you hear” as sound alone — along with glimpses of smoke,fire and ash — presents the horror beyond the wall of domesticity.

“My work began with research and looking through all the documents I could find of witness testimony [as] Jon and I needed to understand every single sound that was, that would have been heard at that place in time…The nature and the river and the frogs, but also the machinery of the camp and the planes that flew overhead, the automobiles, the guns, and then of course, the guards the prisoners themselves. We made an enormous document. And that was the kind of Bible to go out and record a library” of sound,” Burn said, to be ready to merge “film two onto film one.”

“The idea of not showing, not reenacting, the atrocities or the violence was absolutely mandatory for me…There were two films, the one you see and the one your hear,” Glazer said.

A24 is releasing The Zone Of Interest theatrically on Dec. 8, Deadline review here. The film is the U.K.’s Oscar entry for Best International Film.

Best of Deadline

Sign up for Deadline's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Click here to read the full article.