‘It’s Not a History Lesson, It’s a Warning’: Inside the Making of ‘The Zone of Interest’
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Jonathan Glazer was, by his own admission, a little lost. The writer-director behind Sexy Beast and Under the Skin had been chasing an unformed idea for a movie for years, uncertain of where he would go with the story or what he wanted to say about the subject. “It wasn’t even an idea, really,” the filmmaker says, thinking back on the staggering amount of reading and research that took up the better part of his 2010s, as he sat in a small restaurant booth in New York. “It was more of a feeling. I was chasing a feeling.” All he knew was that the subject he wanted to make a movie about, the vehicle for this vague emotion that he couldn’t quite pin down or articulate, had haunted him since he was boy. It still haunted him.
Which is how Glazer found himself in Poland, wandering the site of one of the biggest mass murders of the 20th century. And then he saw the house.
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“It was the home of the Höss family,” Glazer says. Rudolph Höss was the commandant at Auschwitz; the house where he, his wife Hedwig, and their children lived during WWII, some 50 yards away from one of the crematoriums. “I visited the house and the garden, which is not exactly like it was then. But it still exists. And being there, in that space — what struck me was the proximity of it to the camp. The house shared a wall with Auschwitz. It was all happening right there, on the other side of that wall. And the fact that a man lived there, and brought up his family there…” Glazer pauses, still shaken by the memory. “How do you do that? How black a soul must be.”
The Zone of Interest, Glazer’s attempt to capture the horror of the Holocaust from the viewpoint of Höss and his wife — played by Babylon Berlin’s Christian Friedel and Anatomy of a Fall’s Sandra Hüller — spends most of its running time inside that quaint domicile, following the daily routines of its occupants as they throw birthday parties, tend to the blossoming flowers, and chat with their neighbors. Meanwhile, mass extermination is happening right outside their literal backyard. To them, all the screaming, the gunshots, and the sight of billowing black smoke is simply their everyday environment. (The film is now playing in New York and Los Angeles; it will begin going into wider release on January 12th and open nationwide on January 26th.)
It’s the most chilling imagining of the unimaginable in recent memory, made all the more horrific by the fact that, like the 2014 Martin Amis novel that Glazer’s film borrows its title from (the phrase refers to the perimeter around Auschwitz where the camp’s administrators lived), it forces viewers to experience the camps from the pitiless viewpoint of one of their administrators. That aspect was one of the few things he knew he wanted to do when he first started thinking about making a movie about the Holocaust, a subject of fascination that he attributes to seeing photos of Kristallnacht and the camps in one of his father’s National Geographic magazines when he was a boy. “I remember thinking that they were real people in these images,” Glazer recalls. “The people who were being beaten in the streets, who were being put on to trains, who soldiers found at the camps when they liberated them — they looked like my relatives. They looked like me.”
Yet when he began to seriously consider how he might try to render genocide onscreen, Glazer looked at “the darkening world around us, and I had a feeling I had to do something about our similarities to the perpetrators rather than the victims. When you say, ‘They were monsters,’ you’re also saying: ‘That could never be us.’ Which is a very dangerous mindset.”
It was this notion of somehow tackling this atrocity — something so many artists, writers, pundits, and cultural critics had attempted to dissect and/or render within the realm of fiction — in a different yet profound way that sparked the initial conversations about a possible project with Glazer and his longtime producer, James Wilson. “We had not yet finished Under the Skin,” Wilson remembers, on a Zoom call, ”when he first mentioned it to me. There were a lot of books passed around, a lot of discussions about what you could say that had not already been said. He did not want to do another, quote-unquote, ‘Holocaust movie.’ Jon has a very small filter when it comes to doing something that’s never been done before. But neither of us knew what that something would be.”
Glazer had been contemplating an uncomfortably subjective way of looking at this historical act of barbarity when he happened to read a preview of Martin Amis’ book The Zone of Interest in a newspaper in 2014, which resulted in what Wilson refers to as “the atom-splitter moment that happens on all of our films.” It wasn’t much more than a paragraph, the director says, but it tapped into two things that the filmmaker had been thinking a lot about: perspective and complicity.
”The story is told from the viewpoint of a fictional Nazi commandant,” Glazer says, ”and I’d already decided that I wanted to tell the story not of those within the camp, but those who ran it. There was a courage in the book, in that it absolutely committed to the wholehearted expression of that mindset in an extremely uncomfortable way. There is a love triangle in it, which… we had no interest in that. But once I began reading it, the novel became a kernel for me. It was just a spark, but a very, very important spark.”
Yet he didn’t want to simply adapt the book. His research suggested that the novel’s protagonist was based on Höss. Glazer began to dive deep into who this man was. ”Höss went from being this name among many in history books to a human being who was a father, a husband, and a true believer in what he was doing,” he says. ”I just kept asking myself: How? Honestly, the last thing I wanted to do was spend a lot of time reading about him and thinking about him.” A pause. ”Which is exactly what I then spent the next few years doing.”
Piecing together “three lines, two words, a paragraph, whatever” Glazer found in reference to the Höss family, he began to see they were “non-thinking, bourgeois, aspirational-careerist horrors” who’d simply normalized evil. Still, he remained unsure of where he was going with it. The filmmaker began taking trips to Poland, and it was during a conversation with Piotr Cywiński, Director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, that Glazer once again found himself being forced to wrestle with the question of intent.
“He actually said to me: ‘Why are you doing this? Why do you want to do this?!’” Glazer recalls. “I told him, ‘I have no idea. That’s why I am here.’ He advised me to go to Auschwitz, which… I’ll be honest, I had always been afraid of going there. But [Piotr] told me: ‘Go and listen. If you listen, one way or the other, you’ll find out.’”
Once he was there and Glazer saw the house, he felt like years and years of researching the subject had led him to that place. He had his starting point.
The result would end up being something that not only details the banality behind the banality of evil, but looks at the Holocaust in a way that rejects the imagery usually associated with such movies. “We’ve become desensitized to them,” Glazer notes. “It’s impossible to show what happened inside those walls. And in my opinion, one shouldn’t try.” (There is only one scene that actually takes place within Auschwitz, and the camera stays on a close-up of Höss’s face.)
Instead, The Zone of Interest uses suggestion and sound — what he refers to as “ambient evil” — to conjure up how human beings could look upon the methodical killing of other human beings as background noise in their lives rather than a profound tragedy. As quaint domestic scenes play out in sunny gardens and within beautifully designed dining rooms, the sound of barking dogs, gunfire, and screams weave in and out of the soundtrack. He also decided to start the film off with an extended sequence of a black screen, accompanied by nothing but Mica Levi’s atonal, droning score. “I wanted viewers to realize that they’re submerging,” he explains, in reference to the void that greets moviegoers before cutting to the Höss family having a picnic by a lake. “It was a way of tuning your ears before you tune your eyes to what you’re about to view. There is the movie you see here — and there is the movie you hear.“
And when it came to filming inside the Hoss’s residence — a recreation of the home that was constructed, the director says, several houses down from the real thing — Glazer decided to hide close to a dozen cameras in various rooms, and then instructed his cast to play their scenes out in continuous takes as he filmed everything at once, in a manner that suggests found footage captured by surveillance cameras and what Wilson refers to as “a Big Brother house filled with Nazis.”
“Christian [Friedel] recently reminded me of this,” Hüller says, speaking to me a few weeks after I’d talked to Glazer. “Some takes were up to 45 minutes — we were just going and going. You didn’t know what was being filmed from what angle, or from where. The crew and monitors were in a separate building, so if they didn’t tell us to cut, we’d just restart a scene and it would end up being completely different.”
One of the first things I told Jonathan was: I do not want to portray Hedwig. I have no interest in that. And his answer was: This isn’t a biopic. It’s about making the connection between the past and the present.
The idea was to create an immersive experience where performances were able to transform into people going about their daily routines, and the cast was free not only to explore the environments but lean into boring, mundane everyday life — a contrast to the horror literally happening outside their backyard. “You could compare it to theater, but with theater, you at least have to face the direction of the audience,” Hüller adds. “This was all around you. One of the first things I told Jonathan was: I do not want to portray Hedwig. I have no interest in that. And his answer was: This isn’t a biopic. It’s about making the connection between the past and the present. And the cameras in the house helped with that, I think.”
It was a concept that Glazer hoped to make explicit with the film’s ending, in which you are momentarily dropped into Auschwitz in the 21st century — a disorienting flash-forward that he says came from his experience wandering around the grounds one morning and noticing the cleaning crew picking up litter and vacuuming in front of the exhibits. “It was like they were tending graves,” Glazer says. “You know, Höss is long gone. He is ash. But the museum, and the importance of such museums, they are still there.”
They are testaments to what took place, he says, and while Glazer hopes The Zone of Interest is received in that manner as well, he admits that all of that staring into the abyss has taken its toll on him. “I have bookshelves at home that are heaving with books on this subject,” Glazer says, “and I’ll glad to be rid of them and put the making of this behind me. It’s been quite a journey, and not an easy one.”
“But that feeling that I was chasing — I know what it is now,” he continues. “It’s a movie made out of a deep sense of anger. I wasn’t interested in making a museum piece. I didn’t want people to have the safe distance of the past and walk away untroubled by what they see. I wanted to say no, no, no — we should be left feeling deeply unsafe about this kind of primordial horror that is underneath everything.”
“I was determined to make it not about then, but about now,” he adds, quietly. “Because this movie isn’t a document. It’s not a history lesson. It’s a warning.”
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