Director Jonathan Glazer attends a press conference for his film The Zone of Interest at the 76th annual Cannes film festival at Palais des Festivals on May 20, in Cannes, France.Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images
Jonathan Glazer doesn’t make films all that often – just four features across 23 years – but when he does step behind the camera, the world seems to tremble just a little more than it did before.
The British director’s gangster thriller Sexy Beast (2000), psychodrama Birth (2004), and existential sci-fi nightmare Under the Skin (2013) could not be more different in genre and execution, yet they all reveal a filmmaker whose vision is as stunning as it is unnerving. The artist, who got his start in the music-video world, is a true expert in shock and awe.
Yet the 58-year-old reaches a new kind of terrible high with his latest film, The Zone of Interest. A precisely warped adaptation of Martin Amis’s 2014 novel of the same name, the film follows SS commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Huller) as they go about their domestic routines in the literal backyard of Auschwitz. While any Holocaust film is a complicated proposition, Glazer employs a distinctly chilling method here by keeping the horrors of the concentration camp completely in the background of the film – a kind of nightmarish white noise that soundtracks the moral decay of humanity. As bold a work as it is essential, The Zone of Interest is the year’s best film by a wide margin.
While visiting the Toronto International Film Festival this past September, Glazer sat down with The Globe and Mail to discuss his meticulous, staggering methods.
I couldn’t help but think about your 2019 short film The Fall while watching The Zone of Interest. In the short, you’re exploring fascism through a lynch mob scene that is presented from the victim’s perspective. But with Zone, we never see the victims at all.
It’s interesting that you make that connection because I was writing Zone at the time of making The Fall. I was deep into Zone, looking for locations, those sorts of things, when I was asked by Rose Garnett at the BBC to do a short. I didn’t have anything in my head other than Zone. So she encouraged me to think of the short as a sketch for the film – it’s actually diametrically opposite in perspective. We were quite deep into the Trump presidency at the time, so it was about the rise of the mob, the fear of that. It definitely felt related.
Christian Friedel in a scene from The Zone of Interest. Tthe film follows SS commandant Rudolf Hoss (played by Friedel) and his wife Hedwig (played by Sandra Huller) in the literal backyard of Auschwitz.The Associated Press
How deep do you go in your research? A subject like this, it can lead to a real rabbit hole, perhaps.
It is vast, and I was reading for two years before putting pen to paper. The more you read, the more you start to see connections form. You’re never going to be able to get your arms around it, it’s too vast. But you become more specific in what you’re investigating. For me, it was this network of SS families and their private lives. Children had to go to school, and wives had to get things done at the house during the day. It made it frighteningly familiar and in many ways modern.
What was shocking to me is that when you think of Auschwitz, you picture an isolated area. Not somewhere with houses right next to it.
I certainly was surprised when I went to the camps for the first time and I was given permission to see the house of the commandant, and its garden. It was a garden that abutted the camp’s wall. It’s real. That proximity was staggering. And that became where I wanted to set the story – on one side of the wall, where we can only hear what’s happening on the other side.
You managed to film this in Auschwitz. Was that the only place it really could be shot?
There was absolutely only one space, even though we did look elsewhere in Poland. But we kept coming back to Auschwitz, and over a long period of preparation, we built relationships with the people who ran the state museum and the historians there. We built trust, which allowed us to recreate a mirror of the Hoss home in a derelict house 50 metres away from the real Hoss property. We recreated the garden and everything you see in the film based on photographs from the Hoss family album. I wanted it to be as accurate as possible, but it felt like it had to be as present tense as possible. This isn’t a museum piece. It had to feel like we were dropping in on them on a Monday afternoon. He’s reading the paper, she’s making tea.
As a storyteller, how heavy a weight of responsibility do you feel with exploring this history?
It still weighs heavily. It hasn’t stopped because the film is finished. It’s a strange place to find oneself when you have a stack of books on your bed all on this subject, and the images associated with it. These are dark waters that one swims in, and there were plenty of times when I wanted to throw the towel in. It felt impossible for me to contribute anything to this subject.
The Zone of Interest opens in select theatres Dec. 22.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Barry Hertz