From its world premiere at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, where it won both the Grand Prix and the FIPRESCI Prize, to its more recent five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director, The Zone of Interest has remained one of the most discussed titles.

Loosely based on the novel of the same name by Martin Amis, the film is written and directed by British filmmaker Jonathan Glazer. A director with few feature films to his name – he had previously made Sexy Beast (2000), Birth (2004), and Under the Skin (2013) – but known for his bold cinema, a reputation solidified by his work on numerous significant music videos.

The Zone of Interest (read our review here) falls within the tradition of Holocaust films, yet the perspective it proposes is considered by many as original and ambitious. We are invited into the everyday life of Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, and his wife, Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller – read out interview with the actress here), as they and their five children live right next to the grim place of death.

While the foreground is filled with the daily activities of the family, the background and the soundtrack are loaded with signs of the horror unfolding beyond the fence of their garden.

In his approach, Jonathan Glazer proposes an unconventional directorial practice: him and cinematographer Łukasz Żal embedded several cameras in and around the house and kept them running simultaneously, with no crew on set and without revealing their location to the actors, to create the feeling of a video-surveilled space.

In a joint interview with journalists from various countries, held online in January, Jonathan Glazer spoke about the philosophy behind depicting such a topic and character development, the approach in creating the film’s visual and sound language, the decision to film near the former Auschwitz camp, and possible similarities with the world today.

Following a series of previews, The Zone of Interest will be released in theaters on February 16, distributed by Bad Unicorn, who facilitated the aforementioned interview, which served as the source for the responses below.

On the concept of the banality of evil, coined by Hannah Arendt in her book on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organizers of the Holocaust

It was certainly a key area of discussion for us throughout the making of the film because the perspective of the film or the perspective of the people in the film is obviously that of the perpetrator. We’re looking at the perpetrator. The film is trying to look at our similarity with the perpetrator, rather than our similarity with the victim. So in that sense, it is about people who have step by step become mass murderers and how disassociated they are from their crimes. They have compartmentalized so completely what they care about and what they don’t, what they value and what they don’t. 

That mindset that Hannah Arendt wrote so incredibly insightful about felt like the mindset of these real people when I read about them. The status, the petit bourgeois social ambition, property, health, space, all of these things are common to all people. So I wanted us to be able to project ourselves onto these people and see how grotesquely familiar they were to us. It was a very key text, of course, for the whole production, for the whole endeavor.

On the ethics of depicting the Holocaust in cinema

I’ve thought a lot about this, about what I should show and what I shouldn’t, about what is possible to show. And I certainly, for my part, didn’t want to reenact these atrocities visually, I didn’t want to see them. I feel that we understand these images, we know these images, we bring them with us, they are in our head. And so when you hear the sounds of these images we have in our heads, we see them again. So I didn’t need to reenact them. I suppose that became my own personal line of what I felt I could show and what I couldn’t. 

It’s an extremely delicate balance. The whole project was very delicate because I wanted the experience to be that the victims of these atrocities were out of sight in a way that they would be for the perpetrator. That they would not be out of mind for us, but 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. I think the horror is the house in this film. They say fascism starts in the family, which I believe is true. (We wanted) to show a family at this point luxuriating in achievement, let’s say, their success at this colossal human cost that they have no qualms about. It felt like the power of that, the awfulness of what we hear and what we see is the film. The space between what we hear and what we see.

On working with the actors, particularly with Sandra Hüller in creating her character, Hedwig Höss

Everything you see in the film I hope has been rigorously considered for its authenticity. Before I started writing, a very important part of the research process involved two researchers who worked at the Archives Museum. My brief to them was: Find anything you can from testimonies of survivors that mention Rudolf Höss and Hedwig Höss and their family. And so bit by bit they would do almost like an archaeological dig to find these fragments. 

One of them was a testimony by a gardener who survived the war. He overheard a conversation between Rudolf Höss and his wife, where he told her the news that he was going to be transferred and that they would have to leave, and how she reacted, how she hit the roof. She said she would have to be dragged out of there kicking and screaming because it was her dream life. She actually said that she wanted to die there, that she found her Paradise. And so that fragment tells you a lot about that person, that pathology. 

One of the interesting things Hannah Arendt said was that nazis were non-thinking people

Then I start obviously to find everything I can about Hedwig Hoss. It’s not much. And then there is another key line she says in the film, which again I didn’t write, that came from the archives. She is angry at the maid for leaving her mother’s breakfast there knowing that her mother had gone and says: If I wanted to, my husband would spread your ashes across the fields of Babice. That’s her line. She said that. So it’s in those moments that you begin to sort of see who this person might have been. You begin to make this person. 

Sandra and I built this person from these very telling details. One of the interesting things Hannah Arendt said was that they (nazis) were non-thinking people. She talked about how in order to think one has to stop first. So Sandra and I felt that the right way to approach Hedwig was to never see her stop, to always be involved in an activity. So when you see Hedwig on film, when we see what Sandra has done, she’s constantly busying herself with trivial acts and the garden and the food and the maid, in order not to think and in order not to reflect. It’s a way of how she must have been able to live, and that was simply not to stop to think. Across all of those kinds of things, you begin to shape a character. And Sandra’s approach was a physical one, which I think was absolutely right. 

On developing the film’s unique visual language, using hidden cameras and long takes

I kind of found myself not knowing how to film this. How do I film this? I didn’t want to make a film using conventional film language. Not for its own sake, but because I didn’t want to glamorize these people. Cinema by definition will glamorize – the tools of cinema, the opening up of interiority, the way we beautify when we film something, and so on. And there is a drama in the way that you construct a film when using those methods. I wanted to strip all the drama away from this film. I wasn’t interested in their drama or I certainly didn’t want to get caught up in the drama. I wanted to watch them have a drama, if that was their drama – he’s getting transferred, she doesn’t want to leave. But I didn’t want to get caught up in it. I wasn’t interested. I’m interested in watching them get caught up in it. 

I wanted to somehow find a critical distance between what I was filming, the people I was filming, and the subject I was filming, so that I was far away enough to be able to watch it, watch how they are, how they act. Not to get sucked into some screen psychology, but rather be able to project myself as the viewer onto them, so I could see myself, you know, my similarities to them. I wanted to see them as if I was in the house with them, to blur time. I did not want it to be sort of a historical film. I wanted to bring that to the present. I wanted to sort of create a world that we could drop in. And actually very little is going on in the traditional sense of story. But (it was important) to feel trapped in those spaces with these people, to be uncomfortable in their company. 

On the importance of filming right next to the former Auschwitz camp

I felt it was essential to shoot the film there. We were extremely close to the camp. We were 50 yards from the original villa. We reconstructed the villa and the garden based on all of the original designs and the simulation is accurate. The distance between the house and the camp, the house and the chimney, it’s a simulation, it’s exact. I knew that it was about this place and I needed to be at that place to make a film about that place. The weight of it, the awfulness of it, and our proximity to it while filming were essential for me – our proximity to it, and the actors’ proximity to it, and all of the unspoken doubts and fears and feelings that everybody in the cast and crew had. I think all of that feeds into the result. 

So you’re not just filming the objects in front of you and the subjects in front of you, you’re filming the air they’re breathing. You’re filming the light. You’re filming that place. If I was going to try to do this, I would have to do this there. I wanted to try and be as close to the truth as possible. It’s the horror of the place. It’s abominable. And the reality of the people you’re portraying, the reality of the danger, was a difficult thing to make from scratch. Now that it exists, I can look at it. But at the time, it was a very difficult journey for everybody to be on, because you’re not making a normal film. It’s not about a normal subject and it’s certainly not in a normal place. So it’s a combination of all of those ingredients. We all had our own relationship with the place and with our practice, with what we were doing. There was a contradiction between the excitement of making a film and being with the people you want to be with to do that, and what it’s about. That was always in everybody’s mind.

On the similarities between the period portrayed in the film and the direction the world is heading in today

Obviously, the themes of the film predate the current situation by a number of years (i.e. the film was 10 years in the making). The fact that this film is being released now into the world when we are watching atrocities on our television screens, I hope it speaks to the urgency of it. The film is there to ask ourselves why one life is more valuable than another. Our basic needs and desires are the same, fundamentally. So we are looking at these perpetrators who we can see ourselves in. It’s uncomfortable to admit, but they weren’t monsters who fell from the skies. They were human beings who committed these atrocities step by step.

It’s a terrible reality, but the film is relevant. I wish it wasn’t. I wish it felt like it happened in the past and that it was an anomaly, a one-off in human history. But it isn’t. I think that the film is trying to talk about the human impulse, the human capacity for violence, and the awfulness of that and where that leads. And how ordinary people can go down that road with enthusiasm. That’s the horror.

Ionuț Mareș

Journalist and film critic. Curator for some film festivals in Romania. At "Films in Frame" publishes interviews with both young and established filmmakers.