The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘I couldn’t let her into my body’
How Sandra Hüller, the German star of two of the year’s most remarkable films, confronted her nation’s darkest chapter – by playing her first (and final) Nazi
‘Were there any of these people in my family? My country was full of them’
“The funny thing about the Swiss form of German,” Sandra Hüller explains, “is that it makes even the nastiest words sound snuggly and sweet.”
By way of illustration, she locks eyes with her webcam and says something, in a language not her own, that could pass for Hobbit poetry: warm, honeyed and bright, like an alpine dawn in vocal form.
“See?” she smiles. “I just called you a disgusting, stupid pig.”
Hüller’s linguistic skills have served her well of late, and not just when it comes to insulting film critics over Zoom. (To be clear, the exchange above was both solicited and enjoyed.) The 45-year-old German actress is currently best known for starring in the 2016 comedy Toni Erdmann, in which she played an ambitious corporate consultant whose prank-loving father turns up unannounced on a critical business trip.
She is speaking from her home in Leipzig, where she lives with her 12-year-old daughter and black Weimaraner dog – the latter of whom pads around happily in the background of the call. In conversation, it’s hard to miss the resemblance to her Toni Erdmann character: unruffled froideur on the surface; quiet amusement fizzing beneath.
Her two latest films – one French, one British; both among the finest of the year – have given her every reason to fizz. At Cannes in May, they took the festival’s two highest honours, the Palme d’Or and Grand Prix, between them. Hüller, who gives different, but equally fearless lead performances in each, is already being tipped as a prospective Oscar nominee – for either, and perhaps even both.
Anatomy of a Fall, which opens in UK cinemas next Friday, arrives first. Directed by France’s Justine Triet, with whom Hüller last worked on the psychosexual thriller Sibyl in 2019, it’s a slippery modern-day whodunit in which the dun, as much as the who, is what’s up for dispute. Hüller plays a successful novelist whose husband – also a writer, albeit a failed-slashfrustrated one – tumbles to his death from the top floor window of their Alpine chalet.
Or possibly from the balcony below. Perhaps she pushed him, or perhaps he jumped deliberately, or perhaps it was an accident. Triet dreamt up the film for Hüller specifically – the main character is even called Sandra – and though she’s German, we only ever hear her speaking English (at home) and
French (in court), in roughly equal proportions. We are left to decode her knowing that every thought she articulates is mediated; every admission a gloss.
Swapping between languages, Hüller says, “made something switch in my body. It’s like each one doesn’t just change how you communicate and express yourself, but shapes the way you hold yourself and move.”
That was vital, she explains, in pinning down who Sandra was – especially since a significant piece of the puzzle was withheld from her throughout the shoot. During filming, Triet never actually told her whether or not Sandra killed her husband.
At first, she says, “I found myself clinging on to certain facts in the script that felt decisive – like, if she really had done it, I told myself that meant she would have also had to accept the fact that their young son might find his father’s body, which seemed inconceivable. But, I mean,” she smiles, “she could have.”
In the end, she decided to play the part “like Sandra believed she hadn’t done it – and if she had, like many perpetrators, there was some mechanism inside her head that insisted otherwise. So really, I cheated.” Having now seen the film, has she worked it out?
“I still don’t know,” she laughs. “And if Justine does, she hasn’t told me yet.”
Hüller’s other new film took that problem and turned it on its head. In The Zone of Interest, the first feature in a decade from Britain’s Jonathan Glazer, she plays Hedwig Höss, the house-proud wife of Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz. There’s no ambiguity to play here: the woman is complicit in genocide. Her tastefully appointed family home abuts the camp itself; the flowers in her well-kept garden are fed on the ashes of dead Jews.
Yet Hedwig’s comfortable life, and her husband’s status as one of the Holocaust’s coldest facilitators, are sources of nothing but pride. She tunes out the constant roar of furnaces and cracks of gunshots as if they were noise pollution from a nearby road.
Like most German actors, Hüller had already been asked to play Nazis, at various points during her career. But on principle, she had always refused – dreading that she might create sympathy for such a person, or somehow romanticise her nation’s dark past. Yet something about Glazer’s pitch was different.
“I still had huge doubts,” she says. “I had a lot of conversations, both with Jonathan and also my family and friends. In the end I decided to do it because I don’t think I play a character in the film – I played an element, or a piece of a puzzle. I couldn’t allow her to get into my body and brain. And this is the first and last time I will ever play such a role. It’s the only way that I can imagine approaching it.”
What helped, she goes on, “was hearing the doubts that Jonathan also had, about how it could all go so wrong. But it felt like something that had to be done. Because we have to show these people for who they were. There is a human obligation not to turn away.”
Glazer’s film, which was loosely inspired by the 2014 Martin Amis novel of the same name, makes a point of not showing the atrocities at Auschwitz directly. But as the Höss family studiously turn a blind eye, it only makes the audience all the more painfully conscious of what’s being ignored.
Cinema is a naturally empathic medium: all of its basic tools, from lighting to camera angles, are ultimately in service of that. So working out a way to “film these people without filming them,” as Hüller puts it, became the key to cracking the project. What Glazer settled on was restoring a former Nazi staff house, mere feet from Auschwitz itself, and filling it with static surveillance cameras, which would coolly observe the Hösses as they went about their lives. The camera operators themselves were in the basement, while Glazer directed the cast via earpieces from a nearby shed. Hüller describes the process as totally unlike performance in any conventional sense.
“There was no artificial light, no close-ups, never a sense of which angle would be used. And that created a tension – that the feeling of being watched all the time made the cameras more like persons, or entities. It was a technical thing,
but it became something else.”
To prepare, she visited Auschwitz for the first time. “I always felt that when I went it would somehow provide an answer – that afterwards I would understand, in some way, this awful chapter in our history.” She pauses. “But that didn’t happen at all. It only clarified how incomprehensible it all was.”
She also dug into her own family’s history – at least, as deeply as that history would yield. Hüller was born in 1978 in a rural part of what was East Germany, just over a decade before the Iron Curtain was torn down. Her parents were both teachers, born after the war, but Hitler had been in the ascendant just a generation beforehand.
“So I researched my own ancestry, to see if anyone had been an active Nazi,” she says. “I mean, I know that older members of my family served in the Wehrmacht. But they were young at the time and were conscripted, rather than it being something they chose.”
She asked her surviving older relatives if anyone had been a party member. “They all told me: ‘No, there was no one.’” She scoured the family’s papers, too – “And of course, there was no written record of it either.” Was she relieved? She hesitates, and looks momentarily lost. “I can’t trust that there were none of these people in my family,” she says finally. “Because look at my country – it was full of them.”
Neither cinema nor theatre, her first love, figured in Hüller’s early childhood under communism: a Polish cartoon called Bolek and Lolek was about as much culture as she got. But shortly after the Wall fell, a drama department trip to Berlin caught her imagination, and she applied to the city’s prestigious Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts, which even in the GDR days had been known as an incubator of talent.
“School taught me that the theatre was a place where things were easier to say,” she says. “It was coded sometimes, but everybody knew the codes. So it was as open a space as we had.” By the time she enrolled there in the mid-1990s, “it was like you could do anything you wanted”.
For the next two decades, she moved between stage and screen, and found her niche in both. In 2003, she was named Theater heute magazine’s young actress of the year. In 2006, she won the Berlin Film Festival’s Silver Bear for her performance in Hans-Christian Schmid’s Requiem as a young devout Catholic who comes to believe her epilepsy is the work of evil spirits.
But the far broader acclaim for Toni Erdmann – it swept the European Film Awards and was nominated for an Oscar – discomfited
her. Its initial wild reception at Cannes had been “so much fun” – but for months afterwards, she “didn’t know how to move on from it”. The obligatory trip to Hollywood for “meetings” ensued, though no work resulted. Did Star Wars or Marvel try to get her?
“No,” she snorts, with a laugh that suggests bone-deep relief. “But it was a strange moment. My feelings about my profession hadn’t changed. My dreams hadn’t changed. But it was like I’d been nudged out of my path.”
With these two new films, has she found it again?
“Oh yes,” she laughs. “This year, I am a very happy hiker.”