The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review

‘These people absolutely could be us’

Jonathan Glazer reveals why he set his latest film in the home of the Nazi who mastermind­ed Auschwitz

- By Robbie COLLIN

At a small north London cinema in the spring of 2014, Jonathan Glazer’s family and friends filed into the auditorium to watch their boy’s latest film. The air was thrumming with filial pride: the film, titled Under the Skin, starred Scarlett Johansson from the Marvel movies, had got a wonderful review in the Telegraph and was, apparently, some sort of science-fiction adventure set in Glasgow and the Scottish Highlands. As the credits rolled, 108 minutes later, just after Johansson’s alien temptress had been burnt alive in a forest by her would-be rapist, Glazer’s family filed back out to meet the director in the foyer.

“Come on, mate,” his brother said eventually, breaking the silence. “When are you going to make another Sexy Beast?”

The answer is: not yet. Glazer made his name at the turn of the millennium with that stylish British gangster flick, which memorably opened with a shot of Ray Winstone sunning himself in snug orange Speedos. But the intervenin­g 24 years have yielded just two more features from Glazer: Birth (2004) and Under the Skin, each bolder and more dizzyingly innovative than the last. His fourth arrives in British cinemas early next month.

The Zone of Interest is a glancingly loose adaptation of a 2014 Martin Amis novel that imagined the domestic and romantic travails of the Nazi officers at Auschwitz. The only thing Glazer has retained directly from Amis’s book is a single line of dialogue: a black gag in which an officer idly contemplat­es how most efficientl­y to gas a roomful of party guests. The rest of his script draws on the concentrat­ion camp’s archives, and centres on two real historical figures: Rudolf Höss (played by Christian Friedel), the young SS commandant whose diligence and devotion to his employers made possible the industrial­ised murder of millions of Jews; and Hedwig (Anatomy of a Fall star, Sandra Hüller), the mother of Rudolf’s children and his proud homemaker wife.

Glazer had two researcher­s spend four months digging in the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, recording every detail they could find about the family’s life, spent in a house whose well-tended garden abutted the concentrat­ion camp’s boundary wall. The key piece of the puzzle, Glazer explains, was a scrap of testimony from a Polish gardener who overheard the Hösses arguing one morning about Rudolf ’s impending relocation to the SS’s Economic and Administra­tive Office, far from the hell-on-earth he now governed. Hedwig was furious, the gardener recalled, because she wanted to stay.

Over coffee in the drawing room of a London hotel, Glazer explains that it took Amis’s book to “unlock something” in his mind – an idea for a film about the Holocaust that asks the audience to recognise themselves in its perpetrato­rs rather than the victims.

Glazer, who is Jewish, understand­s this is a spectacula­rly tricky propositio­n. So, why do it? The 58-year-old looks into his coffee. “I mean, I do like a challenge,” he says. “I knew this film would have to exist on a knife edge. But I also knew there was no place other than on that knife edge where I wanted it to be.”

His late father, who had worked as a magazine designer at the TV Times, urged him to drop the project in those early days. “My dad died four years ago, but back then, when I told him what I was working on, I remember so clearly that he just said three words to me: ‘Let it rot.’ In other words, don’t dig it up. And I remember thinking, I wish we could – because we’d somehow evolved beyond it. But then you read reports of the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, the genocides in Darfur, and in other regions of the world, and we clearly haven’t.” A few days after we speak, Hamas will launch its October 7 attack on Israel, killing more Jews in a single day than at any point since 1945.

Glazer’s ancestors came to the UK in the 1900s, from what was then Bessarabia, to escape the Kishinev pogroms, and his upbringing in the north London suburb of Hadley Wood was Reform Jewish, “synagogue three times a year, and Friday-night dinners every week”. Thanks to his father’s beloved VHS recorder, film was a constant presence. “Sydney Pollack, Sidney Lumet, Billy Wilder, they were all absorbed, cross-legged on the floor beside his armchair,” he says. But he was left to discover the Holocaust on his own, through articles in his parents’ copies of National Geographic and Time. “Some Jewish families talk about it openly and go and visit the sites; and others stay away, because it’s just too painful. For my family, it was the second of those,” says Glazer. “And that was that.”

Growing up, did he feel vulnerable because of his heritage? “I mean, it was the 1970s, so there were a lot of skinheads about. When you left school, you’d put your blazer and your tie in your bag before getting on the bus home. So, not overwhelmi­ngly. But you’re conscious of it. You’re aware that you’re thought of as different.”

Even while recalling his own childhood, Glazer speaks in a tone of detached yet lively curiosity. He also regularly casts doubt on his own conclusion­s – though perhaps that’s

because unanswerab­le questions run through so much of his work.

Almost as soon as he started work on The Zone of Interest, he knew he didn’t want to make something that could be filed away neatly as a Holocaust film. “It’s its own genre, right? And some of them I’ve been personally moved by very much. But it was a label I felt I had to avoid.” Using this atrocity to shock or tearjerk felt very wrong, he says.

“I read a lot about the ethics of

Holocaust depiction. And it kept me up at night. Still does.” At first, he wondered if he should depict Höss’s violence in his dreams: an idea that broke loose and became a short BBC film in 2019, The Fall. Then he cracked it: the film wouldn’t depict the Holocaust at all, but rather a comfortabl­e life that had been built around it. Only the sounds of the camp at work – the bark of dogs, the crack of pistols, the low, nightlong rumble of furnaces – force us to imagine the images the film itself refuses to show. Glazer obtained permission from the Auschwitz Museum to shoot the film on location at the camp itself, largely in a refurbishe­d former SS residence that still stands on its edge.

He and his crew rigged the building with hidden static cameras and microphone­s – “Big Brother in the Nazi house,” is how he describes it – then directed the actors, via a German translator, from a van full of monitors outside.

“I wanted to avoid all the trappings of cinema – the carefully positioned camera, the nice lighting, the make-up, whatever – because those would empower [the characters],” he says. “I had no interest in being close to them or participat­ing in their drama. Frankly, I just wanted to watch them. So reality TV became the aesthetic compass.”

That look caused any sense of historical distance to collapse, he goes on; and, with it, any sense of safety for the viewer.

“We could be watching the daily life of an executive at Google,” he says. “Serving the corporatio­n that’s set him up for life. I wanted to say, ‘These people absolutely could be us’ – and that human beings still have the capacity for what they did.”

In the end, the perspectiv­e shift is as simple as it is shattering. Holocaust films make you think: “Look at what they did.” With The Zone of Interest, it’s: “Look at what we do.”

While making the film, Glazer paid the bills by directing perfume adverts. He is perhaps the last great British filmmaker to hone his craft in the late-20th-century advertisin­g boom, and his commercial­s and music videos – notably, Jamiroquai’s Virtual Insanity (1996), with its illusory conveyor-belt floor – are still cited among the best ever made.

The freedom of the time, and the budgets, allowed him to create mini-masterwork­s, such as the 1999 surfer ad for Guinness. Not every client was delighted by his vision, though. An ad for Cadbury – in which, to the strains of Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances, a cackling Denis Lavant lobs Flake bars at terrified damsels while dressed as the devil – so appalled the chocolate firm’s executives that it never aired.

This is the immediate reaction Glazer’s films tend to draw, so he was surprised when The Zone of Interest received a warm reception at Cannes, where it went on to win the Grand Prix. “I knew there was something there,” he admits, “but I didn’t think other people would get on board with it as quickly as they did.” At the Venice screenings of his two previous features, the supernatur­al thriller Birth, with Nicole Kidman, and, almost a decade later, Under the Skin, both were rowdily booed, and took months, if not years, to find their audience.

Amid the furore at the latter’s premiere, a well-placed audience member recalls Scarlett Johansson leaning over to Glazer and whispering: “What does this mean?” Well, they had been trying to make something provocativ­e, he’d replied, so it can only be good news if the audience felt provoked. “No,” she whispered back. “What does it mean for my career?”

For most other filmmakers, the 10-year gap between that film and The Zone of Interest would have been read as a sort of profession­al exile. But cinema is incapable of casting out Glazer into the wilderness – he’s already out there of his own volition, following trails that no one else dare tread.

‘I read a lot about the ethics of Holocaust depiction. It kept me up at night. Still does’

The Zone of Interest is in cinemas from Feb 2

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 ?? ?? ‘My dad said, “Let it rot”’: director Glazer
‘My dad said, “Let it rot”’: director Glazer
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 ?? ?? g ‘We could be watching the daily life of a Google exec’: clockwise from far left, The Zone of Interest; Under the Skin’s Scarlett Johansson; and Nicole Kidman with Danny Huston in Birth
g ‘We could be watching the daily life of a Google exec’: clockwise from far left, The Zone of Interest; Under the Skin’s Scarlett Johansson; and Nicole Kidman with Danny Huston in Birth

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