It’s a morning like so many others in a bourgeois household. While the children eat breakfast, the mother gives her instructions to the servants. The father is preparing to leave for the day. In fact, he is only a stone’s throw from his workplace: a concentration camp. Suddenly, this revelation forces the viewer to reevaluate the banality of what came before. The everydayness of evil, as well as its timelessness, is at the heart of the film The Zone of Interest(VO, s.-tf The area of interest), by Jonathan Glazer, winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes and UK candidate for the Oscar for best foreign feature film. During a virtual press conference at which The duty was able to attend, the English filmmaker returns to this deliberately destabilizing project.
The film is very loosely inspired by a novel by Martin Amis published in 2014.
“My interest in a story espousing the perspective of the author of the crime, of the aggressor, predated the discovery of Martin’s novel. This is an extremely uncomfortable narrative bias, for obvious reasons. However, the novel gave me permission to go for it,” explains the director of Birth(The birth) and D’Under the Skin.
Moreover, after Under the Skin, The Zone of Interest marks the second collaboration between Jonathan Glazer and producer James Wilson. Also present at the videoconference, the latter notes: “In the book, it is a fictitious concentration camp and a fictitious commander. It is largely told from the point of view of this commander and his family: his personal and professional little world… It constitutes a 180-degree turn from the traditional way of revisiting the Holocaust. »
Closer to History
In the process of adapting the novel, one of Jonathan Glazer’s first decisions was, paradoxically, to move away from fiction.
“I felt something very powerful when reading the book, but I didn’t consider adapting it faithfully. Above all, it was like a sort of spark, a click. I quickly began to investigate the source of the novel, the real people from whom Martin had drawn inspiration for his characters. The fictional commander depicted is obviously based on the real Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höss. The more I read about the real man and, by extension, his wife [Hedwig Höss], his family and his universe, a private universe, his private life, in fact, and the more I connected with the true story, as opposed to the fictionalized version offered by the book. »
For the record, Rudolf Höss was a high-ranking Nazi officer who was in charge of the Auschwitz camp. In the film, he is played by Christian Friedel. Sandra Hüller, who recently triumphed in Anatomy of a fallby Justine Triet, plays Hedwig Höss.
“Sandra and Christian – Sandra in particular – were reluctant,” reveals the filmmaker. This was, I think, because they had already been asked to play Nazis several times, and both of them had a real dislike for it. But when I explained to them how I was going to make the film, the goal of the film, they understood that there was no fetishization on my part, quite the contrary. And we weren’t filming in a film studio 1,600 kilometers from the scene: we were filming 50 meters from the walls of Auschwitz. I am convinced that the special atmosphere of the place is found in every pixel of the film. »
A disturbing mirror
By taking as protagonists those who commit infamy, Jonathan Glazer wanted to demonstrate how easy it is to do evil. For anyone.
“Yes, the film is set in 1943, during the Holocaust, but I wanted to talk about something more primal, something underlying that. You know: the capacity to perpetrate violence that we have, as humans, as well as the ordinary nature of the people who commit it. In the case before us, these people did not constitute “exceptions”. They were normal people who, little by little, became mass murderers, and who dissociated themselves from their crimes to such an extent that they did not consider their actions to be crimes. Every technique and process used to make the film had to serve this idea, but through the lens of the present, of the 21ste century. »
In this regard, James Wilson clarifies: “The central question of the film is not: how could these ordinary people do these terrible things? That’s the concept of the banality of evil. The real question, and it is timely, is: how much are we like these ordinary people? I think the film deals with both past and present events. We’re talking about hundreds of years of history. This was then, and this is now, and this is ongoing… It’s a continuum. »
Accounting for this timeless dimension, this “continuum”, was fundamental, according to Jonathan Glazer.
“I think we need to evolve, as a species, in terms of our propensity for violence. The film deals with the possibility that in each of us there is an abuser. And it all depends on our choices: what we choose to love, Who we choose to love, who we choose to sympathize with…and who we decide not to sympathize with. I refuse to believe that we cannot evolve. »
The film The Zone of Interest will be on display on January 19 in Montreal and on January 26 elsewhere in Quebec.