To work on The Zone of Interes, Jonathan Glazer’s harrowing Holocaust drama about the domestic life of an Auschwitz commandant and his family, Polish cinematographer Lukasz Zal said he had to “forget everything I was taught” about making “beautiful images.”

Glazer’s film, loosely adapted from Martin Amis’ 2014 novel, follows the seemingly mundane activities of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedl) and his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), as they strive to build a dream life for their family in their house and garden next to the camp. The smooth, stunning monochrome aesthetic Zal perfected on his Oscar-nominated lensing of Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida and Cold War would not do for Glazer’s story, which aimed to evoke the banality of evil by refusing to show Höss and Hedwig as anything but what they were: ordinary, even boring, people who carried out unspeakable crimes.

What made you want to be involved in this project?

I remember reading the script and being completely smashed by it. I had never seen this kind of approach to a Holocaust film. This wasn’t the Hollywood approach, which often can fetishize this history, even when it comes to how the characters are shown — the way the uniforms are depicted, even the use of color and dark shadows. Here, Jonathan wanted everything to be bright and light, everything looking so nice and light and normal. I remember reading this and thinking: I want to do that. I want to shoot this film because I’ve never seen anything like this before, and it goes to the core of something I’m personally very interested in, which is why people do evil, how people can treat killing [as] something ordinary, like mending a coat or cleaning the floor.

Translating the idea of “banality of evil” into visual language?

I realized that for this film, I needed to forget everything I was taught in terms of lighting, in terms of manipulating an image, the whole procedure of trying to capture moments, trying to interpret reality with my camera. This would be the complete opposite. It was against typical Hollywood cinema, that style of trying to tell the story with nice lighting and close-ups that draw you into the emotions of a scene, of the characters. Our approach was completely different: to create a completely unattractive, unappealing, almost objective imagery.

What did that mean in practice?

It meant embracing a different approach, embracing natural light, even the “ugly” light. When I was taught at school, we were also told to shoot with a nice backlight or in the “golden hour” when the light is most beautiful. Here we were shooting at noon, at 1 p.m., 2 p.m., at 3 o’clock, when the light is most harsh. For me, it was extremely exciting, because it was completely against this idea of making beautiful images. Instead, what was beautiful to me about our images for the film was how honest and how real they looked.

I had to forget what I knew about aesthetics, about using the golden ratio for framing, the golden hour for lighting, all those golden tricks you learn and you use again and again: a bit of backlight here, a camera flare there, some shallow depth of field, all the ways you can use the camera to be emotionally manipulative. We wanted a different approach, to show these characters in a way that would be objective, to try to get out of the way and just show things the way they are.

That was when something just clicked for me. I understood we were going to make this film in the most objective way possible, using the most objective lenses, the most objective lighting and the most objective framing.

Scenes in the house, shot with 10 mounted cameras, like reality TV show.

There was this idea: “Big Brother in a Nazi house.” It was a different process than what I was used to, because all my work went into the preparation process, deciding where to put the cameras. We’d set things up in the house and would go down in the basement with my camera operator and my team, going through the images with Jon. We’d change lenses, change positions, again and again. It was a similar process every day, with every scene.

A lot of the tasks I had to do were about preparing the workflow and coordinating the technology. We hooked up all the cameras via fiber cable because we didn’t want to risk disruption in the frequency with a remote connection. So we have these 10 cameras with all these cables coming out of them, going through the house. Every room had a hole in it for the cables, it was like a Swiss cheese. We were all hooked up with this advanced communication system so I could talk to the whole team, coordinating all these cameras and making all these changes. We’d prep maybe five or six hours every day for the next day’s shoot.

Equipment used?

We shot on the Sony Venice cameras because they have this Rialto camera extension system where you can link the camera bodies with fiber optic cables to these smaller, 14×10 centimeter detectors that were very easy to attach to a wall in the house or hide in a cupboard. The shoot itself was done with no crew [on set] with the actors. We were all in the basement, watching on the monitors.

We wanted the lenses to be as small as possible, but we wanted modern lenses. We used Leica lenses, which were amazing because they were so sharp. The whole idea was to use contemporary equipment to make it look 21st century, not vintage. We shot on digital and we wanted it to look digital, not like film, like sepia.

We used very high F-stops to have everything in the frame in focus to not make the decision for the viewer about what to look at but to try to have everything in the frame in focus. It all went back to this idea of being as objective as possible, of trying to do as little manipulation as we could.

Did shooting this way change your view about other historical films?