The Zone of Interest
Jonathan Glazer’s quietly shocking drama is set in and around the stately German bourgeois home where Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), an SS officer, carries on a comfortable domestic existence with his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and children. He’s the commandant of Auschwitz — and the concentration camp is right over the wall next to their garden.
Glazer recreates the nightmare of evil, using the distant sounds of Auschwitz (the fire from the ovens, the screams) to evoke the kind of monstrous evil that the Höss clan–and many other German families–live in denial of.
The film is transcendental in visual style, sound system, and other aspects.
The Zone of Interest was ten years in the making. After completing Under the Skin, Glazer became intrigued by the then not-yet-published Martin Amis novel The Zone of Interest. He optioned the novel after reading it.
Paul and Hannah Doll, the novel’s two main characters, were loosely based on Rudolf Höss, the longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp, and his wife Hedwig.
Glazer opted to use the historical figures instead and conducted two years of extensive research into the Hösses. He made several visits to Auschwitz and was profoundly affected by the sight of the Höss residence.
He collaborated with Auschwitz Museum and other organizations, and obtained special permission to access the archives, where he examined testimonies provided by survivors and individuals who had been employed in the Höss household.
By piecing together these testimonies, Glazer was able to construct a detailed portrayal of the individuals connected to the events.
He also consulted historian Timothy Snyder’s 2015 book “Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning” during his research.
Casting
Christian Friedel first met Glazer and producer Jim Wilson in London in 2019 for the role of Rudolf Höss. Although daunted by Glazer ‘s description of the film project, Friedel felt compelled too.
Friedel, who had first met Sandra Hüller in 2013 while acting together in the historical drama “Amour Fou,” recommended her for the role of Rudolf’s wife Hedwig.
Hüller was first sent an excerpt of the script, an argument between Rudolf and Hedwig presented out of context, before learning the project’s nature as a film about the Holocaust. Though she had resolved never to play a Nazi, Hüller was convinced after reading the script and meeting with Glazer, impressed with how he shared and addressed her concerns about how to properly depict Nazism on screen.
Hüller’s own dog, a black Weimeraner, plays Dilla, the Höss family dog in the movie.
Young Polish Girl: Angelic Figure
The film’s young Polish girl is inspired by a woman named Alexandria, whom Glazer met during his research. At 12, as a member of the Polish resistance, she used to cycle to the camp to leave apples for the starving prisoners.
She discovered a piece of music written by a prisoner named Thomas Wolf, who survived the war. Alexandria was 90 when she met Glazer and died shortly after. The bike in the film and the dress the actress wears both belonged to her.
The Höss House
The original Höss house has been a private residence since the end of the war. Production designer Chris Oddy spent months converting a derelict home beyond the camp wall into a replica of the Höss residence, and started planting the garden in April 2021 so that it would be in bloom when filming began.
Principal photography began in Auschwitz in summer 2021 and lasted about 55 days. Additional shoot took place in Jelenia Góra in January 2022.
Visual Style
Glazer and cinematographer Łukasz Żal embedded up to 10 cameras in and around the house and kept them running simultaneously, with no crew on set. The approach, which Glazer dubbed “Big Brother in the Nazi house,” allowed the actors to improvise and experiment extensively during filming.
Glazer and Żal aimed for a modern look, which did not “aesthetize” Auschwitz. Thus, only practical and natural lighting was used.
Glazer did not want the atrocities occurring inside the camp to be seen, only heard; he described the sound as “the other film.”
Transcendental Sound
Sound designer Johnnie Burn compiled 600-page document containing relevant events at Auschwitz, testimonies from witnesses, and a large map of the camp so that the distance and echoes of the sounds could be properly determined. He spent a year building sound library before filming began, which included sounds of manufacturing machinery, crematoria, furnaces, boots, period-accurate gunfire and human sounds of pain. He continued building the library well into the shoot and post-production.
Most of Mica Levi’s score went unused, as Glazer and Burn did not want to have the film “sweetened or dramatized” by it. The music Levi wrote for the prologue remained, as did soundscapes created for several sequences and a sound collage for the epilogue.
