It’s surely the most provocative movie you’ll see this year. The Zone of Interest, by the British filmmaker Jonathan Glazer—his first movie in a decade—is a meticulous and unsettling adaptation of a 2014 Martin Amis novel set at Auschwitz and centered on the middle-class German family that runs the place. Yet the film makes a radical, risky choice: There is barely a glimpse of Jewish victims and no scenes of violence in this patiently wrought story—just commandant Rudolph Höss, played by the German actor Christian Friedel; his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller); and their two children, living their lives in the shadow of atrocity.
“He wanted to create a movie about bystanders,” Friedel said of Glazer on a recent afternoon in Manhattan. Friedel, who portrays Höss as a stolid and empathetic family man—one nonetheless focused on efficient killing methods at the camp he runs—was here to promote the film, a delicate endeavor given the painfully fraught conversations about antisemitism that have been swirling since the war in Gaza began. The Zone of Interest is a film about violence against Jews that forces you to identify with the perpetrators, not the victims. An advanced screening planned at Auschwitz had been postponed, Friedel told me.
To be sure, there’s no ignoring the horror in Zone, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes last May and is the UK’s submission for the international-feature Oscar. You can hear it throughout—the alarming sounds of gunfire and human misery from the camp that surrounds the Höss home—and it makes you think about complicity, compartmentalization, and repression. “I think there’s a darkness in all of us,” Friedel told me, recalling his first conversations with Glazer about taking on the lead role. “We are not all Nazis, for God’s sake, but whether we are gay or straight, Black or white, which religion we follow—in all of us is a darkness. And Jonathan said to me, during our first meeting in London, ‘There are two wolves inside of us—a good wolf and a bad wolf. And which wolf do we feed the most?’”
Friedel is the least wolfish actor you can imagine, a gentle-seeming 44. You’ll be familiar with his work only if you are as fond as I am of prestige German TV. (Check him out in the excellent shows Babylon Berlin and Perfume, both on Netflix.) He’s also an accomplished musician and an avowed Depeche Mode fan who was also in New York to see the new-wave stalwarts perform at Madison Square Garden. I spoke to him about his astonishing performance in Zone.
Vogue: Tell me about your first meetings with the director Jonathan Glazer. What did he say that he wanted to accomplish with the film?
Christian Friedel: I didn’t know anything when I auditioned, only that it was a new movie from Glazer, and I was excited because I grew up with his work—the two iconic videos he made for Radiohead, and I’d seen some of his commercials when I was younger. It started with a self-tape, and I had to describe myself and say why I became an actor. I decided to do it in German—maybe because it felt natural. I think this was a door opening, because Jonathan doesn’t understand German. He tried to learn German, but it’s too difficult. So then I met him in London and he described how the Amis book was more of an inspiration, an essence. Amis writes about normality—there were birds in the air, and it was a lovely day, the sun was shining, and so on—and next to this is the horror of Auschwitz. This is the essence of what Jonathan used.
It’s probably not a simple thing for a German actor to play a Nazi. So I’m curious about how you establish trust with someone like Glazer—who doesn’t speak German, as you noted—and is casting German actors to play historical figures. How do you know you’re doing something responsible?
I trusted him a lot, and it’s true I play the Nazi, but Höss is not only a Nazi. Yes, he wears the uniform, but I’m searching for the father, for the ordinary man. Jonathan read an interview from an American journalist who interviewed the actual Rudolph Höss when he was at the Nuremberg trials. And he described Höss as a normal, ordinary school teacher. And so this was the search. Yes, he wears this uniform. Yes, he is the commandant of Auschwitz. But I think the most important thing to me is that this is about us. A Nazi could be anyone, in a way.
The movie was shot in Poland, in a house near Auschwitz. What was it like to be so close to the camp?
I felt the responsibility towards the victims every day. And when I visited Auschwitz for the first time and understood the dimension of the crime, I felt the responsibility. It’s so…huge. How is it possible to kill so many people in a short period of time? The organization of Rudolph Höss to perform this incredible crime, to make it more effective—it’s unbelievable and horrible.
I’ve read that Glazer positioned fixed cameras in the house so that the filming could be done remotely and act more like surveillance. What was that like?
Yes, he said it’s like Big Brother in a Nazi house. Sometimes there were 10 cameras fixed at different angles and no technicians at the set. The focus puller was sitting in the basement of this house. Jonathan was next to the set in a trailer with 10 monitors. And so the actors would talk about the scene or the situation and say, “Let’s figure it out, let’s make a first take”—and we had all the time in the world. We’d forget where the cameras were. Sometimes we wouldn’t see them. You never want to be boring when you’re shooting a movie. You want to be exciting or share your emotional archive, or—I don’t know. But here we were allowed to be boring. We were allowed to find things out with all the time in the world. It was a luxury situation.
To some degree this is a movie about a man’s career maybe not going that well.
That’s so true. Höss wants to be the best in his job. As he said at the Nuremberg trials: “It was my work. I had to do this work, and I wanted to do it the best I could.”
If you were to describe Zone without seeing it, you might think that it’s moralistic or a movie that casts judgment on all of us. But it doesn’t feel that way when you watch it. The movie’s actually quite seductive. We identify with your character. I am drawn to Sandra Hüller’s character, who plays your wife, and I would think anyone would be.
It’s saying, no, we are not all evil, but we could be evil if the political system changed, if we want to protect our families or friends or to survive. Sometimes it’s a thin line, and it’s good to know that and to decide to live in a different way. Someone said to me, “Political changes start in the family.” And I think this is right. It starts with ourselves and our loved ones, with our thinking about the world, about what’s going on.
Has the war in Gaza added any dimension to your thinking about how this film will be received and what the conversation will be like around it?
Yes, we talked about it and about the war in Ukraine, which is so close to Poland, where we filmed. And now the tragedy in Israel, Gaza—this never-ending conflict. We postponed the screening in Auschwitz because, in a way, we don’t want to use actual conflicts to promote a movie. And the Austrian director Michael Haneke—he’s a very important mentor to me because my first movie was The White Ribbon—he said to me, “Movies are a springboard, and the viewer has to jump.” And I think this is a good way to describe our movie. This is Jonathan’s vision. And it means a lot to him. It’s a very emotional project to him. But now it’s up to the viewer. It’s in the viewer’s hands.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
