‘It’s like Big Brother in a Nazi house’: Christian Friedel on making The Zone of Interest

Christian Friedel’s first glimpse of The Zone of Interest was startling. No surprise there. Jonathan Glazer’s film, set in and around Auschwitz at the height of its murderous efficiency, has been unsettling festival viewers since its premiere at Cannes, last May. Friedel plays Rudolf Höss, the camp’s longest-serving commandant, as he lives a chillingly ordinary life in the middle-class home that abuts the killing ground. We see no violence. But we hear a near constant clatter of clanking and pistol shots. The ambient chorus of death.

“It was really surprising to see the film in its entirety,” says Friedel. “When you watch the film for the first time you watch it technically. You remember the shooting days. You realise the decisions Jonathan made. You realise the work. It was surprising and overwhelming at the same time.”

There is always some of that for an actor. But Friedel and Sandra Hüller, who plays Höss’s wife, were, when filming, at a greater distance than is usual from the finished product. No film has been shot in this fashion before. I won’t try to explain it. Friedel can do that.

“I don’t know if your readers watch the TV show Big Brother,” he says. “But Jonathan said it is like Big Brother in a Nazi house. We had this multicamera system. There were different angles built in the house, and sometimes we shot scenes simultaneously in different rooms. Sometimes we shot inside the house and outside the house at the same time. We can leave the house, go into the grounds and come back without interruptions.”

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To clarify, Glazer and Lukasz Zal, his cinematographer, mounted as many as 10 digital cameras about the house and allowed them to stay running. The cast could move from room to room without having to cut. It was as much an act of surveillance as one of conventional film-making.

“Jonathan invited us to search for the truth,” says Friedel. “Jonathan said, ‘Don’t act. Just be.’ We were alone in this house, without technicians. Jonathan was in a separate trailer, next to the set. The focus puller and the camera department were in the basement. All the actors were in the same boat. We all had the same tension. We all don’t know what’s going on, how long will be the take.”

Poignantly, The Zone of Interest, very loosely derived from a novel by Martin Amis, premiered on the day the author died. Glazer’s screenplay leaves little unaltered bar the book’s setting. He follows Höss and family as, threatened with relocation, they make the best of the privileges that come the way of a bourgeois family. The phrase “banality of evil” has been overused in reviews. But one can’t deny that the apparent normality of the Höss family adds greatly to the miasma of unease that hangs around this extraordinary project. On another timeline he would be regional manager of an insurance company or an accountant at a golf club.

It was important that we, as an audience, realise, Oh my God, this could be me. In some situations I understand him

“That was the challenge, to create this normality, this ordinary life,” says Friedel in predictably perfect English. “Sometimes we were allowed to be boring or to make mistakes. Sometimes as an actor, if you have a scene, you want to give your best emotionally. Sometimes we’re just sitting, listening and watching. It was a challenge. It was important that we, as an audience, realise, Oh my God, this could be me. In some situations I understand him. He’s an evil person. But now he’s cuddling a dog. He is reading a fairy tale to his children.”

It hardly needs to be said that Christian Friedel is no sort of monster. Indeed he seems positively merry. A fresh-faced fellow who has somehow passed 40, he was born and raised, until that ceased to be an option, in the old East Germany. When not acting, he plays in an elaborate, vaguely post-prog band called (what else?) Woods of Birnam. He seems touched when I sincerely note that I’ve been enjoying their concept album retelling Macbeth through song.

“I always was a musician and an actor at the same time,” he says. “Sometimes I use the wonderful German word for ‘entertainer’, but that makes me sound a little bit like Liberace or something!”

You can see him in the excellent TV series Babylon Berlin. But, to this point, he has probably been best known outside Germany as the schoolteacher in Michael Haneke’s Palme d’Or-winning The White Ribbon, from 2009. The connections between that and the current film are interesting. Set among troubled children in Germany before the first World War, the Haneke film looks to be gesturing towards the Glazer project’s concerns.

“The children in The White Ribbon could be the future perpetrators in The Zone of Interest,” agrees Friedel. “I think there is a strong connection. And I think Haneke is an inspiring director for Jonathan. I’m sure about that fact. He realised he was searching for a kind of schoolteacher. Maybe he saw The White Ribbon and that was an inspiration.”

Glazer has had an odd career. Initially a commercials director – the famous Guinness ad with the horses breaking through waves was his – the Englishman had, to this point, made just three features: Sexy Beast, Birth and Under the Skin. Each has become a modern classic (even Birth, which got inexplicably poor reviews on release). A recent poll of critics voted Under the Skin, a queasy science-fiction flick starring Scarlett Johansson, the best British film of the century.

The Zone of Interest has already taken on the status of unholy icon. It is up for five Academy Awards, including best picture, and seems certain, as a project largely German, to become the first British title to win best international picture.

The horror it doesn’t exactly portray is heightened by the middle-class nonchalance of those in charge. “This darkness exists in all of us,” says Friedel. “I learned this from people like Höss. Even in Germany, now, people are in streets demonstrating against fascism. Against this right-wing party.”

I wondered if I, as a foreigner, should bring this up. But few countries in Europe are now untroubled by a resurgent far right. In Germany forces from that wing are having greater electoral success than any equivalents since the second World War. Last week more than 100,000 people turned out to protest against the rise of the surging Alternative für Deutschland party when reports emerged of it discussing the deportation of migrants. What a time for The Zone of Interest, much of which was shot near the site of Auschwitz, to go before German audiences.

“Some of the younger people are saying, ‘Maybe this could be a lie. Maybe the Holocaust didn’t exist,’” says Friedel. “This is the reason for art: telling stories to remind us. So that we can learn from our past and from this incredible crime. If you’re standing in this camp you feel the dimension of this horror.”

Friedel uses the original Polish word for “Auschwitz” as he gets more animated.

“I have to say, everyone has to visit Oświęcim. Everyone needs to visit Oświęcim. They need to visit the museum. The younger generation maybe have no familiar pictures of this. Maybe they don’t know so much about the past. When they see our movie they maybe feel the atmosphere. They have to ask: what’s going on there? We have to be aware that history repeats – and we have to be aware that we learn from our mistakes. I have had conversations with my grandparents, and they have told me horrible stories. I felt then that was not so long ago. Now the younger generation feel it has passed.”

The film relies greatly on the convincing, icily functional relationship between Rudolf and Hedwig Höss. Friedel and Sandra Hüller look to have been great pals for a decade. They first met when acting opposite one another in Jessica Hausner’s austere period drama Amour Fou. Hüller was the queen of Cannes in 2023. The heavily Oscar-nominated Anatomy of a Fall won the Palme d’Or. The Zone of Interest took the Grand Prix. After decades of solid work, she has become the actor of the moment.

“Sandra and I became friends when we worked together for the first time, and we trust each other a lot,” says Friedel. “It was really important for this movie to have a colleague you could trust, like Sandra. We felt the responsibility every day, because we are working so close to the original camp. Because we were so long in Oświęcim. And Sandra is an actress who is fearless. She is an inspiring personality.”

[ Jonathan Glazer: The joy of division ]

We are talking the day before the 2024 Oscar nominations emerge. Hüller seemed certain to be up in the best actress category for Anatomy of a Fall. She looked to be 50-50 in best supporting actor for The Zone of Interest.

“She is not only an extraordinary actress. She is an extraordinary human,” says Friedel. “And I hope she gets tomorrow two nominations.”

She ended up with just the one, for Anatomy of a Fall. But Hüller has unquestionably arrived. And so has her friend.

The Zone of Interest is in cinemas from Friday, February 2nd