Jonathan Glazer on his holocaust film The Zone of Interest: ‘This is not about the past, it’s about now’
https://amp.theguardian.com/film/2023/dec/10/jonathan-glazer-the-zone-of-interest-auschwitz-under-the-skin-interview
“To acknowledge the couple as human beings,” says Glazer, shaking his head, “was a big part of the awfulness of this entire journey of the film, but I kept thinking that, if we could do so, we would maybe see ourselves in them. For me, this is not a film about the past. It’s trying to be about now, and about us and our similarity to the perpetrators, not our similarity to the victims.”
“The more fragments of information we uncovered about Rudolf and Hedwig Höss in the Auschwitz archives, the more I realised that they were working-class people who were upwardly mobile. They aspired to become a bourgeois family in the way that many of us do today. That was what was so grotesque and striking about them – how familiar they were to us.”