2024-01-30 18:27:58
The cross : Why did you come to France to support the release of The Area of Interest ?
Piotr Cywinski: It’s a film for which we feel co-responsible. It is the result of several years of discussions with Jonathan Glazer, who came without having a ready idea of what he wanted to undertake, unlike many other artists who approach us.
Did you refuse certain requests from Jonathan Glazer?
P. C. : I refused any filming inside the memorial. It is above all a murder site and should not be considered as a setting for fiction. This has been a rule since the 1990s. The only scenes filmed in the museum are documentaries. A way, in my opinion, of showing a memory that persists and a desire to save it.
The question of the representation of the Shoah has greatly agitated the cinema world. Did you discuss these questions with Jonathan Glazer?
P. C. : Not really. Of course, there are reference points, the ten important films on the Shoah, which were discussed during our discussions. Pretty quickly, I realized that Glazer wanted to do something different. In the commander’s house that he recreated, he placed around ten small fixed cameras on the walls, similar to those of video surveillance. All the rest of the team was installed in a sort of technical control center. For the actors, alone in the house, it was much easier to be natural.
Do you think this clinical vision helps us understand the enterprise of systematic destruction that was the Shoah?
P. C. : It must be said that this is not just a film about the Holocaust and concentration camps. The Area of Interest enters into deep discussion with the way the SS officer has been shown in cinema history. He was either presented as a fugitive or as a monster. The terminology is often dehumanizing towards the executioner. It’s a way of protecting ourselves. Humanizing the executioner is disturbing, because it shows the dark side of the human being.
Jonathan Glazer seems to paint the portrait of an almost ordinary family. But is Rudolf Höss really just anyone? Is he not also an ideologue entirely devoted to his task of extermination?
P. C. : Höss was a pragmatist in the service of an ideology. When the first gas chambers were put in place, there were two solutions: gasoline engines and Zyklon B. He opted for the latter and I think you can see that as an ideological approach. Before the war, Zyklon B was used to control the bilges of ships. Animals to which Jews were compared in Nazi propaganda… But Höss was above all appreciated by his superiors for his organizational skills.
Aren’t the formal musical audacity and dreamlike scenes out of place in this context?
P. C. : Jonathan Glazer tried to find witnesses, including a very elderly woman who lived a few kilometers from the camp. She was 14 at the time, and at night she would go to prisoners’ workplaces to hide food. To show this action of resistance, Glazer reverses the colors, showing that it is the negative, the opposite of what is happening in the camp. The entire film requires an enormous amount of knowledge of the history of Auschwitz. If we know nothing or not much, it is true that this reference will not be understandable.
Doesn’t that create a bit of confusion?
P. C. : Maybe. But, having discussed it with many viewers of the film, I have the impression that it invites them to learn more about Auschwitz. It is an achievement in itself to force us not only to reflect on the human condition but to return to Auschwitz, which over the decades becomes more and more a symbol and less and less the object of interest. concrete history.
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Jonathan Glazer in a few dates
1965. Born in London.
2000. After directing numerous notable music videos, he released his first feature film, Sexy Beasta supercharged thriller.
2004.Birtha fantastic film about the meeting between a widow (Nicole Kidman) and a child who says he is the reincarnation of her husband.
2013.Under the Skina science fiction film about an alien (Scarlett Johansson) seducing men.
2024.The Zone of Interest (The Zone of Interest)Grand Prix of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.
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