In order to stay connected to their characters and their scenes in A24's The Zone of Interest, stars Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller worked within the confines of writer-director Jonathan Glazer's fully surveilled set. Throughout the production, which took place on-site at Auschwitz, Glazer kept multiple cameras set up and rolling and asked his cast to improvise around their lines. In this interview with Collider's Steve Weintraub, Friedel and Hüller share what kind of environment and results a technique like that creates.
Based on the novel by the late Martin Amis, Friedel and Hüller play Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig, a couple whose idyllic home sits nestled near the banks of a river. Hedwig spends her days toiling in the garden and raising their children while her husband serves as the commandant of Auschwitz, brainstorming the best methods to dispose of bodies. Their lives take place just on the other side of the German concentration camp, though viewers are shown only the mundane day-to-day lives of the Höss family. The horrors are never explicitly depicted onscreen, but the haunting nature of what's going on just beyond their garden wall marks every beat of the film.
In their interview below, Friedel and Hüller discuss the acclaim and emotional response the movie has received since first premiering at this year's Cannes Film Festival, as well as their anticipation for its release in Germany. For The Zone of Interest, Glazer kept up to 10 cameras rolling, embedded on set; the costars recall what it felt like to constantly be in character and perform for "one-and-a-half hour improvisations" with nowhere to escape to, and little room for error.
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