In examining the role of the sonderkommando in German concentration camps, filmmaker László Nemes was preparing to enter his debut film Son of Saul into a long line of auteur-driven projects made in response to one of history’s most devastating instances of genocide. Drawing influence from Elem Klimov’s final film Come and See as well as the horrifying documentary Shoah, Nemes conceived of a project that would acknowledge the horrors of camps like Auschwitz without placing a direct focus on the actions themselves. His movie Son of Saul utilizes a shallow depth of field to obscure the frame around its central figure, the sonderkommando Saul, allowing the intricate sound design and some clever suggestive filmmaking to fill the visual gaps.

“When I finished [reading] the script I thought that finally this was a movie that was going to do it right,” explained Son of Saul’s lead actor Géza Röhrig. “Two out of three Jews were murdered in Europe during the Holocaust and all the movies I saw were talking about the lucky third.”

Son of Saul is an often-brave depiction of the ill-fated lives of the sonderkommando, Jews forced to work in the Nazi death camps. In this interview with the movie’s filmmaker László Nemes as well as its star Géza Röhrig from before Son of Saul picked up an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film, the pair talked to Way Too Indie about the movie’s intimate perspective, the challenges of minimalist filmmaking and the responsibility they felt in portraying these events.

The Holocaust and World War II have been extensively covered in films and other documents, what compelled you to explore that territory for Son of Saul?

László: I think it hasn’t been explored. Filmmakers [have] established, over the decades since the war, a sort of codification of the Holocaust film as a frozen genre in and of itself. I was more interested in making a portrait of one man, one individual, to convey something about the human experience within the camp. Within the extermination machine. With all the limitations and lack of knowledge and frenzy that were at the heart of this experience.

I think these aspects were forgotten by films. I wanted to go back to the experience I had by reading certain text such as the scrolls of Auschwitz and the writings by the sonderkommando. Texts that were written during the extermination process, within the crematorium. These were texts that gave us, as readers, the [feeling] of being there. And it was this feeling of being there that was not communicated in cinema, I think.

How early on did you develop the idea of this very experiential, immersive type of presentation?

László: It wasn’t there at the very beginning. It took me years to develop the project and to discuss it with my cinematographer [Mátyás Erdély]. I think the short films [we made together] were a way to devise a directorial strategy to immerse the viewer. But it took years and several steps to design it.

So many other Holocaust films indulge the violent aspects of that war in a way that lessens the impact of that violence.

László: I agree.

Your film does a remarkable job of putting the viewer in that moment without lessening that experience.

László: Yes! Convention is an invention. My approach is that you cannot truly put your finger on the very clearly horrible aspect of the extermination. It has to be in its essence. I think cinema can do it by giving certain limitations to frenzy of this experience. [Violence] can be diffusing in a way and not as clear-cut as cinema wants to make us believe.

You strip down the elements, in a way.

László: We went against that. We went against those effects. It was very conscious.

Géza, as an actor, how does having less going on around you in the frame impact your performance?

Géza: First I had to fall in love with the project. I believed in this movie because I felt this was going to be credible and authentic. I saw that the crew, Laszlo and the cinematographer, basically everybody involved took it extremely personally. They were very focused. So I wasn’t alone in this.

On the other hand, as an actor, it presented a singular challenge because actors imitate. Actors simulate. But with such a distance from our everyday world and the world of Auschwitz, how do you bridge this existential gap? I did lots of reading. That was my primary source. Every single account I could read. Then I had to realize that the less-is-more concept that the movie was applying is true visually, as well.

There’s this very interesting paradox in the movie that, “you only show my face,” so to speak, but the human face is the place where the world and a person meets. That’s why it’s so expressive. On the one hand, it’s a little but on the other hand, it’s the most. It’s huge because there are so many tiny muscles around the eyes and lips that every single thing is on surface. The key for that is just to put myself there and sustain the right state of being. I had to not just understand intellectually but really grasp it with my whole being. What did it take for these people? How is it to live without feeling? I don’t live like that generally so I had to get to that state of being.

Is it a challenge to perform without a traditional, melodramatic, over-the-top moment?

[László laughs]

Géza: No, first of all, László was very strict to kill any sort of theatricality from my acting. I also understood the concept that when people are in a theater they have to be visible and effective to the 30th row, or balcony. This is film. We have a camera that is 20-30 inches from my face. There is no room for routine or technique. I just had to be in the moment as intensely as I could.

How do you work on striking that balance between the intimacy of those moments and the sweeping nature of this story, which takes place in a busy concentration camp with tons and tons of extras at times, without allowing the intimate style to overwhelm the experience?

László: Well you just asked how to direct a film [Laughs]. That’s something that’s challenging, especially for a first-time filmmaker. You have your material but once you’re on set how do you make it happen? I don’t really have a clear answer but I think for this film it was especially frightening. But at the same time we were very prepared and had time for preparation.

I wanted to have a director instructing everybody on set but I knew I couldn’t instruct all the extras, so I had a director friend—who was hired by the production—and he directed all the background action. In this film, the background sometimes becomes the foreground. We are in this very immersed situation so the central action couldn’t be separated from the rest [of the film]. I think it’s how we worked together as a team that made it believable. That was the most challenging [element].

One of the ways it’s so believable is the textured sound design. I’ve read you spent 5 months in post-production specifically working on the sound design, but how much went into the process in pre-production and how much did you work with that along the way?

László: We knew beforehand it would be a long ride. I consulted with the sound designer throughout pre-production and production, but with sound we worked on it in a very organic way. A lot of indications were there [in the script stage] and we certainly worked using a lot of production sound but the more we worked on it, the more it became evident that we needed more human voices. So we had to go and record more human voices in different languages so this kind of babel of languages is part of the experience and part of the film.

What’s the sense of responsibility you feel when you tell a story with such serious, resonate subject matter?

Géza: For László and for myself too, the Holocaust is an inter-generational term. It’s not something that the second or even the third [generation] is learning from the books. We are traumatized by this experience whether or not we’ve experienced it directly ourselves. It’s almost like having a phantom pain in a limb that wasn’t amputated from us but our grandfathers, but still the pain is real.

I feel that this is part of the legacy of modernity—it’s an extremely important thing to speak about, especially the sonderkommando—because there’s a new brand of killers that appeared here in history. People always killed each other, but they kind of took responsibility for it. Here in the middle of the 20th century there is this new type of, “I just obeyed orders, I did nothing wrong.”

There is this distance. The executioners are removed both physically and psychologically from the outcome of their actions. Now the sonderkommando became a software because the killing is going on with drones and pilotless bombers. There is no human sonderkommando anymore and the distance between the murderers who are sitting somewhere underground with a mouse they click and another continent that is being bombed, they are not feeling any sort of consequence just like the Nazis did not face the screaming or the stench of the gas chamber. They left the dirty work for the sonderkommando.

I think it’s an extreme challenge in terms of going into the 21st century. If we are to avoid anything [like the Holocaust] happening again, we have to first recognize we haven’t turned the page yet. Still, the same evil manifests in this world. You can list the alarming frequency of genocides after the Holocaust. The U.N. is consistently incapable to invoke its own genocide convention of 1948. We are still living in the times of Auschwitz. Basically, the driving force behind this movie, is an appeal to vigilance. An appeal to constant reflection.

László: I think we have a responsibility to talk to our world. The new generations are forgetting about the possibility of evil within civilization. The most advanced civilization of Europe, in its peak, killed the entire Jewish population of Europe. So I think it’s true that we have to be conscious of this possibility within humanity. People consider history as a history book. Like history through postcards. But history doesn’t necessarily announce itself, it might just be the present.

At this point in the festival, I was more than a little burned out on movies that made me feel down in the dumps. Every single movie I’ve covered so far has dealt with dark subject matter, from Spotlight‘s Catholic church scandal to Miss You Already‘s cancer coping, to I Smile Back‘s onslaught of misery and moping. Even Here Is Harold, while incredibly funny, follows a character digging himself out of a suicidal hole.

My dumpiness reached critical mass when I started day four with Son of Saul, a grimy Holocaust drama by debuting director László Nemes. Suffice it to say, I was not a fun person to be around following the screening. I dreaded heading into my next film, Mitchell Lichtenstein’s Angelica, which was advertised as a “haunting tale of unfed appetites and the damage they can wreak.” That sounded like the last thing I needed to see at the time—but it turned out to be the best thing and my biggest surprise of the festival.

Right Behind You

Before we get to Angelica, I need to talk about Son of Saul, which was, as I alluded to, a devastating experience, and yet also a beautiful, unforgettable one. I’ve been wanting to see it since it won the Grand Prix at Cannes, and it surpassed my expectations. Géza Röhrig plays Saul, a Jewish prisoner of the Nazis and member of the Sonderkommando unit whose job is to stack corpses for incineration. When he finds a body he believes to be his son’s, he makes it his mission to arrange a proper burial while the rest of his unit plots a rebellion against their captors. Immediately striking is director László Nemes and cinematographer Mátyás Erdély’s camerawork, which for long stretches stays inches behind Saul, almost filling the screen with his back as he hurries around the camp, the world around him a literal blur of movement, shape, and color. The effect is astonishing and views the Holocaust in a nightmarish way I’ve never seen before. As you can imagine, an experiential Holocaust film is one of the hardest things one could sit through, but Son of Saul is an outstanding, transcendent work of art that, amazingly, came from a first-time director.

Mommy’s Mental

Heading into Mitchell Lichtenstein’s Angelica, I was a bit of a mess, still reeling from Saul. But my spirits were promptly lifted when the lights dimmed and I was treated to a wonderfully weird Victorian ghost story that had the audience cringing and gasping in the most fun, wickedly delicious way. The movie follows Constance Barton (Jena Malone), a mother forbidden to make love to her husband (Ed Stoppard) following the complicated, life-threatening birth of their daughter, Angelica. When sexual frustration and obsessive over-protectiveness of her daughter begin to wind Constance up beyond recognition, a spectre begins visiting the house, sexually tormenting her and threatening to do the same to young Angelica. Angelica is a deliberately paced mind-bender with exquisite cinematography (from the great Dick Pope) that gets more bizarre and frightening as it goes.

The film lifted me out of my emotional slump, and for that I’m thankful. I was also thankful to be in attendance for the subsequent Q&A with Lichtenstein and Malone, who made a surprise appearance. The audience and talent had a nice rapport, volleying ideas about the film’s rich themes and influences like Henry James and Edgar Allen Poe. Malone even went so far as to say it was the best Q&A audience she’d ever been in front of! My favorite insight came from Malone, who recalled her sister taking the film as a lesbian love story, an angle Malone hadn’t considered.

Debut filmmaker László Nemes’ Son of Saul is, by a fair margin, the best film that I saw at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival. It follows our protagonist, Saul (portrayed with great nuance and facial acting skill by first time actor Géza Röhrig), over the course of two chaotic days in Auschwitz as the camp nears its liberation. Saul is what is known as a Sonderkommando, a prisoner marked with a red X on their back to signify that they’re responsible for helping dispose of the bodies of fellow Jews whose lives have been taken in the gas chambers. Saul’s motivation in the film is introduced when he spots the body of a young boy who he takes to be his son, and he spends the rest of the film in search of a rabbi who can assist him in providing the boy with a proper burial.

As one can imagine from only having read a summary of the film’s narrative, Son of Saul is a deeply dark and devastating experience. In total, it’s composed of what can’t be more than one or two dozen long takes. Nemes and his skilled cinematographer, Mátyás Erdély, already had me in tears within the first few lengthy shots. I cannot think of a film that better utilizes shallow focus; there is so much noise and movement and chaos within the first ten minutes of the film that one may not understand exactly what is going on, until a pile of still bodies sneaks into the corner of a frame, almost wholly out of focus, and suddenly the realization hits. That was when I first lost it.

It’s easy to tell that Nemes worked as an assistant to master filmmaker Bela Tarr, since Son of Saul’s atmosphere is reminiscent of the intense riot scene in Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies. Both filmmakers craft complex and extended one-shot scenes with as much, if not more, going on in the background as the foreground. Nonetheless, the way Erdély’s 35mm camera follows Saul throughout the camp, never breaking concentration on either his face or the back of his head, is more reminiscent of the legendary Alain Marcoen’s famous tracking shots (Rosetta, La Promesse, etc.) than Tarr’s cinematographers. Erdély is even smoother and more precise than Marcoen with the movement of his camera though, further allowing the audience to forget they are watching a film and experience full immersion. I can’t remember the last film I watched that was able to transport me into a frightening past the way Son of Saul is able to.

Another one of my favorite directorial decisions made by Nemes was his choice to avoid tapping into Saul’s mind or providing an inner dialogue. Rather, the camera hovers around his head constantly, always remaining external, his audience perpetually existing as flies on the walls of Auschwitz. Some viewers may have difficulty with this decision, as it makes it more difficult to understand the reasoning behind Saul’s actions, especially if the boy is not actually his son. Fortunately, the ending sheds some light on the significance of the role of children in the film, although admittedly, it was a denouement that caused a couple of my viewing companions to scratch their heads.

To me, however, it isn’t so much a confusing ending as it is a complex one (much like the entirety of the film), and a conclusion that I feel is attempting to make a commentary on how each generation is affected by the actions of the last. In order to assess the finale beyond that though, I will most certainly need to see the film another time or two. Until then, I can safely deem László Nemes as a novel name to look out for in the world of cinema, and I’m anxiously anticipating his next effort.