When Christian Friedel was preparing to play Rudolf Höss, the real-life Nazi commandant at Auschwitz who’s the alarmingly opaque protagonist of “The Zone of Interest,” he discovered an audio recording of Höss from the Nuremberg trials.
“It was really interesting to hear his voice, because it’s not the voice of a commandant in his prime,” the soft-spoken 44-year-old says over Zoom from New York. “It’s more a voice of a prisoner. He described in a very precise way what he [did]. It was chilling — I never heard an apology to the victims or that he realized his crime. He said, ‘It was my job, and I want to be the best at my job.’”
Höss would eventually express remorse before being executed in 1947 at age 45, but Friedel wasn’t concerned about portraying the actual Höss. (“This was an interpretation with a lot of freedom in it,” he notes.) And that audio enabled him to get a bead on how to portray an unremarkable monster. Like the hypnotically minimalist drama that contains Friedel’s restrained performance, the Höss we meet is immaculately presented, his hair never mussed, his manner often serene. An efficient cog in a terrifying machine, the character, alongside his wife (Sandra Hüller) and their blandly spirited young children, resides in his own personal slice of heaven, the concentration camp just beyond his spacious home’s manicured garden and picture-perfect shrubs — the killings out of sight and most certainly out of mind.
The British-born filmmakers Jonathan Glazer (‘The Zone of Interest’) and Steve McQueen (‘Occupied City’) have made two of this year’s essential Cannes Film Festival titles.
Growing up in East Germany, Friedel didn’t know the name Rudolf Höss. “I was 10 when the Wall [fell],” he says, crediting “a really, really good [history] teacher” for opening his eyes by showing his class “Schindler’s List.” “This was the first time I realized the dimension of this immense crime,” says Friedel. “I started thinking about this past.”
Grappling with Germany’s history would become a theme in Friedel’s work. His first film was Michael Haneke’s Palme d’Or-winner “The White Ribbon,” in which he’s a teacher in a village in the 1910s where the children are concocting malicious schemes, an upsetting prelude to the rise of Nazism. (“He could be a kid in ‘The White Ribbon,’” Friedel surmises of Höss.) Friedel later starred in “Downfall” director Oliver Hirschbiegel’s 2015 drama “13 Minutes,” the true story of Georg Elser, who failed in his attempt to assassinate Hitler. But what made “The Zone of Interest” writer-director Jonathan Glazer, who adapted Martin Amis’ novel, think Friedel would be right for Höss?
“There was a very famous interview from an American journalist with Rudolf Höss, and he described him as an ordinary schoolteacher,” Friedel says, adding with a laugh, “Jonathan saw ‘The White Ribbon,’ and I played a schoolteacher.” Getting more serious, he offers, “I think he was searching for, maybe, a soft person — Jonathan said, ‘You are full of warmth. You are a sympathetic person, really kind.’”
Not that Friedel, who exudes a shy sweetness, was meant to utilize those attributes in “The Zone of Interest.” Working inside a set equipped with multiple cameras — “‘Big Brother’ in the Nazi house” became the cast and crew’s shorthand for the technique — he and his co-stars are, essentially, being surveilled by the audience, their characters’ actions reduced to the most basic domestic activities, their personalities neutered.
One of the film’s most fascinatingly unsettling sequences couldn’t be more commonplace: It’s just Höss walking around the house turning off lights before bedtime. The lenses’ dispassionate stare transforms Höss into a nonspecific father, husband and Nazi commandant. We are faintly aware of the camp, but those atrocities are intentionally absent. As a result, the humdrum everyday is infused with invisible menace.
“Haneke said to me, ‘To [portray] normality on screen, it’s the most difficult challenge for an actor,” recalls Friedel, who drew on the lessons from “The White Ribbon” for “The Zone of Interest.” “That was the challenge: We see [Höss], and sometimes there’s a question mark.” He and Hüller had the unenviable task of depicting people that they didn’t want viewers to connect with, while behaving in recognizable ways as a married couple.
“To be honest, Sandra and I hate [these characters] from the bottom of our heart, but it was important that the audience can believe what we are doing — or that they believe the reality, their ordinary life.” The trick for Friedel was to resist his instincts and, as he describes it, “not be afraid to be boring. Sometimes [actors think,] ‘I don’t want to be boring! I want to be exciting and emotional, and I want to show my talent!’ But, here, it was not important.”
Still, it was jarring for him to watch the finished film and notice what parts had been cut. “I missed some ‘important’ scenes for me as an actor,” Friedel admits, referring to moments when Höss is more emotionally expressive. “But I really think it’s great that [Glazer] decides not to use those scenes in the movie. My ambition to show the world that I could be a great actor or a very fascinating personality, it’s not necessary for this project.”
Consequently, it’s easy to miss how sinuous the performance is, the tension of Höss’ placid surface set against the unseen horrors just over the backyard wall. Often, Friedel is in the background, his back turned to the camera, as Glazer strenuously keeps him at arm’s length, eschewing any possibility of “relating” to the commandant. But repeat viewings of “The Zone of Interest,” which was awarded the Grand Prix at Cannes, reveal the precision Friedel brings to the role of a prideful cypher defined by his social standing. Höss is good at his job, and nothing more.
Friedel finds that interviews have helped exorcise Höss out of his system, which he’s grateful for, but he’s not interested in explaining the character. “I’m always thinking, ‘How was it possible to live with this crime, with this guilt, and then to believe, “Our home is a paradise”’? I cannot understand it.” He couldn’t have imagined tackling such a part when he was a boy first falling in love with film. Those fond memories have stayed with him. “I had a weekly routine,” he tells me. “Every Sunday, there was a 9 a.m. [screening] in a cinema next to my neighborhood — and after, we had ice cream.”
Glowing reviews have praised “The Zone of Interest” for its haunting depiction of the banality of evil, which is accurate but risks simplifying this stunning film to critic-speak clichés that could be applied to so many lesser Holocaust dramas. Friedel believes it’s crucial to be precise about what the movie’s true intentions are. “We want to define these persons not as evil,” he says. “They do evil things and the decisions they made were evil, but they were not born evil. There is a darkness in all of us, and we have to be aware of that.”
To illustrate his point, Friedel tells a story that acknowledges how complacency can poison anyone — including himself. Early on, he would ponder his character’s moral ugliness. “I cannot understand how is it possible to ignore the smell, to ignore the sounds that are going on — to ignore your work killing millions of people,” he says of Höss living happily with his family near the camp. “But when we [shot] in Auschwitz, we were for three months very close to the [actual] camp, very close to the original house. And there was a time I realized, ‘Oh, I forget where I am’ — I was shocked how easy it is to forget. And this is, for me, the most important thing in this movie — it’s so easy to ignore [what’s around us]. We are masters of self-deception.”
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