Why The Zone of Interest director wanted to show the humanity of evil

Before Jonathan Glazer had shot a single frame of his new Holocaust film, The Zone of Interest, he knew he wanted to contrast the film's sound and visuals to tell different stories.

"There are two films here: one you hear and one you see," the director tells Q's Tom Power in an interview. "And the one you see is actually strangely undramatic."

Loosely based on Martin Amis's 2014 novel of the same name, The Zone of Interest is a portrait of the daily routine of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his family as they enjoy life in their idyllic home with a garden, which abuts the wall of the camp. While the atrocities happening nearby are intentionally not shown, the ambient noise of screams, barking dogs and gunfire can be heard subtly in the periphery.

Glazer, who is Jewish, says he's been thinking about making a film about the Holocaust for a long time. After talking to historians and visiting Auschwitz, he was stunned to discover that the real-life Höss and his wife raised their five children in close proximity to the camp, having become inured to its horrors.

Contemplating how an entire society can become complicit in a hateful, destructive and evil ideology, Glazer sought to "somehow demystify this very comforting idea that we're nothing like them, and that we couldn't be like them, and we couldn't do what they did."

"[I] was trying to sort of look at the perpetrator, turn the camera onto the perpetrator," he tells Power. "I think I understood that I wanted to do that very early on. I just didn't quite know how, or what part of this subject I would feature. I wanted to look at our similarities with the perpetrator rather than our similarities with the victim."

"[The Holocaust] was committed by monstrous human beings, but it wasn't committed by monsters. It was committed by us."

WATCH | Official trailer for The Zone of Interest:

The full interview with Jonathan Glazer is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Jonathan Glazer produced by Lise Hosein.

Q18:50Jonathan Glazer: Shooting his film at Auschwitz, the humanness of evil, and why he always knew he’d create a film about the Holocaust