Visiting that disturbing Grey Zone

Director Tim Blake Nelson offers different perspective of the Holocaust in latest movie

Some will recognize him as the soggy-bottomed boy who trapezed through the south alongside George Clooney and John Turturro in the Coen brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Others will remember him as the sleazy blackmailer who forces his best friend's wife (Jennifer Aniston) to sleep with him in The Good Girl. But few are familiar with Tim Blake Nelson's directorial efforts (O, Eye of God, Kansas).
This will most likely change with The Grey Zone, the movie he's directed and adapted from his stage-play about the Sonderkommandos, the "Special Squads" of Jewish prisoners placed by the Nazis in Auschwitz to help exterminate fellow Jews in exchange for food and a few more months of life. The movie stars a veritable who's who of indie talent: Harvey Keitel, Steve Buscemi, Mira Sorvino, David Arquette, Daniel Benzali, Allan Corduner and Natasha Lyonne.
Tandem talked to Tim Blake Nelson from his home in New York City.

You're Jewish. Making The Grey Zone must have been difficult for you.
"It certainly was. I also want to say, as difficult as the subject matter was, and is, and painful as it was at times to work on this film, not only for myself but for others who worked on it as well, there was something quite exhilarating and life-affirming and validating about the process. I think we felt as though we were involved in the first opportunity that has been presented to make a film about the holocaust which was unfettered by the demands of commercialism. There was no studio involved in making this movie. Therefore we felt not only the responsibility but the opportunity to deal with this material in a truthful and searchingly honest and uninhibited way."

The details on how the extermination camps worked are very precise. Did you get this information from actual diaries?
"I did. In fact this is the most meticulously researched film I'll ever make, and I search meticulously whenever I make a movie. I can't imagine doing more research than we did for this film. The primary source material came from eyewitnesses who were not only there but who were there involved in these groups. One was Philip Mueller's book, Eyewitness Auschwitz, and Mueller is a surviving Sonderkommando; Miklos Nyiszli's book, Auschwitz, A Doctor's Eyewitness Account; a book by a Greek Sonderkommando, named Daniel Benamius, called Sonderkommando; and then five diaries which were buried at Birkenau by Sonderkommando members who perished. They're obviously almost all dead, but these men wrote diaries in anticipation of being killed so that there would be some first-hand record of what they had witnessed and in a sense participated in. And this is not to mention the secondary source material, like Primo Levi."

When you read and researched these accounts, was there ever a time when you tried to put yourself in their place?
"I think the whole film is an experiment with that. I mean when you write a character, if you're doing it honestly there's got to be some piece of yourself in that character. The five main characters who are complicit, and I'm talking about the doctor, Abramowics, Steve Buscemi's character, Hoffman, David Arquette's character, Schlermer, Daniel Benzali's character, and Rosenthal, David Chandler's character, are all in a sense fragments of my own response, imagining myself in that predicament."

How did you come out of this experience?
"How did I come out of it? That's an interesting question. Not any younger and certainly a lot wiser, and more in touch with myself and who I am morally as a person. How I fit into a greater society around me and my family."

Not angry at all?
"No. No. I think probably my faith in a fair divinity has been questioned."

It's interesting that in the film there is very little about faith.
"That's a deliberate choice. I simply did not want to repeat for the audience familiar thematic stories or images from other holocaust films. I think we all know that characters in striped uniforms with yellow stars are Jews, and so we don't need to hear about that a lot in their dialogue. We already know from other holocaust films and from what we've read in holocaust histories that faith was challenged in this context. It was not something I felt this film needed to examine. In addition, the research that I have done into the Sonderkommandos rarely ever brought me into contact with issues of faith. And that makes sense; they were looking for young males who were physically strong and who had the emotional fortitude to do this gruesome work. That is not were you would go in 1944 to find your most firm or religious contingent among the Jewish population. Recently I was hanging out in Los Angeles with a new friend of mine, Dario Cabai, who is a surviving Sonderkommando member, and we were going to his house to have some lunch, and he said 'You know there is no God. You should know that I have never believed in God, and particularly after Auschwitz, I know there isn't a God'."

But you would think that people who know they're going to die, that's where they would turn?
"But these were not your familiar image of Jews in the holocaust. And that that's one of the film's strengths. That it's departing from what Primo Levi described as the hagiography, the sanctification, of Jews in the context of the holocaust, which he feels is false, because it's not allowing Jews to be human beings like everyone else. And also precisely not what he experienced."

You realize that the film will be criticized for that.
"Absolutely. I mean I think there's a contingent out there that, I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but there are people out there, many of them, it's a large group, which has invested in having defined what makes a holocaust film. This movie violates many of their principles."

You've been told this?
"Yeah. I've read, in certain responses to the film that the characters aren't emaciated enough. Which is a ludicrous statement, because the Sonderkommandos were well fed. And this movie I think, without ever insulting the audience's intelligence, would be hard to explain why you're not seeing that familiar image of the Jew in the holocaust. You see a tracking shot on a table with people gorging themselves. And there's a card up front which says they were privileged, in ways unheard of in the context of the reality for the rest of the camp. This is just an example of what people say: Jew, holocaust, must be emaciated. Without ever allowing for this particular and incredibly provocative nuance to bleed. And I didn't make this up. I mean the table that you see in the film with that tracking shot is precisely how Miklos Nyiszli described the tables he saw in the number one crematorium in the Sonderkommando barracks."

Apart from the Sonderkommandos, you also talk about an uprising in the camp, which I've never heard of.
"Everything, pretty much everything you see in the film did happen. There was also a girl who survived a gassing who was saved by a group of Sonderkommandos. And she was ultimately killed by the Nazis."

How do you know that?
"It's in Miklos Nyiszli's book. He was the doctor who revived her, and he writes a chapter about it. That's where I found it."

How did you find out about the Sonderkommandos?
"Primo Levi's book, The Drowned and the Saved, contains an essay called The Grey Zone, in which he writes about them, and when I read his essay I basically couldn't spend any idle waking hour without exploring it further and then writing about it."

Did the actors have a difficult time with their parts?
"I think they did. I mean it was not easy for any of them but I should also say that my demands as a director didn't make it any easier either. Their willingness to take a more dangerous route in creating their roles is what helps to deliver these performances. This is also a significant holocaust film in that it's in English and you don't hear the Middle European accent

That was a great idea.
"Thanks. But that meant that the actors had really to resource themselves and that was part of the intention. The reason for that is that the audience wouldn't be able to depend on that distancing that happens with those accents, to alleviate the important pressure which comes to bear as a result of the film on an audience member. I think this has to be a very emotional experience. It has to speak to you personally as an audience member. And if, while the film is historically accurate, you can as an audience member see yourself up there in that situation, the film is going to be all the more powerful. Foreign accents in English make that difficult, I think. In addition, it gave the actors no place to hide. And so you see David Arquette really reaching into himself, rather than reaching out to some image of what he thinks a holocaust character would be like. And the result is that David, Mira, Steve Buscemi, my wife Lisa Benavides who plays Anja in the movie, Daniel Benzali, Allan Corduner, they deliver these incredibly personal and also in a sense electric performances of deep honesty. I mean David Arquette has such gravity in his performance, you really feel for the character and you feel that he is accessing himself."

Did you ever think of putting yourself in the film?
"I was going to play Hoffman, but I ultimately had to admit that David was a better choice. And a more surprising choice, so I stepped aside and there he was. You have to put the film first, even though a choice might be very good for your acting career."
The Grey Zone is currently playing in local cinemas.

Publication Date: 2002-11-17
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=2010