 |
Dec 15 - Dec 22,2002 |
Visiting that disturbing Grey Zone
Director Tim Blake Nelson offers different perspective of the Holocaust in latest movie
By Angela Baldassarre
Originally Published: 2002-11-17
 |
|
Director Tim Blake Nelson
|
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."
Page 1/...Page 2
|
| Home / Back to Top |
|
|
 |
|
|
</ td>
