‘The Zone of Interest’ Cinematographer and TIFF Variety Artisan Award Winner Lukasz Zal on the Quest to Capture Life’s ‘F—ing Beautiful Moments’
variety.comChristopher Vourlias When U.K. writer-director Jonathan Glazer approached Polish cinematographer Łukasz Żal about “The Zone of Interest,” a provocative Holocaust drama adapted from a 2014 novel by Martin Amis, he had a bold proposition for the film, which centers on the domestic life of an Auschwitz commandant and his family living in the shadow of the notorious concentration camp.
What if, Glazer suggested, they shoot the scenes inside the Höss family home without a single camera on set? Working on location, production designer Chris Oddy and his crew built a replica of the camp commandant’s real-life house.
Then Oddy, Glazer, Żal and first A.D. Marc Wilson got to work, outfitting the set to accommodate the director’s daring gambit, which would allow the actors to move about the house unobstructed and offer a more natural portrait of the family’s everyday life. “We drilled the house like Swiss cheese,” Żal says. “We were shooting 10 cameras at the same time.
I wanted to have everything hard-wired — no remote stuff. The idea was to have no film crew on set. Cameras were hidden, if it was possible.
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