‘The Zone of Interest’ took a decade of work. Its director will never be the same

To hear him describe it, eyes lighting up and arms blocking out the imaginary space, British filmmaker Jonathan Glazer has a happy place, his small post-production studio in London’s Camden. “And I think the fact that we are in the space together is how we get to where we get, because we are all in conversation with each other and with the film.” Paradoxically, the film that has emerged from this happy arrangement is “The Zone of Interest”, Glazer’s radical, disquieting reinvention of the Holocaust drama set just on the other side of the Auschwitz camp wall, where a Nazi commandant’s family somehow pretends to enjoy its private garden. It’s more something which happens inside me, which compels me to go down a certain road.” Glazer’s work on the movie began in earnest in 2014, when he first read the newly published novel “The Zone of Interest” by the late Martin Amis, a fictionalized account set at Auschwitz that the filmmaker would ultimately re-research for years and jettison most of, including its central love triangle. “I didn’t want to get caught up in the screen psychology of an actor,” Glazer says. “It is literally the inverse of everything else we’ve been seeing in the film,” Glazer says.