There were several excellent films in contention for this year’s Best Foreign Language Academy Award, but I was thrilled when Hungarian director László Nemes’ haunting and unusual Son of Saul won the Oscar on Sunday night. Taking place entirely in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp over a few days in October 1944, Son of Saul focuses on a Hungarian Jewish prisoner named Saul Ausländer (played by poet Géza Röhrig) who is a member of the Sonderkommando, a group of Jews isolated from the rest of the camp and forced to assist the Nazis in the machinery of large-scale extermination. While working in one of the crematoriums, Saul discovers the body of a boy he takes for his son. As the Sonderkommando plans a rebellion, Saul decides to carry out an impossible task — to save the child’s body from the flames, find a rabbi to recite the mourner’s Kaddish, and offer the boy a proper burial. The unusual filming style of Son of Saul plunges the viewer directly into the heart of the concentration camp. The film does not attempt to tell the story of the Holocaust, but rather the story of one man caught in a horrific situation.
“I want to share this with Geza Rohrig, my main actor, and the incredible cast and crew that believed in this project when no one else did,” said Nemes when he accepted his Oscar on Sunday night. “You know, even in the darkest hours of mankind … there might be a voice within us, that allows us to remain human. That’s the hope of this film. Thank you very much, thank you.” I sat down with director László Nemes (who co-wrote the screenplay with Clara Royer) and the star of the film, Géza Röhrig, just before the film’s U.S. release.
Danny Miller: This was one of the most powerful films I’ve ever seen set in the Holocaust. One of the things that impressed me the most was how you kept such a tight focus on Saul for the entire film. Was that always your plan?
László Nemes: Yes, absolutely. We wanted to make this film a personal experience for every viewer. And I think that if you rely more on suggestion you can make it more of that type of experience because each person has to project his or her own personality or soul, if you will. We knew that we had to hint at the enormity of the suffering that took place there and that this had to be achieved through limitation — to convey something in an intuitive way about the human experience in the camp. Our strategy was to restrain what you’re seeing with the idea of making it more infinite in the mental realm.
That totally worked. I kept remembering scenes I thought I saw in the film, like what was happening inside the gas chamber when Saul was standing outside of it, but I know there were no such scenes. Géza, I was surprised to hear that acting is not your main profession. Did you ever worry about taking the lead role in this film?
Géza Röhrig: If I had ever felt that way, I would have said, “This is not for me.” But if I feel in my guts that I’m up to something, I’ll do it. The script was great, nearly perfect and I believed in the movie from the get-go. I sensed that there were things from my own experience that I could bring to this role that I had been gathering for many years. I wasn’t hesitant at all, I felt that I was the right guy to play Saul.
Had you already been to physical place of Auschwitz?
Oh, yes. When I was 19 years old, I was a literature student in Poland. My grandfather in Hungary had asked me to visit the camp.
Was he a survivor?
His younger brother who was 11 years old, his older sister who was pregnant, his parents, everyone died there. He had survived because he had only one leg, one had been amputated, so they left him in the Budapest Ghetto and he was liberated from there in January 1945. He was the only one in his family to survive. He told me about all of this when I was 12 during a chess game and then again, when I became interested in going to Poland. I learned Polish and went to school in Krakow but I kept pushing away this idea of visiting Auschwitz. Then, finally, when I was 19, on a cloudy morning, I thought, “Okay, let’s be done with it.” It was a transformational experience, I felt I grew up there. What I had planned as a one-day visit ended up being a month. I rented a room nearby in the town of Oswiecim and I went back to the camp every day. That’s where I wrote my first collection of poetry which is entirely dedicated to the people who died at Auschwitz.
Wow. Is that available in English?
I think some of the poems will be translated into English because of the movie. So again, my involvement and connection with the subject matter was quite strong.
László, was it that poetry that made you first think of Géza to play Saul?
László Nemes: No, I knew him and thought he was a very interesting man. I was looking for someone with conflicting layers who already had a mixture of things that the main character had — someone who could be ordinary and sacred at the same time. I considered established actors in Europe but I realized that for this project I needed someone who didn’t have to switch on some kind of “soul mode” but was already this kind of person.
There has been a lot written about the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz, the Jewish prisoners who were forced to deal with the bodies after they were killed in the gas chambers. They don’t always come across in the best light. Was part of your reason for making this film to help set the record straight?
Yeah, there has been a tendency since the war to put blame on the victims. The fact that there may have been some bad people among the prisoners doesn’t change the fact that the entire responsibility of what happened lies with the perpetrators and not the victims. But there has been this kind of post-modern push to try to make the victims share the responsibility even asking, for example, why did the Jews go to the gas chambers? It’s this kind of attitude that I find very damaging.
I remember when the TV series “Holocaust” came out and was such a huge deal but it makes me cringe when I see it today. There have been many films about the Holocaust since then, including some that take place in Auschwitz. Do you tend to be critical of those films?
I am extremely critical of them. We watched many of those films in order to know what not to do. It was very important to identify the codes of the Holocaust genre. The films usually use the Holocaust for its dramatic value and never really look at the nature of human experience within it. So that was certainly one of our main goals — to avoid projecting today’s emotions onto those stories and establishing safe passage for the audience. We tend to focus on the very rare stories of survival and we forget to talk about the extermination process. But when you have to look into yourself and look into evil, that’s a completely different kind of journey, and that was the journey we were interested in.
Is there a lot of Holocaust denial in Hungary today?
Yes, there is, but Holocaust denial is alive and well throughout the entire world. I think it’s coming big time to the U.S. Anti-Semitism has a big future in this country.
Do you notice a different reaction to the film from different age groups?
There has been an extremely strong reaction from younger audiences who have no link to this time period and are caught off guard. That’s reassuring. They have a visceral reaction to the story which means that the film will remain with them as a personal experience.
Have you gotten feedback from Holocaust survivors?
Géza Röhrig: The survivors I’ve spoken to our grateful for the movie. Some of them don’t want to watch it but I think the word is now out in this elderly community that this is a very strong and uncompromising film, they don’t need to be worried about images included just for the shock value. But, of course, it has to be worked through for the survivors — they have their own readings of the movie.