There’s no doubt the Germans were fully aware of what they were doing it, Dachau was in the outskirts of Munich, not in rural Poland, the camps were near centers of civilization… These people who were involved in an indirect way, people who were manufacturing the poison they were using to gas the Jews, it’s troubling how they were in the heart of the European civilization, right there in front of everyone. The system was indifferent to the point that there were no Germans around, in the very same way in Japan people are now proud of making cars without humans, in the camps, Germans were proud because they killed without touching the people.
They water down stories in a way that aren’t fair to the memory of all the people who were murdered. They always add flavors to the Holocaust because in its raw reality they find it indigestible, so they make it nice and put some sugar on it. GÉZA RÖHRIG: I couldn’t agree with you more. In the concentration camp you couldn’t think. Surviving was the exception, so I wanted to go back and show what it meant to be a human being in the middle of it, and not have this post-war intellectual view in all the emotions and projections. The moral issue is with those who constructed the camps, not with those who were transported there and had to do terrible things to survive. The thing about survival is that survivors, in a sense, felt bad for having survived, because of the things they had to do in order to stay alive. LÁSZLÓ: Yeah, and being selfish doesn’t mean that you’re evil. and movies about the Holocaust completely forget this. In Son of Saul, you remind us that whether we like it or not, selfishness is an essential part of being human… JOSE: Most films about the Holocaust tend to be very romantic, something like Schindler’s List for instance, focuses on one person saving thousands, or something like Life is Beautiful, in which a father turns a camp into an amusement park for his son. I guess this frustration is part of the game, I hope in the future I can be as bold. We wanted to make it that way though, we knew it would be a difficult and ambitious project, and it was constantly frustrating because I had a sense when I was filming it, that I wasn’t succeeding in getting what I wanted. I was very anxious when I made the film, but I knew it was also a prototype, it’s the kind of film we have to invent as we go. You need to be unconscious of the dangers of failing with the film and in your career. LÁSZLÓ NEMES: I wish! When you make your first feature you don’t really understand the dangers, you’re not aware of the dangers. Would you say you were this bold because it was your first film? Or are you planning on pursuing different storytelling methods as bold as this one?
JOSE: Son of Saul is very bold in terms of storytelling and technique. Speaking with them made it clear, no other two people would have been able to make Son of Saul. I had the opportunity to sit down with Nemes and Röhrig, who weren’t just eloquent when it came to discussing the technical aspects of the film, but also spoke with authority about philosophical and ethical matters. The inner hell in this case, is that of Auschwitz prisoner Saul (Géza Röhrig), a Sonderkommando member, who one day makes a gruesome discovery that drives him to make a decision that might have deadly results.
There are no string-filled overwrought scores, no movie stars losing weight, gaining accents or donning beards, and most surprisingly, there are no attempts at oversimplifying the Holocaust as anything other than a series of personal infernos lived in a collective reality. Holocaust films in a nutshell always go for the emotional and rarely, if ever, attempt to touch the intellectual.Įnter first time director László Nemes, who caught Cannes by surprise with his unique Son of Saul, which has just opened in US theaters, a film that dispenses of each and every cliché you’ve seen played in every other Holocaust movie. However, perhaps because of Hollywood’s tendency to overpraise the human spirit, and its relentless need to “inspire”, Holocaust films have become a “niche” meant to help actors and directors win awards. Film in particular, has created a subgenre that consists of harrowing stories about concentration camps, the diabolical genocide of the Jews, and other events that put all the human race under a shameful light. The evils of the Nazi regime have been documented in myriad ways, and in practically every medium possible.