‘It Was More Than A Film, It Seemed Like A Mission’

No matter how much authenticity a film production strives for in a Holocaust drama, the end product will never fully capture the indescribable horrors of the Nazi effort to exterminate Europe’s Jewish population during World War II. Movies are, at the end of the day, a mere simulacrum of reality; a staged representation of the multifaceted human experience, flaws and all.

With that said, there is one cinematic Holocaust project that comes closest to depicting the objectively depraved existence of life in a concentration camp, 2015’s Son of Saul, which premiered at Cannes 10 years ago this week.

Son of Saul: The greatest Holocaust film of all time?

The powerful debut from Hungarian director/co-writer László Nemes is told solely from the perspective of Saul Ausländer (played by Géza Röhrig), a member of the Sonderkommandos, a special Auschwitz unit comprised of Jewish inmates who led hapless victims into the gas chambers, plundered the corpses for any valuables (like gold teeth, for example), and then disposed of the evidence in the camp’s crematoria.

What makes the film so unique and groundbreaking is a utilitarian approach that maintains an incredibly tight frame around the main character at all times. The camera, expertly wielded by cinematographer Mátyás Erdély, literally nips at Saul’s heels across lengthy takes, forcing the audience directly into the nightmare via a first-person perspective. As a result, this shallow depth of field relegates much of the nonstop atrocities to the blurred periphery.

The wholesale murder and profound found at the Nazis’ largest extermination factory in Europe are just out of focus or denoted completely through sound design, yielding a visceral moviegoing experience unlike anything you’ve seen before. The cries of women and children disembarking from cattle cars, the snarling barks of German Shepherds, the dull pounding of innocent people choking to death on Zyklon B become infinitely more powerful when the human mind is left to fill in the visual gaps.

No swelling music, no saccharine moments of sentimentality — just a miserable day in the life of an individual forced to commit mass murder. Mind you: this is roughly a decade before The Zone of Interest went for a similar approach.

“You cannot represent the Holocaust with an overarching point-of-view, you have to see the individual in it. That creates this resonance.” Nemes states over Zoom. “I wanted to convey the individual resonance and this credible perspective with its limitations that [would spark]

something very unique in the audience. It had to be singular, it had to be subjective; thereby trusting the audience to add their own layers, to live their own movie, which is never the same.”

“László was well aware of the fact that the movie’s visuality was leaving a lot for the imagination of the viewer,” echoes Röhrig (a Hungarian actor and poet who was adopted by a Jewish family at the age of 12) on a separate call. “We did not want to do ‘Auschwitz porn.’ We did not want to show too much, because if you show too much, then you don’t show enough [and lose the overall effect]

… [Son of Saul] created a new language [for Holocaust cinema].”

The origins of Holocaust drama Son of Saul (2015)

Nemes was inspired to make the film sometime in the mid-20o0s after discovering Gideon Greif’s We Wept Without Tears, a book containing firsthand accounts from former members of the Sonderkommando. “I said to myself, ‘This is an incredible, untold part of the Holocaust,’” he remembers. “I had a feeling I wanted to make a film about the Holocaust, I just didn’t know how to approach it.”

“We were deeply dissatisfied with how the Holocaust had been portrayed [in cinema], especially by the Americans,” adds Röhrig. “We felt most movies were exploiting the suffering and sometimes outright falsifying history. [They seemed to] always concentrate on a survivor and on the rescuers. Meanwhile, two out of three Jews in Europe died.”

Several years after reading Greif’s book, Nemes found himself driving through Transylvania at night (he was shooting a short film there at the time) when the idea finally rose from the depths of his mind like a vampire rising from its coffin. It seemed so obvious: The movie would center around a Sonderkommando who finds the gassed body of a young boy he believes to be his son and sets out to give the corpse a proper Jewish burial at all costs. While Saul tries to seek out a rabbi who can recite the special prayer for the dead known as Kaddish, his colleagues gear up for the famous 1944 revolt among the Sonderkommando to blow up the gas chambers and crematoria before escaping.

“It just came in a flash, but it took me years and years after first reading about the Sonderkommandos to actually cook that in my subconscious,” Nemes says. “So it was very interesting and then it unfolded with my co-[screen]writer, Clara Royer.”

While telling a fictional story, the screenplay drew inspiration from a wealth of real-world sources like We Wept Without Tears, Claude Lanzmann’s gargantuan Holocaust documentary, Shoah, and Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account by Miklós Nyiszli, a Jewish physician who worked under sadistic Auschwitz doctor Josef Mengele.

“I was very connected to certain material, certain testimonies,” Nemes admits. “I think I was guided by an internal, unconscious force that just went beyond my own experience. It was almost like the whispering of the dead. It was more than a film, it seemed like a mission. [There was] something sacred around it and I was the tool.”

Despite a solid script and an almost preordained force guiding the project, financiers were rather hesitant to put up money for Son of Saul. “Nobody wanted to hear about this movie from a first-time filmmaker making a film about the Holocaust,” Nemes says of what potential backers saw as an incredibly risky proposition. “I think there is something in my work that sometimes scares the financiers. But I don’t care.”

“Most movies about the Holocaust do not go into the epicenter — the gas chambers, the crematoria,” explains Röhrig. “And considering that László had never directed a full-length feature film before, they thought that he should prove himself [before tackling] such such [weighty] subject matter.”

In the end, the film was made on a shoestring budget of less than $2 million, most of it provided by Laokoon Filmgroup. Aside from netting critical acclaim and plenty of awards (see more below), it also grossed nearly $10 million worldwide.

Becoming Saul

Interestingly, Röhrig — whose entire first book of poetry (Hamvasztókönyv, roughly translating to The Book of Cremation in English) explored the subject of Auschwitz — was not originally cast to play Saul, but the main character’s best friend, Abraham (a role eventually given to Levente Molnár). Nevertheless, he ended up blowing Nemes’ expectations out of the water during a rehearsal in Budapest.

“They asked me to describe one day of mine as a Sonderkommano in Auschwitz and I spoke for about two-and-a-half hours,” he reveals. “[I] just spoke and spoke and spoke — from waking up, all the way to going to bed. I think they asked for a lunch break and gave me the role pretty much soon after.”

“We finally saw that he was this character and he became the obvious choice,” says Nemes. “But at the beginning, he was pretty unknown and I was unknown and the whole enterprise didn’t make much sense. But then it just made itself.”

To prepare for the role of Saul, Röhrig lost a bunch of weight and pored over texts like We Wept Without Tears and Eyewitness at Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers, the latter hailing from ex-Sonderkommando, Filip Müller, who helped collect and hide evidence of Auschwitz during his time there. “I had some nightmares,” the actor shares. “I tried to read [these books] before going to sleep, but these materials aren’t suitable to read immediately before bedtime.”

He continues: “I understood — and László helped me a great deal with it — that in order to be a member of the Sonderkommando, you have to freeze, you have to become a zombie. There is a certain shell of yourself which has to meet the outer world. You have to [retreat] deep into yourself and not be too communicative. Saul tries not to look into people’s eyes — not just the Nazis, but also his own colleagues. He’s sort of living under the earth like a mole, just following his own way … I think if you could read Saul’s soul right from his eyes, then the movie would have been pretty boring after the first 10 minutes. But somehow, you couldn’t really figure me out.”

That aloof exterior fuels the movie’s central mystery of whether or not the murdered boy is really Saul’s child. Was the boy born out of wedlock or has Saul simply snapped? Both director and star have their own explanations, but want to leave the interpretation up to the audience, shifting the discussion of the main narrative engine to the film’s overarching theme of rebellion — both in rational and irrational contexts.

“It wasn’t enough to just have a man who’s trying to save the body of this boy from being burned,” Nemes emphasizes. “It was very obvious that there had be something else in this film. I came up with this [subplot] in a very organic way, another form of revolt, which is the collective revolt, the revolt that makes sense in a way from a classical point-of-view. Whereas Saul’s revolt doesn’t make sense in a classical sense. I think the conflict between these two forms of rebellion is very interesting. It creates questions, it gives reference to the other. They are in dialogue and it’s very interesting.”

Röhrig agrees with that sentiment, adding: “It’s a strange, but very noble, attempt on Saul’s part to remain human in a completely inhuman world.”

Filming Son of Saul

Principal photography on Son of Saul took place in Hungary and spanned less than a month, though the shoot was far from easy. “It was my first film and I was terrified. People were worried I wouldn’t be able to pull it off,” Nemes admits, recalling how he developed a terrible migraine on the first day.

“We had containers, [because] we didn’t have money for trailers. I went into the dark the first day and was just there for an hour. It was difficult. We recreated a concentration camp on a small scale … I think it did create a very oppressive environment, which helped us, but was also sometimes hard to deal with.”

Röhrig asserts he knew they had something special by the fifth day of filming: “I felt the unity of the team and once we started to shoot, I really had no personal meetings on the side. I tried to stay in character, besides running, which was my number one technique of normalcy in order to de-stress. I was running 5-10 miles after shooting.”

A passionate devotee of celluloid, Nemes shot the entire thing on film. In fact, all of his projects are only shot on film. “Film as a medium was very much in the physical world and I think it’s a shame that it became an IT department. People want to have the quality, they want to have a relationship to life and things that still have a meaningful dimension,” he laments of the industry’s modern emphasis on digital, CGI-heavy tentpole releases. “I still believe in the craft and the power of cinema … It’s also very important from a directorial point-of-view because you actually have to make decisions before and during the shoot, not doing everything in post-production. Film creates the discipline, you have to be thoughtful of the shots and your strategy.”

One thing he could save for the post-production process was the sound mix, which would make or break the audience’s immersion. To that end, Nemes and his crew put “tremendous effort” into the sonic aspect to “create a very spatial sound that was immersive, that was telling more than the image was,” the director explains. “Sound works in ways that are mysterious and therefore, creates an incredible power in the experience of moviegoing. In this case, because there is so much in the dark, so much out of frame and out of focus, that you start paying attention to the sounds even more. It becomes overwhelming at times; there’s a never-ending composition between sound and imagery that creates something very unique to this movie.”

Son of Saul dominates awards season

Released in the United States by Sony Pictures Classics, Son of Saul was met with universal critical acclaim (it holds a near-perfect score of 96% on Rotten Tomatoes), and rightly so. Hailed as one of the most greatest — if not the greatest — Holocaust portrayal ever put to film, it received a number of coveted industry accolades such as the Cannes’ Grand Prix, as well as a Golden Globe, BAFTA, and Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Feature. Not bad for a first-time director, though Nemes, while pleased, did not set out to collect prizes. “We were very happy to have these accolades and recognition,” he says. “But it came organically and it was a build-up … We were on a train that was going somewhere. We didn’t start with an Oscar, it was the end of the road in a way, so we had some time to prepare.”

“We had some hopes, to be noticed, but not in our wildest dreams did we expect such coverage and success,” echoes Röhrig.

For the actor, the greatest compliment came not from the Academy or Hollywood titans like Steven Spielberg, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Jesse Eisenberg, but from the late Dario Gabbai, a Greek Holocaust survivor and one of the last-remaining members of the Auschwitz Sonderkommandos. Wanting to get his opinion on Saul, the filmmakers set up a private screening with a doctor on hand just in case (after all, Gabbai was well into his 90s at the time).

“We said, ‘Listen, you can stop this anytime you want,’” Röhrig remembers. “He watched it and said, ‘Boys, you got it right.’ That’s what he said … Dario Gabbai’s approval of our movie meant at least as much to me as the Oscar prize, because he was the only one [left] in the world at that time. That was sort of the ultimate hechsher [a certification given to kosher food products].”

Delayed vindication

More than anything else, Nemes and Röhrig hoped that their film would help vindicate the Sonderkommandos, all of whom were branded as Nazi collaborators after the war and treated as pariahs within Jewish communities, especially within the newly-founded State of Israel. Ironically, the “I was just following orders” refrain used by the war criminals put on trial at Nuremberg is arguably more apropos of the Sonderkommando, who were immediately put to death if they didn’t comply with the SS guards running the concentration camp. Not to mention the fact that the average lifespan of a Sonderkommando was incredibly short, with entire units liquidated and replaced after a period of several months in order to keep the genocidal secret from getting out (which is why so few made it to the end of the war).

“I wanted to shift the responsibility back to the [real] perpetrators instead of creating moral differences [among the victims] in the Holocaust,” notes the director. “The Sonderkommando were as much victims as the others — even more so. That was evil within the evil. If I [helped mitigate that notion], if it was [at all] possible to shift the responsibility back to the real perpetrators, then I’m a little bit satisfied.”

Röhrig, meanwhile, recalls an encounter with a Holocaust survivor, who slapped him across the face and chastised him for “glorifying” individuals who had worked alongside the Nazis following a screening of the film in Florida.

“I grabbed his hand, kissed it, and said, ‘Look, I understand where you’re coming from. Please hear me out.’ Then I tried to explain that aside from suicide, what chances of survival did the Sonderkommando have? They had their lives and families to return to and obviously they wanted to survive. It’s an instinct … [Son of Saul] started a longer process, probably a lifelong process, of me, as a private person, trying to square with the deeper questions … [to help] manage the pain.”