‘The Zone Of Interest’: Read The Screenplay For Jonathan Glazer’s Searing Holocaust Drama About Humans’ Capacity For Evil

Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series spotlighting the year’s most talked-about scripts continues with The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer’s historical drama that was inspired loosely by Martin Amis’ 2014 novel of the same name set outside the walls of Auschwitz during the Holocaust.

The A24 film has been a critical smash since its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Grand Prix and FIPRESCI prizes and was in the running for the Palme d’Or that was eventually won by Anatomy of a Fall.

The pic, which made the Oscar shortlist as the UK’s submission for this year’s International Feature race, hit U.S. theaters with a qualifying run in December and just had a screening at the United Nations. It marks Glazer’s first feature film in a decade – since the Scarlett Johansson-starring sci-fi drama Under The Skin in 2013. His other writing-directing credits include the Nicole Kidman-starring Birth (2004), and he helmed 2000’s gangster drama Sexy Beast which scored star Ben Kingsley an Oscar nomination.

The Zone of Interest stars Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller (also the star of Anatomy of a Fall) as Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig, as they strive to build a dream life for their family in a house and garden separated from the Nazi concentration and extermination camp by a only a short wall. What is happening on the other side is rarely hinted at.

Glazer said at Cannes that it was during a trip to Auschwitz in southern Poland that he saw the house and garden where the commandant (a fictional version of the character was a key cog in Amis’ novel) lived — it was “jaw-dropping that it really got to me,” he said.

For the film, he spent two years researching the area’s history, and used the real names of the people involved to keep the story as authentic as possible.

“It’s to try and show these people as people, not as monsters; that was an important thing to do,” he said.

“The great crime and tragedy is that human beings did this to other human beings,” he said of the film, which serves as a warning about our capacity for violence and atrocity. “It’s very convenient for us to distance ourselves from them.”

Click below to read the script.