Lás­zló Nemes: ​‘I want­ed recre­ate the expe­ri­ence of Auschwitz’

The Acad­e­my Awards may be a glitzy par­ty with an arbi­trary approach to dish­ing out Oscars but, with­in the cir­cus, are moments of grav­i­tas. Lás­zló Nemes is the embod­i­ment of grav­i­tas. His debut fea­ture, Son of Saul, is a relent­less immer­sion in the quest of a Jew­ish pris­on­er whose job, in 1944, is to clear Auschwitz’s gas cham­bers of the dead.

Bod­ies – out of focus, naked and stacked high – are in Saul’s periph­er­al vision. This cre­ates grief and empa­thy for a char­ac­ter who search­es for reprise, despite the night­mar­ish hor­ror all around. See­ing Nemes with his baby face and bull­shit-free speech col­lect­ing the shiny Best For­eign Film gong is a pos­i­tive omen for the future of this impres­sive­ly seri­ous Hun­gar­i­an 39-year-old.

LWLies: How did you recre­ate the con­di­tions of the exter­mi­na­tion camps?

Nemes: The film takes place in and around one of the cre­ma­to­ri­ums of Auschwitz, so we found the right loca­tion and build­ing. It had all the lev­els of the cre­ma­to­ri­um, from the attic to the ovens lev­el to the low­er lev­els – the under­ground undress­ing room and gas cham­ber, out­side the court of the cre­ma­to­ri­um and the out­side. Every­thing was in one place so you could have a con­tin­u­ous expe­ri­ence film­ing between the one lev­el and the next.

And all the piles of bod­ies that you see in the background?

I’m not going to com­ment on that. This is the secret of the work­shop. I know how we did it but it has to remain a sacred thing when we’re talk­ing about the dead. I don’t want to dis­close too much about that.

What are your thoughts on cre­ative inde­pen­dence? Do you strive for it? If so, how?

It’s scary how lit­tle we are allowed, as film­mak­ers, to have our own worlds cre­at­ed because of peo­ple who want to sec­ond guess the mar­ket but actu­al­ly don’t know more about the mar­ket than we do. They try to say we should make this film so it looks like anoth­er film, which already had suc­cess. But film­mak­ing is about tak­ing risks. If a film­mak­er doesn’t take risks then cin­e­ma is dying. You can see how a sort of very sta­t­ic mind­set has tak­en over Euro­pean film­mak­ing and world­wide filmmaking.

So how did you do it?

Just stick to your ambi­tion, then you wait until you get lucky and hope that the project doesn’t die with­in you. I think I got lucky. When I was close to not real­is­ing it – actu­al­ly not mak­ing this film hap­pen – the Hun­gar­i­an Film Fund was the only organ­i­sa­tion will­ing to sup­port this film. Had they not done this, it would have been impos­si­ble to do this film.

Did you come close to cry­ing or did you cry at any point?

No. Inside, yes, I still am.

How close is the fin­ished film to the vision you had before you made it? 

Six­ty per cent. I only think of the 40 per cent miss­ing. I nev­er think of the 60 per cent that I made happen.

What was your full ambition? 

To have it the same but better.

Would that have been a tech­ni­cal change? 

No, not tech­ni­cal. I’m the only one who knows but it just frus­trates me. It’s not real­ly an emo­tion­al change, it’s not the approach. It’s more the scope of it.

And that still haunts you?

Of course, that’s why I can’t watch the film, but I think in two years it’s going to be eas­i­er for me to watch it.

Did you make Son of Saul because it was an issue you were obsessed with?

Yeah.

Has mak­ing this film changed the nature of your obsession?

Yeah, it makes it a lit­tle bit eas­i­er to live with the thought of… I tried to com­mu­ni­cate some­thing that I had an intu­ition of, the expe­ri­ence of being a human in the midst of the exter­mi­na­tion machine – some­thing that hasn’t been com­mu­ni­cat­ed in cin­e­ma, the vis­cer­al expe­ri­ence of it. Not the exter­nal point of view, not the sur­vival point of view, but some­thing immersed in the real­i­ty of one human being with the lim­i­ta­tions, the impos­si­bil­i­ty of know­ing what’s going to hap­pen. I want­ed the imag­i­na­tion of the audi­ence to recre­ate the expe­ri­ence of the camp.

Did you always… because I read that some of your fam­i­ly members…

Peo­ple were killed in my fam­i­ly. It was not unusu­al for Jews to be killed. But it’s a very trau­mat­ic expe­ri­ence and I think it’s trans­mit­ted from gen­er­a­tion to gen­er­a­tion, in an almost genet­ic way. I want­ed to make a film about that because peo­ple tend to con­sid­er the con­cen­tra­tion camp as either some­thing remote and abstract or his­tor­i­cal, not real­ly tak­ing place here and now. Or in a very over-aes­theti­cised fash­ion. I want­ed to make it hard­er for oth­er peo­ple to make films in the camp because it’s so easy to go there but it should be very hard to go there. You have to have the respon­si­bil­i­ty as a film­mak­er to go there and talk about it. I want­ed to bring the present of it, the here and now, and not this remote point of view.

Have your fam­i­ly seen the film?

My moth­er, my aunt, a few peo­ple. I made this for peo­ple who died in my fam­i­ly who have no trace of their exis­tence apart from a few pic­tures. So many peo­ple died in ter­ri­ble ways and they tried to erase even the fact that they exist­ed by not even scat­ter­ing their ash­es. There’s some­thing very… the destruc­tion of peo­ple is some­thing very… I’m very obsessed by it.

What’s next for you?

I have a project that takes place before the First World war; it’s the sto­ry of a young women in Budapest.

Have you writ­ten the script?

We have a script but it’s being rewrit­ten and we are already work­ing the prepa­ra­tion of the film.

Does this sym­bol­ise that you’re mov­ing on from…

Yeah, I have to leave the sub­ject. I don’t want to live in a cre­ma­to­ri­um forever.

Son of Saul is released 29 April.