Sandra Hülser: She looks calmly at the Oscars

In his new film “The Zone of Interest”, the acclaimed British cult director Jonathan Glazer (“Under the Skin”, 58) directs the German Oscar hopeful Sandra Hülser (45) as Hedwig Höß (1908-1989), wife of the camp commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höß (1901-1947), who is portrayed in the film by “Babylon Berlin” star Christian Friedel (44).

In the unusual Holocaust drama, nominated for five Oscars, the Nazi couple Höß tries to lead as normal a family life as possible – even though the property on which their luxurious single-family home stands borders on the outer wall of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Day and night, the Höß family hears screams, gunshots and the sounds of the Nazis’ industrial extermination of people from beyond the Wall. Director Glazer and his team have created a soundscape for “The Zone of Interest,” which is also nominated for “Best Sound” at the upcoming Oscars, that truly gets under your skin.

Sandra Hülser, who is nominated for “Best Actress” at the 96th Academy Awards on March 10th for her role in the French courtroom film “Anatomy of a Case”, talks about her Oscar nomination in an interview with the news agency spot on news Insights into the unusual production method of “The Zone of Interest” and reveals why she didn’t go to bed as Hedwig Höß in the evenings during filming on the outskirts of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

How are you dealing with the current increased attention on yourself?

Sandra Hülser: I can only accept it, not change it. I am fully aware that these are all attributions. It has little to do with me. The expectations have nothing to do with me either.

I can’t do anything anymore. Everything that happens now is basically out of my control. Only how I react to it and deal with it is in my hands.

It basically has nothing to do with my private life. I feel the same as before. Everything else is outside.

But do you occasionally resist a little, against the attention, against the attributions, as you say? You kind of get the feeling – surely some people would jump around for joy?

Huller: I did that too. But I can’t do that every day. I was really happy when I found out, really. But you can’t walk around with this feeling every day, it’s impossible.

Have you already prepared a thank you speech just in case – or do you say to yourself: If so, then spontaneously?

Huller: I haven’t decided that yet. I always have to check how I feel beforehand…

What did it do to you to play Hedwig Höß in “The Zone of Interest”? The filming even took place next to the former Auschwitz concentration camp.

Hülser: Personally, I wasn’t really involved in this character. It was not our intention to tell the story biographically. We actually wanted to shed light on this phenomenon and ask ourselves how it is possible to live like this and what it has to do with us. Whether we don’t actually do the same thing in a figurative sense, that we all put up with a lot of other people’s suffering for our own convenience.

That was more about that, not so much about this woman Hedwig Höß. I don’t really care about that, I have to say.

Where would you see this in our society today?

Huller: I think that’s pretty obvious. The clothes we wear are sewn and shipped by people who live on a fraction of what we live on here. Every day we exploit people and animals to feed ourselves. We accept deaths at Europe’s external borders. This happens every day and everywhere.

They said they didn’t want to play the role of Hedwig at first. Is that correct? And if so, why?

Hülser: Yes, I was simply not interested in embodying fascist-minded people. After all, the actor’s work always has something to do with wanting to understand things, being empathetic and perhaps even apologizing and making things comprehensible. But I didn’t really see a reason for that.

There is no understandable reason for me to act like this and I don’t want to understand it either. It is a decision that people make who risk the death of millions of people for their own beautiful lives. That is out of the question.

Were you able to put the roles down easily after the day of filming?

Hülser: As I said, I never really got into this role. I actually perceived myself more as an element of the film, this experimental setup by Jonathan Glazer. I actually didn’t do any psychological work with this character. Didn’t try to find any kind of empathy or get emotionally involved in any way. That’s why there was nothing to put down there. I didn’t go to bed at night as Hedwig Höß.

So you basically acted as an instrument in this film?

Hülser: It was really not the intention that you would want to identify yourself as a person watching. During this work, no one wanted anyone to have any understanding for anyone. It was about observing this life as neutrally as possible.

This background noise was basically impossible to ignore, and yet they did it anyway.

How did you perceive the sound level when you first watched the film? What were your feelings there?

Hülser: I didn’t have that many feelings when I saw it for the first time. The first look is always technical. We had 800 hours of material from the ten cameras that were constantly running. So we asked ourselves: What of what we wanted is really in there? Which scenes are in it and how was it edited?

I didn’t know beforehand what kind of image quality that was, what colors those were. Hearing this background noise, the music by Mica Levi, which I think is really fantastic, for the first time, and seeing everything working together was very exciting and interesting. Jonathan Glazer calls the sound film that Johnnie Burn and his team created there “film two”. And the first time I looked, I noticed that it worked.

Can you please describe this way of working a little more? You just mentioned that there were cameras running in the house at the same time?

Hülser: All cameras were constantly recording something. We just didn’t know what or what the cutout was. Some weren’t even visible. Especially when working with children, it is important that the camera is under no circumstances played on and that this presence is not there.

That does something to you. It constantly forces you to center yourself again because there is no direction in which you can play. There is nowhere to present anything. That’s why all concentration always went to the partners or stayed with oneself. It was never about transporting anything anywhere.