- I don't think any subject matter is off the table when it comes to art. I think it can be done. I hope it was done by us.[2015]
- [on Son of Saul (2015)] We tried to be very restrained. Cinema seems more and more keen on giving more and more. I think less is more and the right way was to rely on the imagination of viewers to reconstruct something that cannot be reconstructed. For them to create in the mind the experience of the extermination camp.[2015]
- [on Son of Saul (2015)] We wanted to maintain logic at all costs: logic of space, logic of work, the work processes, the hierarchy. So everything that could be preserved in its logic was very important. So I think you can feel this logic in the way the work was organized. Those are the rules of the game. We had testimonies from the survivors of the Holocaust. We read those in several books. There was one direct source, which was the "Scrolls of Auschwitz," the written diaries by the members of the Sonderkommando, that they buried before they revolted in 1944. So a lot of elements were given to us by these testimonies and then we consulted with historians. We had the constant supervision of a Hungarian historian specializing in the Holocaust, from checking the places where the numbers were to constructing the sets, how the paint would look, where the lighting would be, what were the bulbs and those kind of things. We had a Yiddish adviser who helped us with this vernacular, with a special vocabulary recreated that had been lost. It gave us these many levels of realism, although the normal viewer cannot comprehend all these things. But we wanted to keep the authenticity as much as possible and make it believable.[2015]
- When I was working for Béla Tarr, I learned about his extreme attention to detail - controlling the creative process to the point of involving a team to do that, and also having the technical crew as much as a creative crew. He knows who his focus should be on.[2015]
- I saw Claude Lanzmann, the director of Shoah (1985) at one screening and started talking to him. Afterward, four different people posted pictures about it. He said that my film was good, which is apparently kind of revolutionary, but for me it wasn't that surprising. I don't mean to be pretentious, but I think he's been frustrated by representations and visual strategies associated with the Holocaust, which I have also questioned.[2015]
- I think that what I came to understand is big stories such as the Holocaust are always made in a way that reassures the audience. In their fears, in their hopes, these are stories of survival. And the Holocaust is not about survival, it's about the extermination of the Jews of Europe. I think it's the difference in mechanism that was put in place unconsciously after the war by artists and people who came back and the messengers from the camp, but this complicates the perception of the Holocaust itself, the experience of the camp. It contributed to a dogma around it. It's always the same path; you're not confronted with anything. You show a lot, you tell things, you suggest the guilt lies with this guy or these others guys. It's a well-established set of signals.[2015]
- [on Son of Saul (2015)] Come and See (1985) by Elem Klimov was a great source of inspiration for me. The movie follows a boy in 1943 on the eastern front and stays with him in an organic manner through his hellish adventures. But Klimov allowed himself far more baroque things than we did.[2015]
- [on Son of Saul (2015)] In a sense, you were there as a witness: You had a feeling you were in a crematorium, rather than on a movie set. For that reason, cast and crew believed they were in a real situation. The fact that we used longer shots also contributed to the organic feeling within the shoot itself. Everyone could relate to it in a much more visceral sense - we were immersed in this world. It made it more difficult in a psychological way, but it made our work much more concentrated, with a sense of mission. [2015]
- [on Son of Saul (2015)] It's trying to give an immersive experience to the viewer by coexisting with the main character. (...) In this way, we can emphasize his individual experience, not jumping around with different points of view, to make things more easily understood by the audience. [2015]
- [on Son of Saul (2015)] I had to first find an angle, the basic, core story. (...) I knew I wanted something very primitive. That became the main character's story - a man, working in a crematorium, finding a boy, thinking he's his son and trying to bury him - that came years after. [2015]
- [on the re-creation of a crematorium in Son of Saul (2015)] It was not a studio; it was a real place. (...) In a sense, you were there as a witness: You had a feeling you were in a crematorium, rather than on a movie set. For that reason, cast and crew believed they were in a real situation. The fact that we used longer shots also contributed to the organic feeling within the shoot itself. Everyone could relate to it in a much more visceral sense - we were immersed in this world. It made it more difficult in a psychological way, but it made our work much more concentrated, with a sense of mission. [2015]
- [on production designer László Rajk] For him, our collaboration was to determine how to re-create specific buildings within the concentration camp. We couldn't re-create the crematorium inch by inch. Our challenge was to create the logic of a crematorium, the spaces, how the rooms were interconnected in their logic, rather that re-create it exactly - how to give it an organic believability. [2015]
- [on sound designer Tamás Zányi] He was the sound designer who also did sound mixing and editing, of course assisted by other people. I warned him at least 50% of the film would be sound. We spent almost five months in post-production on the sound. We kept adding layers, because the sound is suggesting that there is much more than the audience can see. So we added human voices, and the sound spectrum of the crematorium, which is always there, always making noise. At some point, we had to take away some sound, because it was overwhelming. I think the most difficult part was the human voices, the cries and shouts in the gas chambers. [2015]
- [on scoring Son of Saul (2015) with composer László Melis] I didn't want a 'score,' it wouldn't have been right. We wanted something where you cannot trace the music, you cannot put your finger on it. It's very hidden; that was one of his achievements. The second achievement was to find the final song at the end. He helped us get access to lost music from Transylvania, very folkloric and Hasidic. This civilization has vanished, so this is a song from a lost world. That was an important contribution. [2015]
- [on casting Son of Saul (2015) with casting director Éva Zabezsinszkij] We went through a lengthy e-casting process, people sending us videos. We wanted people from several backgrounds, several countries, a lot of languages. So we had people from Poland, Germany, Israel, Romania and, of course, Hungary. [2015]
- [on his biography] I studied International Relations and Political Science in Paris where I grew up. I wanted to go to film school but couldn't. I took some classes in film theory at university and I learnt by myself, I read a lot and watched films. Then I went back to Hungary and worked as an assistant director. Then I went to film school in New York [NYU's Tisch School of the Arts] but I quit before finishing. [DK: Why?] I did not like it. [DK: Too conventional?] Yes, it's a long story but film school was not my cup of tea. Then I'd already started making short films and continued doing that and developing them into features. [DK: How many short films have you made?] Three. Interestingly, none of them were accepted in the shorts competition in Sarajevo. [Interview with Dana Knight at Sarajevo Film Festival 2015]
- [on the use of shallow focus in Son of Saul (2015)] Yes, it's a portrait, it's a very reduced scope of an image and it actually corresponds to the limitations of a human being: you see very little, you know very little in a concentration camp. And the human experience, with hindsight, is different but the people who were there knew much less. I wanted to convey how limited we could be in this kind of situation. [DK: That's also how we experience life in reality, the background is always a bit blurred.] Exactly. And that's the other thing: we wanted to have something very human as an experience. So these limitations don't apply solely to the concentration camp. I think cinema nowadays goes too far in showing. We were against that, we tried to find ways that were more at the human level. [Interview with Dana Knight 2015]
- I was an assistant director for years. I was an assistant to Béla Tarr in Hungary for two years, which taught me the basics of not just filmmaking, but high-level filmmaking - in terms of how to choreograph a scene, how to stage complicated shots, how to work with a professional crew etc. Also I had made three short films before this. And I had built a relationship to some key creative crew members over the years: the DP, the production designer, the sound designer. On such a foundation I can communicate with them effectively. It's like we've been doing rehearsals all this time. [2015]
- [on Son of Saul (2015)] I think people never had a direct, visceral understanding of what it might have been like to be inside a concentration camp, to be caught in the middle of an extermination machine. There have been attempts to approach it in a more intellectual manner, but not viscerally - to put you in the shoes of someone in that situation. It's something that cinema can achieve, this kind of direct, intuitive relationship between the individual audience members and the character. We lack empathy in the sense that there's a distance when we think about the camps in abstract terms. So I hope this movie can help make people really feel what it's like to be oppressed and destroyed in our human experience. Also, if we consider Holocaust as a myth and not as something that took place in this world - I mean, Auschwitz was a factory, built by people and not by martians - if, as a civilization, we don't address the genocidal tendency in our nature, how can we prevent such atrocities from happening again? So - maybe I'm being optimistic here - I think that's something that cinema can do, to speak to the human in the audience. [2015]
- [on the cinematography of Son of Saul (2015)] In fact we established a set of codes for this movie which we actually wrote down. Rules like: this is not a beautiful film. No beautiful shots. There would be no aestheticizing the suffering of the people. Or that the camera should be trained at eye level, making it a very subjective experience. Also, to use more or less only one 40mm lens because we wanted something that's close to the human perception. And we didn't want anything iconographic that would distract people's attention. The movie should look a little messy, with an uncertain, unfinished quality. [2015]
- [on Son of Saul (2015)] We were deciding between widescreen and the narrow academy aspect ratio [1.37:1]. In the end we found that widescreen - although it would have looked very nice - would have been too... cinematic, it would have made a spectacle out of the background, made the background so stylistically important that we would lose the portrait-like focus we wanted for the film. [2015]
- [on Son of Saul (2015)'s historical background] The story of this man wanting to bury his assumed son is a fictional story which just came out of my mind. I chose the name Saul for the main character because I liked it. It was this one line with which we started the whole project five years ago. Then with Clara Royer, my co-screenwriter, we did extensive research, reading the personal accounts by Schlomo Venezia and Filip Müller. We also read the records of Miklos Nyiszli, a Hungarian Jewish doctor who had a job in crematoriums. Zoltan Vagi, Gideon Greif and Philippe Mesnard historically helped us in the project. We also watched previous movies on the topic and of course there was Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (1985), especially its 'Sonderkommando' sequences. [2015]
- [on Son of Saul (2015)] We didn't look for a hero. We wanted a marginal figure, someone more low key and normal, because previous films about the Holocaust all dealt with abnormal, exceptional characters who wanted to survive. However, the camps were not about survival; they were about death and to survive was an exception. What we looked for was inner survival and this is linked to the story of the boy. This quest does not make sense to anybody but him, though we hope it does to the viewer. For this reason, I focused on the Sonderkommando. What I liked about that group was that it was very real, concrete, and tangible; it explains and describes things in a normal way, it explains how a death factory functions with its organization, rules, shifts, and hazards. [2015]
- [on Son of Saul (2015)] What we usually define as madness in real life does not have any meaning in Auschwitz. That was an entirely different set of coordinates. So what is madness? What is happening within Auschwitz is supposed to be super rational. Don't you call that madness? It's absurd. The madness of Saul is the most important human quality; it is a form of revolt. (...) In fact, the movie represents different forms of resistance with the armed revolt being just one of them. Saul looked for another form of revolt and his attempt to look for his personal quest is what defines it for him. He is constantly moving between different places and behaviours, such as looking for a rabbi to give sense to his personal form of resistance. In the face of a situation in which there is no possibility of hope, Saul's inner voice commands him that he must survive, to be able to do a thing that bears meaning. [2015]
- [on Son of Saul (2015)] The aim was to try taking this out of the history books and bringing it into the present in a sense while concentrating on one man, one human being, and not being distracted by all kinds of things that we want to show and tell. For this movie which tells its story in just a day and a half, I did not look for a hero and I was not interested in the survivor's point of view; I was not even interested in representing too much of the death factory. I only looked for a unique perspective in order to tell the story in the simplest and most minimalist way possible. I looked at the world from the perspective of [the character] Saul Auslander, a Hungarian Jew, a member of the Sonderkommando, and I limited my film to his perspective. I wanted to make something very historic into something very alive and I wanted to boil everything down to the dimension of a single human being. Given this, my movie is very different from a survival story such as Schindler's List (1993), which is a very good film, very talented, dramatic, and almost epic. My film is not about survival; it is about the reality of death. Survival is a lie, it was the exception. Furthermore, I did not focus on a group but rather on the experience of one human being. Having said this, it is not only a subjective stance since we see him as a character representing something universal. [2015]
- Béla Tarr for me was my school. He taught me the essential things to become a filmmaker but there is no other relationship. He was nervous when I talked to him so I haven't talked to Bela in eight years. While it was very important to work with him, it's part of history now. [2015]
- [on Son of Saul (2015)] Even if it was ambitious, I felt the scope of it was something I could control. I wanted to immerse the viewer in an experience rather than construct an intellectual discourse or use the Holocaust for its dramatic value. [2015]
- [on space and immersion in Son of Saul (2015)] I wanted to have a building, where we didn't have to cut from one level to the next. I wanted everything to be in the same place to preserve the organic feeling of immersion of the film. (...) But I also wanted to give the impression that we were in a real place, which turned out so much so that the cast and crew reacted emotionally and felt they were on a mission. [2015]
- [on the editing of Son of Saul (2015)] Matthieu [editor Matthieu Taponier] and I had extensive discussions on how to go from one immersive situation to another. (...) We cut according the gaze of the main character, like when he starts looking around to find a way to realize his quest to bury the boy. [2015]
- [on the sound design of Son of Saul (2015)] I spent five months with Tamas [Tamás Zányi], our sound designer. It was very painful and very difficult. He was very intuitive and approached it like music. (...) It was very important that we had this Babel of expressions, the sounds, the whispers and the shouts in all kinds of languages. [2015]
- [on favorite filmmakers] In general, Stanley Kubrick is the one that I'm the most interested in. (...) His approach. You can feel his approach and the symptom as a reference point. I really like Barry Lyndon (1975) or The Shining (1980). The thoughtfulness and the directing strategy. [2015]
- [on Son of Saul (2015)] We wanted to convey something about the human experience within the concentration camp, within the extermination process and that was our strategy. We achieved it through the mixture of chaos and organization. These two elements of chaos and organization are in the film, are in our strategy of directing and making it happen but also are at the heart of the human experience within the concentration camp. [2015]
- I think, the Nazis, besides being murderers and thieves, were also liars. The entire process was invented using lies. And people want, in order to survive, to believe. That is something that we more and more forget because we have this external standpoint. When you're inside, it's a different story. [2015]
- [on Son of Saul (2015)] I think also, when you are in Auschwitz, there is no sign that you are in Auschwitz. You have to forget everything that was given to you by the films on the Holocaust. It has to be forgotten at some point because all those films rely to an extent on an external point of view. I really wanted to immerse the viewer in an experience that's not explained. It had to be visceral because that's the way it happened. [2015]
- [on Son of Saul (2015)] I wanted to make this film, yes, because I had a family that was wiped out with no trace. So, I guess, it was a way to leave a trace. [2015]
- [on Son of Saul (2015)] I've been completely frustrated by other films on the Holocaust. They try to show too much, and tell too much. Something had to be done to bring the viewer's experience back to the level of one human being. (...) We really wanted to exclude all the representation codes that were built up after the war, the scene logic to the way characters are addressed or behave, because they're related to survival strategies. This event was not about survival, it was about death and killing, in what was a factory. [2015]
- [on Son of Saul (2015)] There has been so much responsibility shifted back to the victims. At some point, from a moral standpoint, you have to separate. You don't make the victims morally responsible. [2015]
- [on Son of Saul (2015)] Even if Yiddish was used throughout the camp whenever it could be used, you had this mixture, this chaos of languages, this Babel. And we wanted to have that - we have eight languages in the film, because we wanted something that is anchored in the very heart of the film. This sense of being lost, of being unable to communicate. [2015]
- [on Son of Saul (2015) and the main character's name] Auschwitz and the camps were about dehumanisation of the individual. In a way sticking to one person, gives back to the individual the human dimension that has been lost. So in a way we go against the logic of the camp even if we try to recreate the logic of the camp. There's an internal conflict in it. And the fact that he was named Ausländer - it was an intuitive choice. We were looking for a name that came from this region, the place from which my family came. And I like the fact that he is in a certain way a foreigner or a stranger. I think a lot of Jews were in a way. [2015]
- [on Claude Lanzmann] Yes, he likes it [Son of Saul (2015)] a lot. We became friends through the film. And I know he is very hard with fiction films. (...) We watched Shoah (1985) a lot before making this film. It inspired us. I think "Shoah" has a tremendous outer frame off stage. It's the vanished world of the Jews of Europe. The idea of an off-screen that is always there that fueled our approach. [2015]
- The interesting thing in Judaism if I understood it correctly, because I wasn't brought up in a religious fashion, is the constant obligation to ask questions. You cannot just take a rule as it is and take it as a dogma, there is a continuous obligation to wonder if it's right or wrong. Son of Saul (2015) is not religious but it's not about a God it's about something very human and universal - finding a voice within that would give you a way to remain a human being in this darkness. [2015]
- [on Béla Tarr and long takes] He was my film school. (...) It's a long Hungarian tradition. Tarr comes from [acclaimed Hungarian-Romanian film director] Miklós Jancsó. We're from that school of long takes. [2015]
- [on Son of Saul (2015)'s narrative strategies] The way we stick to him is a way to accompany him through the journey. We're looking at what he is interested in - he's not paying attention to the horror because there was a sort of psychological distance he had to create. (...) The sound constantly reminds you as a viewer that there's more. [2015]
- [on Son of Saul (2015)] When you make your first feature you don't really understand the dangers, you're not aware of the dangers. You need to be unconscious of the dangers of failing with the film and in your career. 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. 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 guess this frustration is part of the game, I hope in the future I can be as bold. I wish I could be on the edge once more. [2015]
- [on Son of Saul (2015)] 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. 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. [2015]
- [on Son of Saul (2015)] When I was first editing it or sound editing it, I had this feeling that this film would never reach the audiences, because I was so frustrated by all the things that I couldn't accomplish. It was so difficult to make. This film was so difficult to make. We encountered so much resistance. And every shooting day was a different difficulty. Every day was a different difficulty. And I knew that we were making a prototype. This is not the usual coverage kind of film. We knew that it was stylistically very different from the usual films. I think we were more terrified than confident, but also because probably I don't have enough experience. [2015]
- [on Son of Saul (2015)] Even in the financing stage, people asked me why I was making a film about the Holocaust and not a film about myself. My life is not that interesting, and also what is wrong in this world in which people are so narcissistic that they not only talk about themselves, but also make others talk about themselves. [2015]
- [on Son of Saul (2015)] In Europe and the US it seems that films have to have a message that is clearly understood, it's like we're in an era of public education, not filmmaking. I think that filmmaking is something that has to rely on the viewer and their imagination. It has to have its zone of darkness and unknown, otherwise it's all planned out and we're on some safe road. [2015]
- [on Son of Saul (2015) and filmmaking] ...if you don't take risks, you shouldn't make cinema. I mean, that's part of art. If there's no risk, then there's no interest also. It's good, because it's thrilling. Not the film, but the experience is thrilling as a maker, because it's something new. [2015]
- [on Son of Saul (2015)] Once you have a clear-cut visual strategy, and in this case it was that we wanted to accompany he main character, then everything has to follow in a very coherent way. It gives you guidance. In this case, we knew we had establish a code of conduct on what to do and what not to do. We didn't go beyond the capacity of one human being visually. We wanted to stick to one character, one individual. If he is pushed down to the ground, we go down with him to the ground, if he goes to the water, we go to the water with him. We wanted to use one lens, the closest to the human perception. We had to have longer shots and we had to have beats within the scene and not edit for beats. It's more like internal editing that takes place within the frame. [2015]
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