"THE GREY ZONE is the story of people trying desperately to give their lives meaning in a place designed to kill," says writer and director Tim Blake Nelson. "Each character has a different definition of what a meaningful life is. And while there are people who act heroically at given points, this is not a film about heroes. "
Nelson is a uniquely American artist. His body of work as a writer, director and actor is as eclectic as his origins. Like many New Yorkers, he is not from New York. A self-described "Jew from Tulsa," Oklahoma ("one of those folks from the Bible," he likes to say with a rural twang), Nelson's first film was the acclaimed Sundance favorite EYE OF GOD. Set in a small Oklahoma town, the film was based on a play written by Nelson revolving around faith, fidelity and punishment and featured extraordinary performances from Martha Plimpton, Hal Holbrook and Kevin Anderson. As an actor, Nelson is perhaps best known for playing Delmar, the dingbat convict on the lam with George Clooney and John Turturro in the Coen brothers' O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? As a director of material that is not his own, Nelson just saw the release of the long-delayed and controversial film O, a contemporary adaptation of Othello set in an all-white Southern prep school.
But Nelson considers THE GREY ZONE his most personal work to date. A reporter with Entertainment Weekly recently observed that Nelson's collection of antique wristwatches from all over the world numbers over 120, and that Nelson is "a man obsessed with time. " The characters in THE GREY ZONE are also obsessed with time, knowing as they do how little of it they have left.
In the mid-90s, Nelson encountered an essay in Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved about the Sonderkommandos - Jews forced to become part of the Nazi extermination machine. When he read Levi's work, he recognized that these men had been forced to face the ultimate moral dilemma. The Sonderkommandos, prisoners in the death camps, were selected to ready their fellow Jews for death in the gas chambers, and then to process their corpses after gassings, stripping them of clothes, valuables and even hair and teeth before incineration, ensuring that the huge death machine operated as efficiently as possible.
Those who refused to perform their duties were shot on the spot, and many chose suicide over execution. Those who accepted the labor lived for an extra four months at most, before being slaughtered themselves.
In exchange for assisting in the extermination of their fellow Jews, the Sonderkommandos were granted privileges unheard of in the rest of the camp - larger quarters, better food, books, alcohol and cigarettes, and the right to loot the belongings of the transports just exterminated.
"At the time I began researching their lives, I was an able-bodied Jewish man in my early thirties, so it could have been my life, my predicament. To this day I cannot tell what I might have done if faced with their impossible choice. It became personal," says Nelson.
A year earlier, Nelson had written a play about the escape from Germany of his mother's family, which happened just before Kristallnacht, when the Nazis made clear to the world their intention to rid Germany, and then Europe, of its Jewish population. He decided that his play added nothing new to the spectrum of work that had already examined the holocaust, and put it aside. In contrast, one of the considerations that drew him to tell the story of the Sonderkommandos was that their history had never been explored on stage or film. "I grew up attending synagogue and Hebrew school, and I had never heard of the Sonderkommandos," Nelson explains.
With Levi as his guide, Nelson then read Auschwitz: a Doctor's Eyewitness Account, the memoirs of Miklos Nyiszli, a Hungarian Jewish doctor who assisted the notorious Doctor Josef Mengele in a range of dubious medical experiments on Auschwitz inmates. Nelson personally optioned the rights to Nyiszli's book for film and stage, and the Doctor became a character in the first incarnation of THE GREY ZONE, a stage play produced in 1996 at New York's Manhattan Class Company off-Broadway. The production was extended repeatedly, and ended the season to great acclaim winning numerous awards, including New York Newsday's Oppenheimer Prize, and four Obies.
Nelson centers his story around a squabbling and mistrusting group of Hungarian Jews from Auschwitz's twelfth Sonderkommando as they are helping to plan a quasi-successful rebellion which took place at the camp in the Autumn of 1944. The uprising is threatened when a young girl is, against all odds, found alive underneath a heap of dead bodies in the gas chamber, and the group's focus is diverted by the impulse to save her.
While four characters in the story are based on historical figures (Miklos Nyiszli, Erich Muhsfeldt, Josef Mengele and the young girl), Nelson based the fictional characters of Hoffman, Rosenthal, Schlermer and Abramowics on five diaries written by Sonderkommando members, and found buried at Birkenau. In reading these diaries, along with every other piece of writing he could acquire on the subject, Nelson learned that these men were, as he puts it, "a far cry from the lachrymose, cowering Jews depicted in most holocaust narratives. They were often crass, and profane, and they certainly weren't skulking off to pray or philosophize about God. They simply were doing whatever it took, and I mean whatever it took, to survive. "
Nelson goes on to stress the historical truth that internecine hatreds within the Jewish community pervaded the camp: "The fact is that conditions in the camps, and particularly in the Sonderkommandos, brought out shameful qualities in men, the most benign of which were mistrust, greed, xenophobia and self-hatred. "
With this in mind, and with the aim to de-sentimentalize his subject matter, Nelson dispensed with the convention of middle European accents and "quaint ways of speech" for his characters, allowing instead for the actors playing the Jews in THE GREY ZONE to "speak as they normally speak, without of course slipping into regionalism. " He adds, "Though they're speaking English in the film, they're meant to be speaking Hungarian, their native tongue. They wouldn't have the silly Jewish accents which never cease to mystify me in holocaust films. " Nelson's characters curse at one another, and cut one another off. "My hope is that the result has the feel of immediacy, while still being accurate to the period," he says.
The other major plot in the film involves women inmates who worked in the Union Munitions Factory near Birkenau, and who managed to smuggle gunpowder to Sonderkommando members in the trucks and carts which ferried corpses to the crematoria. Nelson based these female characters loosely on four women, led most notably by the young Pole Rosa Robota, who were ruthlessly tortured, and then publicly hanged without ever revealing to the Nazis the purpose of their thefts of gunpowder. The date of the Sonderkommando rebellion, the only formally organized revolt ever attempted by a Sonderkommando, was October 7th, 1944, and the weapons used were makeshift: stones, axes, hammers, home-made grenades, and a small cache of machine guns and pistols smuggled into the crematoria by local partisans.
According to most accounts, the uprising was initiated by the members of the Number Three Crematorium kommando fighting against their own imminent gassing, but Nelson chose to base his version on a report he found stating that the rebellion began when "a crazy Hungarian set his mattress on fire. " Nelson explains that his decision to have the rebellion begin haphazardly fits with his determination to portray the action in THE GREY ZONE as desperate rather than heroic. Says Nelson, "I wanted to make it clear to an audience that the uprising is completely doomed from the outset, that there will be no mass slaughter of Germans followed by an heroic escape. The rebellion was probably clumsy and poorly organized. "
While the play used stark sound and light to hint at the horrors of the crematoria, Nelson reworked his story with the knowledge that, for the film version, he could visually explore the bleakness and horror of the environment he was setting out to portray. He says, "Once I began imagining it as a film, it was as if I'd never written it as a play, and the process of exploring such unspeakably challenging material began anew. "
Specifically, Nelson saw the opportunity to recreate, for the first time on film, the mortifying and sometimes ironic details of the extermination process. For Nelson and production designer Maria Djurkovic this meant building two model crematoria at eighty percent to scale in the village of Giten, 20 miles outside Sofia, Bulgaria where the film was made.
Meticulously based on the same architectural plans employed by the Nazis for the actual site in Poland, the buildings were constructed in farmers' fields using reconstituted bricks and timber. Torn down immediately after the completion of photography, one of the structures contained a nearly exact, to-scale replica of the furnace room at Birkenau's Number One Crematorium, complete with five massive three-crucible ovens, the rail carts used to shuffle corpses into them, and the cement water canal which expedited the transport of bodies to the gas chamber elevators into the furnace room above. For the women's' scenes, barracks were built adjoining the crematoria compound. In Boyana Studios, Bulgaria's former state-owned production facility, the film recreated undressing rooms, a gas chamber, Sonderkommando wash rooms, and the office and laboratory in which Doctor Nyiszli carried out his work for Josef Mengele.
Nelson worked closely with Cinematographer Russell Lee Fine to make the camerawork"suggest a hard and jagged realism," as Nelson puts it, and to create a feel that is "fast and cold, not mournful or sentimental. " Often shooting with hand-held camera, Nelson wanted the audience to feel that they themselves are in the frame. "It was important to me that this story should not be witnessed," he says. "Instead, I wanted it to be lived. Through performance and visual language, we tried to show the audience that they are in a place where brutality is a monotonous, and even essential, norm. " Nelson's approach echoes a quote from one of the Sonderkommando, diaries unearthed at Brikenau, which explains, "The only way to survive was to cease being human. We reached a stage where we could eat and drink among the corpses, totally indifferent, utterly detached from our emotions. "
Nelson had begun writing plays while studying acting at New York's Juilliard School, and, although he has not attended film school, he has learned film direction from watching directors with whom he's worked as an actor, such as Terrence Malick (THE THIN RED LINE) and Joel Coen (O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU?). While playing a supporting role in Malick's THE THIN RED LINE, Nelson took time on set to watch the director at work and to study his script (also a World War II story) to teach himself how to adapt THE GREY ZONE for the big screen. When the script was completed, Nelson approached New York producers Pamela Koffler and Christine Vachon, attracted by their company Killer Films' orientation towards working with writer/directors, and their track record for funding a broad range of exciting projects which would not necessarily be considered mainstream. Killer Films has an enviable profile resulting from the success of their many productions, both at the box office and at first rate film festivals around the world. Their filmography lists internationally acclaimed writer/directors such as Todd Haynes, Todd Solondz, Mary Harron, and most recently John Cameron Mitchell, whose film HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH opened in the United States this year. Pamela Koffler took the driving seat, knowing that the project would be a challenge to fund. She says,
"I was impressed by the writing -- it was a page turner, but I recognized that the subject matter made it a very hard sell. The response from everyone was unanimous: 'It's fabulous, but you are crazy to think you will ever get the money. '"
At the same time, Nelson's agent had shown the script to another of his clients -- actor Harvey Keitel. Keitel was so impressed by the writing that he invited Nelson to meet him and his producing partner Peggy Gormley. Keitel, renowned for his support of first-time directors (including Quentin Tarantino, Tony Bui, Paul Schrader, Ridley Scott and Nicolas Roeg), suggested that their company, The Goatsingers, might become involved as executive producers, and that he himself could play a role in the film.
Nelson offered him the part of Oberschaarfher Erich Muhsfeldt, the German official in charge of the Number One Crematorium where much of the film's action takes place. Explains Keitel, "Tim's script is inspired and reaches down to our collective consciousness in a very profound way. He asks questions about our humanity that must be explored. Our children deserve for them to be. "
Nelson's script and the participation of Killer Films and Harvey Keitel attracted a high caliber cast, including David Arquette, Steve Buscemi, Allan Corduner, Mira Sorvino, and Natasha Lyonne, as well as David Chandler, who appeared in the original stage production. Nelson appreciates the diversity of styles and experiences his cast brings to each role. Knowing how difficult each part would be, emotionally and physically, he used his audition process to learn about potential actors as individuals as well as performers, allowing him slowly and methodically to build an ensemble that would meet the material's extreme demands together. In turn his cast praises him for his sensitivity and tenacity. Says Mira Sorvino, "He has a clear-cut idea of what he wants from each scene, but leaves room for the actor's performance. He's an actor's dream director. "
Best known to audiences for his roles in the SCREAM series and more recently the comedy hit SEE SPOT RUN, David Arquette relished the chance to do work he'd never been asked to do before. "Hollywood has a way of pigeon-holing you, in a business sense," says Arquette. "I wanted the opportunity to play a darker, more dramatic role.
I knew that I might have a little difficulty persuading Tim to cast me, as a lot of people wouldn't necessarily see me in that light. I went in, really wanting the part, really prepared, and finally, I got it. " Says Nelson, "This may seem like unlikely material for David, but I've always felt that his humor is based on shame. The comic tension in David's work is about his characters trying to be people they are not, so that they're ashamed of who they actually are. Hoffman is a character who is full of shame. It's been exciting to watch an actor who is known for his humor gradually let go of what he relies on and make other choices for how he works. " Adds Arquette, "In many of the scenes in the film I really feel revealed, not something I've been used to in previous roles. "
While Killer Films began the always arduous search for funding, Nelson was speaking with another company, Nu Image/Millennium about a project for which they had him in mind to write and direct. Rather than take the job, he showed them his script for THE GREY ZONE, and soon he, Koffler, and Vachon were sitting at lunch in Los Angeles with Nu Image partners Avi and Danny Lerner offering to finance the film in full.
Although the company had produced fifteen action/adventure films at their Bulgarian studio complex in Sofia, they were beginning to diversify into more quality niche projects, and Nelson's script along with his first rate cast seemed a perfect fit. Millennium's facilities and experience in Bulgaria also fit well with Nelson's and Killer's need for value for money, spacious locations on which to build large structures, and the availability of hundreds of extras who looked Eastern European. Although the decline of Bulgaria's state funded film industry has left a shortage of skilled film technicians, Millennium has gradually been rebuilding the country's film labor force over the past few years. Koffler admits that, coming from the film-driven community in New York, differences in culture and work practices presented many challenges to the production. Nonetheless, filming was completed on schedule and on budget. For Nelson, although experienced as a film director, the combined challenge of working with so many extras in crowd scenes, the large amount of special effects and the bleak subject matter took their toll. "I didn't get any younger on this one," he confesses.
Avi Lerner, himself the producer of around 200 films, explains why he committed his company to THE GREY ZONE. "Most films about the Holocaust do not explore this particular angle of the horrors experienced in the camps. Bringing up this part of history will cause debate and controversy, especially in the Jewish community. But it's an important and very human part of our history. This film is a realistic view of what day to day existence was like within the camps. It considers not only the physical atrocities but the psychological as well". For Lerner, THE GREY ZONE explores the unresolved question of what he might have done if he had been faced with the Sonderkommando's impossible choice. "Growing up in Israel after the war, there were many survivors of the Holocaust. I could never understand why the Jews did nothing to fight the Nazis. Why was there no resistance? How would I have behaved?" he says. Watching the daily rushes became a difficult task for Lerner. "I really hope people will be brave enough to go and watch this movie," he adds.
Before production began, Nelson sent cast and crew a long memo explaining in detail the history of the world they would create, and outlining his intentions as to how he wanted THE GREY ZONE to be acted and filmed. In his conclusion he wrote, "We have the opportunity to make a film the likes of which no-one has seen; a film which will force each of us making it to ask questions of ourselves and of our audience which most would say are better left unuttered. I believe they must be asked, and if we succeed at our work, the film's impact will prove this to be so. "
