Tim Blake Nelson

Tim Blake Nelson makes his own rules when it comes to working in the film industry. Best known as an actor with key roles in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Minority Report and The Good Girl, for the past five years Nelson has been quietly building a reputation as a talented writer and director, beginning with the film adaptation of his stage play, The Eye of God, which premiered at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival. Nelson continued his dramatic directorship with Kansas (1998) and O (2001), though none have plumbed the depths of human emotion as his latest, The Grey Zone, is sure to.

Based on Miklos Nyiszli's Auschwitz: a Doctor's Eyewitness Account, the film probes the "quintessential human predicament" faced by a group of Sonderkommandos, prisoners who were offered a better quality of life in exchange for helping the Nazis in the crematoria. The story turns when the men discover a young girl who was able to survive the gassing, and must decide what to do with her. With a budget of just $4 million, Nelson was able to recruit an esteemed cast including Harvey Keitel, Steve Buscemi and Mira Sorvino, and recreate the camps in which these Sonderkommandos existed. Unrelentingly authentic, Nelson considers his film fairly unconventional in the tradition of other Holocaust films: "The characters aren't cowering in corners or simpering. They're not skulking off to pray; they're not feeling sorry for themselves. They're dealing with their situation in a strong way. It was very important to us to depict Jews in this way." Here, Nelson talks about adapting his play for the big screen and the joys of being an actor-writer-director and (now) editor. He also answers the big question everybody's been asking: David Arquette???

Jennifer Wood (MM): What was it about this story that made you want to tell it? The situation of the Sonderkommandos is an intriguing one, but what was most interesting to you about the story from a character or storytelling perspective?

Tim Blake Nelson (TBN): When I first read about the Sonderkommandos in Primo Levi's essay The Grey Zone, I felt that the predicament these men faced in the camps was as quintessentially human a predicament as I have ever encountered in history or literature. These men, in choosing to abet slaughter to save their own lives, were pitting the two most essential human impulses against one another: the impulse to survive as an individual at almost any cost against the impulse as a social animal to work for a greater good and the betterment of those around them. The challenge of what the Nazis proposed at gunpoint that these men do was simply irresistible to me as subject matter for a dramatic exploration.

MM: Why do you think that yours is the first exploration of the Sonderkommandos- either on stage or in film?

TBN: Well, understandably, people are not interested in nuances when it comes to the Holocaust. We want to construe history as a continuing struggle between good and evil, victims and perpetrators, us and them. We want to be able to interpret history from the extreme margins, not from where history really occurs and where the human story really occurs, which is in the center of all these poles where most of us exist. That's too inconvenient.

MM: Which brings me to the question of financing-

TBN: "How the hell.?" [laughing]

MM: Well it certainly doesn't have the upbeat ending audiences like. And obviously there are a number of people who aren't going to want to take a chance on this kind of material. So how did the financing happen? Was it a long road?

TBN: I was told it would take seven years to get it made, and Killer Films and I were willing to set out on that journey. I had been asked by Millennium Films to write and direct a book for them and I said I would do it if they looked at my script for The Grey Zone, because that was the script I really wanted to make next. My agent and I were able to make a deal with them in which I would do the one film and then they would finance TGZ.

I was so fervent in my desire to do TGZ that I ultimately had to go to them and say 'I really do just want to make TGZ next. I'm sorry, I know we made this arrangement, so why don't you find someone else to do the project and I'll find someone else to do TGZ.' And they said, "No, we want to do TGZ." We had this extraordinary meeting with Avi and Danny Lerner, who run Millennium. They said "we are prepared to lose money making your movie. We don't expect to make our money back, we just want to make this." An astonishing thing to hear! As I had found the material irresistible when I had read Levi's essay, they found the prospect of working on this film irresistible, which was very lucky for me.

MM: You were told it would take seven years. How long did it take?

TBN: In less than two years, I was in Bulgaria making it. So it was less than two years to get it financed.

MM: The Grey Zone originally ran as a play. When did you decide to make a film out of the material?

TBN: Well, at first I didn't feel it was possible. The play was a thoroughly "theatrical" experience: You saw no bodies, no corpses. There were no ovens. The set was minimal-just tables, chairs and benches. Everything was created with light and sound, and depended on the audience inferring from what the characters said to one another was, what the setting was, etc. The film obviously takes a completely opposite approach-you really see everything. I think that there really was no other way to make the film, which I realized when it was a play. Because film audiences, with an ever-more-mobile camera and with miraculous digital effects, simply expect to be able to see anything. And in a movie like this, where killing and violence become workaday and monotonous, you do have to show that. That's the aesthetic strategy of the movie.

There's so much casual violence in the film that, like the Sonderkommandos, you become somewhat inured to it. And it's a gradual build-up. By the end, you really can't believe you're able to tolerate some of the things you've been watching. I just didn't think I was the filmmaker to pull that off-or the screenwriter to pull that off-when the play was up. And I thought well, the play did really well and had a wonderful life and that will be that and I'll move on.

But then I acted in The Thin Red Line with Terrence Malick and I watched him. Having made two extraordinary but intimate films, Days of Heaven and Badlands, I watched him work on this enormous canvas of a war film and something clicked in me and I just became a student of Terrence Malick, in a sense. By the time I'd left Australia, I had compiled, in my own mind, a sort of list of approaches, and they added up to the script.

MM: The recreations in the film are amazing-particularly considering a budget of $4 million. How far in advance did you begin working with your production designer?

TBN: Oh, I love that question! [Maria Djurkovic], the production designer, and I were the first to arrive in Bulgaria and we arrived three months before principal photography. We worked six-day weeks, 12-plus hours a day. It was an incredibly arduous and incredibly invigorating process.

MM: How much research was done beforehand? The sets are so authentic.

TBN: The sets were based on architectural plans for the actual camp, which Maria Djurkovic found at the Imperial War Museum in London. The crematorium you see in the film is a replica, to scale, of the number one crematorium in Auschwitz Two Birkenau, which was the largest crematorium in the Third Reich. The one you see is a 15-crucible furnace room. In each crucible they would burn five bodies at a time; it would take 20 minutes to burn the five bodies. We wanted the feel of a factory, so we built practical ovens, and we were burning dummies in them. And then we were mixing real bodies in with the dummies. They were littered around the room and being heaved up onto the pushcarts.

I think the wardrobe came from five different European countries. We scoured Europe to get the right sprinkler heads for the sprinklers you see. There were arguments about what type of grass seed to use to get those lawns to be the way they were. The Nazis built these buildings with reconstituted bricks. Basically they'd go around Poland and destroy buildings and then take the bricks from the buildings they were destroying and use those bricks to build the crematoria. So we bought farmhouses that were abandoned, took the bricks and used those to build the crematoria so that we would get exactly the right texture.

MM: How long a shoot was it?

TBN: Well, this is extraordinary: it was a 45-day shoot, but we finished in 41. And that was a function of great pre-production. I also had the actors in Bulgaria with me for 2 1/2 weeks of rehearsal. We were incredibly prepared, and we never used any overtime, either.

MM: Having seen the film, and hearing you talk about how realistic each aspect of the film was, I can only imagine that the atmosphere on the set was very serious.

TBN: I can speak for myself, and I have to tell you I saw this in the eyes of the people who worked on the film with me-and I include the actors, the designers, the crewmembers: this was, ironically, an incredibly invigorating and life-affirming experience. And it was that way because we were waking up in the morning absolutely sure of the validity of what it was that we were doing. You felt proud to be involved in telling the story. You felt proud to tell it the way we were telling it. And those are two distinct sentences.

It's not only about telling the story, it was about our approach. We knew that whether people came to see the film or not, we were doing nothing cheaply or casually. That what we were about-and the rigorous nature of the process-was as unimpeachable as probably anything we would try to do in our careers. Not more unimpeachable, I'm saying as unimpeachable. I really don't know what I could ever try and accomplish which is going to feel more important to me than this movie. I'll feel that way whether it succeeds or not, and I feel that that's a common emotion on our set.

MM: You made a number of interesting choices on this film-from some of the technical aspects to your casting. One question that I'm sure you've been asked-

TBN: Arquette! (laughing) Right?!

MM: Uh, yes. That's what I was going to ask you. What was the casting process like for you in general, and David Arquette in particular? Do you think that your experience as an actor makes you better able to see something in another actor-what s/he is capable of-than someone who has only directed actors?

TBN: That may be true. I'll tell you real shortly the way the film was cast; it's kind of a funny story, really. Harvey [Keitel] was first.

MM: He produced the film as well?

TBN: Yes. He got hold of the script; I didn't send it to him. I was summoned to his office in New York and he announced that he would like to produce the movie and he would like to act in it, but that acting in it was not a condition of his producing it. And he also said he wanted to play the German, and Harvey is Jewish. [laughing] So I was speechless, as one can be around Harvey, regardless of the subject matter. But since this involved my own movie, and Harvey said he'd produce it, act in it or both, I was particularly speechless. I went away, thought about it for over a month and I came to the conclusion in a snap one day that having him play Muhsfeldt was actually a great idea. So I called him and there we were. Then Killer got involved, and so then we started to gather a cast around the movie.

Then I added three more people-who shall remain nameless. That's when Avi Lerner said, "Well, okay. If you get three of those four people, it's a greenlight movie for us-and we still don't expect to make any money." And I said 'great!' and I called all four of these actors, who had made promises personally to me that they would do the film. Harvey said "Fantastic. Just tell me where to be and when, and I'm yours. Whatever the money is, it's the money. Deal done. Let's go." I couldn't be happier. The other three actors. (laughing) I think committing to the movie cost them nothing because they thought "This guy is never going to get this made. What does it cost me?" Actually, one of them had a legitimate reason-his wife was going to give birth a month after he was to get back and he didn't want to abandon her. So he and I still get along. (The other two others, they vanished! (laughing) But I thought to myself, because I am an actor, there's such a paucity of material out there which asks of its actors what this movie asks of its cast. We are going to replace them and we will still make the movie. So Avi Lerner furnished a list of actors commensurate in foreign sales value with those who had left us. Within a few months, the three were replaced, and we actually wound up giving Avi five actors who were useful to him, because we added Harvey, David, Steve Buscemi, Mira Sorvino and Natasha Lyonne. So there we were. Now, onto David...

I'd known David from having done a western with him, as an actor, in 1996 and we became fast friends. I quickly realized about David Arquette that  in spite of his goofy persona and his ability to play goofy characters extremely well in really goofy, sometimes suspect, films, that this was a serious person. And that he had about him an incredibly seductive and palpable sadness that comes from the very strange life and troubled life he has lived-and troubled life he has lived, at times. Have you read my theory on David's comedy? Cause if you've read it I don't want to bore you.

I think that David's comedy is based on shame. With his goofy characters and his goofy public persona with the clothes he wears, he is allowing you to laugh at him in a way that is extraordinarily-even extravagantly-open about who and what he is. He allows you to pass judgement. The ability to play goofy characters that the audience can laugh at is to me very much related to the ability to play vulnerability and shame in dramatic characters. When David expressed interest in this material, it made immediate sense to me. And so we met and worked on the role for about an hour and a half and, like with Harvey, I went away and thought about it for about a month.

What troubled me about David playing the role had absolutely nothing to do with David personally or his acting ability. I honestly wondered about an audience's ability to accept him in a film like this. As a filmmaker, you absolutely must make choices with an eye on what an actor has done before-it's essential. Quentin Tarantino is the best filmmaker I know at this. He makes really intelligent casting choices, and he does so not only with full knowledge of what actors have been in, but he then exploits it on behalf of his movies in a very clever way.

MM: I would agree. Tarantino is definitely the master of changing your perception of someone...

TBN: By exploiting your perception of someone at the same time! And I actually thought "Well, we can do that with David in this movie." And I remember saying to Pam Koffler, on the day I finally decided to cast David, "I want to use David. And the film is going to begin with a close-up on him." And the message that that's sending to the audience is that you see David Arquette absolutely still-with such gravity and fear in his eyes-I think the film is saying to you in its opening moment "this movie is different."

MM: Did you ask your actors to do any research beforehand?

TBN: [laughing] Yeah! It was kind of merciless! They did a huge amount of research. Each actor got a different reading list: everyone around the number one crematorium had to read the [Miklos] Nyiszli book [Auschwitz: a Doctor's Eyewitness Account]; The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi's book of essays which includes The Grey Zone; and a book called Amidst a Nightmare of Crime, which is five diaries by Sonderkommandos who perished in Birkenau, but buried diaries before they were killed. They had to read Filip Muller's book, Eyewitness Auschwitz. They had to read Daniel Bennahmias' book, Sonderkommando. And then there were many optional books. [laughs] The women were required to read Olga Lengyel's book Five Chimneys; Primo Levi's book, Survival in Auschwitz; a book called The Kingdom of Auschwitz by Otto Friedrich. And everybody read everything, and we were able to reference this stuff. That sort of material cannot help but live in a performance.

And what's particularly good about reading survivor accounts is that they are about people actively trying to live. They're not about suffering and how hard it was; they're about living. And what you see the characters doing in TGZ is living active lives in the context of death. They're trying to cheat death for another moment so that they can die with dignity. That's the kernel of this film. And the result, how that tangibly reads in the performances-and this is unconventional for Holocaust films, I think-is that the characters aren't cowering in corners or simpering. They're not skulking off to pray; they're not feeling sorry for themselves. They're dealing with their situation in a strong way. And it was very important to us to depict Jews in this way. What the survivor accounts offer are these incredibly vital experiences that were extremely useful for the actors. And I really think that you read that in the actors.

MM: Was the use of a handheld camera at certain points a budgetary decision, or one to further the storytelling?

TBN: When I was writing the film, [using a handheld camera] was the intention. Actually, it was more expensive to do it that way because we had to get a MovieCam SL, which cost a lot of money. You're meant to feel like you're in the middle of this experience, rather than standing in front of it as a viewer. And that's why there's sound all around you throughout the film as well. The sound team actually got the script before any of the actors did.

MM: You also edited the film, which is not an area you'd had experience in before. Why now?

TBN: It was so personal to me that I just didn't want to hand it over to someone for an assembly. I was terrified of coming back from Bulgaria and watching the footage cut together without my having controlled that. So I found this wonderful young editor, Michelle Botticelli, who'd been an assistant on O and who was willing to bump herself up to associate editor and work with me. Her contribution ended up being at a level where I ended up saying that even though I came back to do the assembly, she worked her ass off and at certain points made very viable contributions. So we ended up sharing the credit. But it's what I'll do from now on.

MM: What's your favorite part of the process?

TBN: I don't know. I can't answer that question. For me, some of the worst parts of the process are my favorite parts-like the shoot. Shooting the movie is where I'm the most unstable, and yet that's incredibly exciting. On these indie films, during the shoot you're really doing a high wire act because you can't get more money and basically, if you're not making your days, you have to start rewriting your script and dropping stuff. Now that's never had to happen for me, but I'm always terrified it will.