Lions Gate FILMs
Presents
THE GREY ZONE
A film by
Tim Blake Nelson
Starring
David Arquette
Steve Buscemi
Harvey Keitel
Mira Sorvino
Natasha Lyonne
Distribution Contact:James Ferrera-East Coast
Melissa Holloway-West Coast
Lions Gate Films
4553 Glencoe Ave., Suite 200
Marina del Rey, CA 90292
T: (310) 314-2000
F: (310) 396-6041 / West Coast Agency:
Karen Fried
Rogers & Cowan
1888 Century Park East
Suite 500
Los Angeles, CA 90067
T: (310) 201-8820
F: (310) 788-6631 / East Coast Agency:
Jeremy Walker
Jeremy Walker + Assoc.
171 W. 80th St. #1
New York, NY 10024
T: (212) 595-6161
F: (212) 595-5875
Running Time: 108 minutes / Rating: R
1
CAST
(in order of appearance)
Hoffman...... David Arquette
Moll...... Velizar Binev
Rosenthal...... David Chandler
Cohen...... Michael Stuhlbarg
Lowy...... George Zlatarev
Old Man...... Dimitar Ivanov
Schlermer...... Daniel Benzali
Nyiszli...... Allan Corduner
Abramowics...... Steve Buscemi
Muhsfeldt...... Harvey Keitel
Mengele...... Henry Stram
Girl...... Kamelia Grigorova
Anja...... Lisa Benavides
Inmate...... Shirly Brener
Dina...... Mira Sorvino
Rosa...... Natasha Lyonne
Woman Inmate...... Dafina Katzarraska
Young Woman...... Donka Avramova
Woman Inmate...... Rumena Trifonova
Guard...... Simeon Vladov
Girl’s Mother...... Mariana Stanisheva
Rivkin...... Oncho Alexanyan
SS Officer...... Georgi Kalchev
Man With Watch...... Lee Wilkof
Man’s Wife...... Jessica Hecht
Interrogator...... Brian O’Byrne
Torturer...... Valentin Ganev
Hauptman...... Steve Ubels
KS Man...... Vladimir Velev
Kahn...... Victor Kalev
Halivni...... Hristo Shopov
Schott...... Mark Wing-Davey
Woman Inmate...... Ioana Christova
Kaminski...... Harry Anichkin
SS Officer...... Dobrin Dosev
Voice of Young Girl...... Portia Ranier
FILMMAKERS
Written and Directed by...... Tim Blake Nelson
Based in part on a memoir by...... Dr. Miklos Nyiszli
Producers...... Pamela Koffler
...... Christine Vachon
...... Tim Blake Nelson
...... Avi Lerner
...... Danny Lerner
Exec. Producers...... Danny Dimbort
...... Trevor Short
...... Brad Weston
...... John Wells
...... Harvey Keitel
...... Peggy Gormley
Co-Producer...... David Varod
Director of Photography...... Russell Lee Fine
Editors...... Tim Blake Nelson
...... Michelle Botticelli
Line Producer...... Trish Hofmann
Production Designer...... Maria Djurkovic
Costume Designer...... Marina Draghici
Music By...... Jeff Danna
Military Advisor...... Andrew Mollo
Casting by...... Bernard Tesley
...... David Vacarri
ABOUT THE STORY
Based on actual events, THE GREY ZONE is the story of Auschwitz’s twelfth Sonderkommando – one of the thirteen consecutive ‘Special Squads’ of Jewish prisoners placed by the Nazis in the excruciating moral dilemma of helping to exterminate fellow Jews in exchange for a few more months of life.
As written and directed by Tim Blake Nelson, and performed by a first rate ensemble cast including Steve Buscemi, David Arquette, Harvey Keitel, Mira Sorvino and Natasha Lyonne, this film chronicles the Sonderkommando’s struggle to organize the only armed revolt that would ever take place at Auschwitz. As the rebellion is about to commence, a group from the unit discovers a fourteen-year-old girl who has miraculously survived a gassing. A catalyst for their desperate attempt at personal redemption, the men become obsessed with saving this one child, even as doing so endangers the uprising which could save thousands.
From inside the working organs of the infamous Auschwitz death camp, this film asks to what terrible lengths we are willing to go to save our own lives, and what in turn we would sacrifice to save the lives of others.
ABOUT THE PRODUCTION
“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. Born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, 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 Weeklyrecently 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 Savedabout 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. “Unlike the emaciated prisoners in the camp proper, they were allowed, even encouraged, to grow physically strong,” says Nelson. “They defied the understandable holocaust cliché of the meek and cowering Jew. At the time I began researching their lives, I, too, was an able-bodied Jewish man in my early thirties. This could have been my life, my predicament. To this day I cannot tell what I might have done if faced with their impossible choice,” says Nelson.
A year earlier, Nelson had written a play about the escape from Germany by his mother and her 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. “Having been taught a particular aesthetic by a succession of really extraordinary Holocaust films,” says Nelson, “I was surprised to read first hand accounts from Sonderkommando members in which profanities we consider ‘modern’ – like ‘fucking’ and ‘shit’ – were rampant. 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 were racing a death clock. They didn’t have time for politeness. They didn’t wait for one another to complete sentences. Nothing was precious, not even life.”
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.
For both the play and the film, 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.
For both the play and the film, Nelson worked hard to avoid the natural sentimentality that comes with the subject matter, which is why he dispensed with the convention of middle European accents and “quaint ways of speech” for his characters. Instead, he asked 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 that always mystify me in holocaust films. The Germans in the film speak with German accents to indicate conversations taking place in German. We’ve tried to keep this delineation as simple as possible.”
Nelson’s characters curse at one another, talk over each other and cut one another off. “My hope is that the dialogue, while intentionally heightened to reflect the tension of the characters’ predicament, has the feel of immediacy while still being accurate to the period,” he says.
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.”
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 that ferried corpses to the crematoria. Nelson based these female characters very 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. In a sense, the film has been so blown open, that only remnants of the play are distinguishable."
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.