I was very worried about the pitfalls,” he says. “Most movies treat the Holocaust in a very poor and silly way. Rohrig was struck by how vividly the script presented the director’s vision. It’s almost like being there because it’s so subjective.”Īs Saul began to take shape, Nemes sent the screenplay to his friend Geza Rohrig, a Hungary-born poet who lives in Brooklyn. The whole idea is based on this desire to be super-subjective and base the experience on a single person - that is the key. I can give you the sound of something without showing it to you, and then when I show it to you it’s going to have a much bigger effect because you saw it at first out of focus or blurred but you heard the sound of it, so you have a relationship with it. It’s about controlling the visual information and using sound in relation to that.
Oscars Guide: Inside the 81 Foreign Films Vying for the PrizeĮrdely explains the approach he and Nemes developed together: “We try to hide as much of the information as possible but give the audience just the right amount of information in the exact right moment. “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.” “It’s trying to give an immersive experience to the viewer by coexisting with the main character,” explains Nemes, 38.
What sets the movie apart from previous Holocaust dramas is that, visually and aurally, Nemes forces the viewer to walk in Saul’s shoes, experiencing the sights and sounds that swirl around him in an unmitigated rush of shadowy images and barked commands.
He goes about his hellish assignment like one of the walking dead until he stumbles upon the body of a young boy and begins an impossible quest to give the boy a proper burial. 18 by Sony Pictures Classics - focuses tightly on one man, Saul, a member of the Sonderkommando, the Jewish prisoners forced to staff the gas chambers. The film - Hungary’s foreign-language Oscar submission, set for release in the U.S. Audiences emerging from screenings of Saul, which had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, have been affected similarly.