A song comes to mind when pondering the moment that Sandra Hüller seems to be having. It’s I’m in Love with a German Film Star, the dreamy only hit by early 80s English band The Passions that has become a cult classic. Quite a bit of the cinema world is now in love with the German film star Hüller after this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
She is the lead in the French psychological thriller Anatomy of a Fall, which won the Palme d’Or, and UK-US-Polish Holocaust drama The Zone of Interest, which won the event’s second-most prestigious trophy, the Grand Prix.
She has been a familiar face in European cinema for nearly 20 years for her roles in films such as Requiem and Toni Erdmann.
She has also been a prominent figure in German theatre in that time, too, and her career extended to music with a debut album in 2020. This year, the 45-year-old has gone international. In the week the Listener speaks to Hüller, she’s looking very glamorous on the cover of The Hollywood Reporter beneath the headline “Actress of the Year?” The publication is already talking up her 2024 Oscar chances.
She has become so for good reason and while playing two challenging characters: a murder accused whose guilt or innocence isn’t obvious; and Hedwig Höss, wife of Rudolf Höss, the founder and commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Hedwig was known as the “Queen of Auschwitz”.
The Zone of Interest is by Brit Jonathan Glazer and was inspired by the 2014 Martin Amis novel of the same name. The director-screenwriter made his film about the Höss family rather than Amis’s fictional characters. They are depicted enjoying an otherwise pleasant life in occupied Poland, their home and well-tended garden just over the wall and within earshot of the atrocities.
Doing some of his filming at the real Auschwitz, Glazer, who is Jewish, mounted up to 10 unobtrusive cameras within the Höss house. He wanted to capture, at a remove, how domestic life could go on, oblivious to, and complicit in, the genocide taking place metres away.
Apart from a small role in the Netflix film Munich – The Edge of War, set in the years before World War II and based on a historical espionage thriller by Robert Harris, it’s Hüller’s first role set in that period of German history.
In Anatomy of a Fall, by French director Justine Triet – now the third woman to win the Palme d’Or after NZ’s Jane Campion and France’s Julia Ducournau – Hüller plays Sandra, a German writer living in the French Alps who is put on trial for the murder of her husband after he is found dead by their young son outside their chalet.
It’s a courtroom drama, a Hitchcockian psychological thriller, and a forensic dissection of a faltering marriage, all of which hangs on Hüller’s inscrutable and trilingual (English, German and French) performance.
Hüller’s wry smile and quizzical gaze are fully on show when the Listener connects via Zoom. She’s at home in Leipzig, a couple of hours’ drive from Suhl, the city in which she was born in what was then East Germany.
From the outside, you appear to be having quite a year. How is it from your side?
Yeah, and people are telling me it’s just getting started, and already I have a lot of things to do and to consider and to think about. But so far, I have enjoyed it very much because it’s very connected to the films. They are resonating very well with people and there are a lot of questions coming up in a lot of discussions and different opinions. I like that a lot. I’m just thankful to find people who trust in the way that I work so much that they could also give me the responsibility to play such difficult or interesting or deep characters, and different characters from each other. That is something that maybe happens once in a lifetime.
Your character in Anatomy is called Sandra, which I imagine was deliberate?
Well, it’s always hard for me to talk about that, because it was Justine’s [Triet’s] decision. So, it’s probably a question that she should be asked. But as far as I know, she wrote it for me and then she named the character after me. The husband is called Samuel and it’s [the actor’s] real name, too.
At the beginning of the film, there is a montage of the marriage using what have been snapshots of you from years ago. That must have been interesting, having your own past invested in the character.
Oh, that’s all AI, you know. We don’t do that any more.
Really?
Ha, no. What I underestimated is the fact that when I gave them to Justine, I wasn’t aware that it would be so in the face and that it would be such an important part of the movie. But now I’m really happy that they’re there, because they add a certain intimacy and another layer to the story and make it more believable.
How did the director tell you she had written a script for you?
I’ve known Justine since 2011 when we met at [the Berlin] Biennale. She had a short film there and I was on a short film jury and we gave her an award. I saw everything she did after, and then she asked me for [her 2019 film] Sibyl and told me she was working on something with me in mind. I didn’t want to have too much hope because I don’t like to be disappointed. When she told me that, she wanted to know what I thought about it.
What did you think about it?
I loved it from the first second until the last word of the script. It was perfectly crafted, so smart, a touching, thrilling script. I don’t know when I’ve read anything like that before. So, I was really, really happy that she proposed it to me.
Did you ask the obvious question at the start about whether Sandra was guilty or not?
Not in the beginning, really, because the work was not so much about if she is or isn’t. It came up much later, when I was working on the script and working on the language with my French teacher. Then some things didn’t make sense … and then of course, I wanted to know if she was capable of doing something like that. But I liked the fact that we think it’s possible. That we kind of project all kinds of fears or anger or resentment or love onto her. That’s what I like about this character so much. So, the question came later, and I asked her, I think one day before we started shooting, if she would please tell me what her opinion was on it because she never told me. She said, “That’s not important”, and I always felt, “Okay, it isn’t that important.” And then she said, “You have to play her like she’s innocent”, and that totally freaked me out. And then she took a step back and said, “No, just stop thinking about it.”
The trial and particularly the French inquisitorial style of it offer quite a theatrical setting to much of the film.
Yeah, very much. There is an audience and the lawyer and Sandra. You see them in a scene where they’re rehearsing testimony. It’s also a bit seductive to act everything out – to make it bigger than it actually is. So, that was a thing – we had to learn that it’s not necessary. It’s not a stage. It might seem like one, but it isn’t. I know that Justine watched every courtroom drama you can imagine and she neither wanted to do a whodunnit nor a court film that she had already seen. She really wanted to focus on the French judicial system.
Both Anatomy and Zone were in contention at Cannes. Was that planned or due to the pandemic?
Nobody knew that it would happen. Jonathan Glazer told me that he would take three years editing because we worked with so many cameras and there was so much material, and he didn’t really know what the way through all that would be. Then, shortly before Cannes, he decided to go for it and Anatomy did, too. There was, I think, half a year between the shooting of both.
Coming to Zone of Interest, you’ve said you were never interested in doing something about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. What was it about this film that changed your mind?
Frankly, I tried to avoid it because I really had a problem with the manner of showing the violence and showing the victims and the sort of exploitation going on at some times. There has been, not a romanticising, but people have used it as a base for telling a very intense story where the actress suffers blah, blah, blah, and it is something that disgusts me. I have never wanted to be part of that. I never wanted to wear any sort of costume that people would lovingly stitch a swastika on to. Being in something recreating the time was not my interest at all. It was really about Jonathan Glazer. He made me do it.
Was it interesting or did it help that it was an English film-maker working from an English novel, telling the story from a German perspective?
No, because there have been a lot of American movies about that time, so that was not the point. It was really the person. It was the way Jonathan and [producer] Jim Wilson were talking about the topic and the risk they saw in making it. Jonathan had a completely different agenda. He wanted to try to get to the core of the question. First of all, how is this possible? What does it have to do with us? Who are we in this? And what would we do? Those questions are something people avoid.
You were born in the GDR, lived through Germany’s unification and started at drama school in Berlin a couple of years after the Wall came down. If at all, how has that affected your artistic sensibilities?
That I don’t know. But what I can say is that it has affected my way of viewing the world, of knowing that things can change in the blink of an eye. You can wake up the next morning and you live in another country, and especially when you’re a child, you don’t know how this happened. So, I’m very suspicious about any sort of system because it’s just an invention. We live in this system, and it can soon be another one.
How has your theatre background, some of which has been quite avant-garde, influenced your approach to screen acting?
It definitely shaped my art. I am grateful for this experience, because I learnt how to read text. I learnt how to decide whether it’s a good text or it’s not a good text, because of what you can do with it. If it gives you the possibility to add something to it – or if it’s just good to read out loud and that’s it. Can you do anything with it? With your body or with your language or with your mind?
How is the very good year you are having manifesting itself? Are people making you interesting offers? Assuming that that’s happening, how are you coping?
Yeah, I’m trying to be at home a lot and to do the things that I do here that have nothing to do with the hype, with the buzz. At the same time, I try to be calm, and I try to be thankful for everything that happens to me. And I try to say no when it’s too much.
Is this the career you had planned when you started?
No, I never thought about anything like that. I was just doing theatre and I loved it. That was all. I never made any plans for the future. I think it would be weird to try to control what is going to happen. So, when things come my way, I decide whether I want them or not. And that has consequences and then I live with them. l
Anatomy of a Fall is in cinemas from October 12. The NZ release date for Zone of Interest is unknown.
