‘The Zone of Interest’ centres around Rudolf Höss (camp commandant of Auschwitz) and his family as they go about their everyday lives over the wall from the horrors of the concentration camp.
The film won the Grand Prix at Cannes Film Festival where it was hailed as ‘a masterpiece’ (BBC) and ‘a landmark movie’ (The Times). It has gone on to win for 2 Academy Awards (including Best International Feature) and 3 BAFTAs (including Outstanding British Film).
The film is Dirty Looks’ second feature film collaboration with Glazer, after working on his 2013 film, Under the Skin.
Colourist Gareth Bishop worked closely with Glazer in the creative grade to help tell this historic story through a modern lens.
Glazer’s pioneering approach to filmmaking demands meticulous preparation for the post production. The majority of the film was shot simultaneously through up to 10 cameras, using only available and practical lighting. Maintaining the naturalness or ‘verity’ of the image was upheld as a guiding principle throughout the entire picture post production process.
Colourist Gareth Bishop said: “Jonathan and I created a set of rules to keep the colours as natural as possible in line with what Łukasz Żal, the film’s cinematographer, had shot as opposed to creating a cinematic picture.”
Bishop continues “No shapes or keyframes were used to lift the images at any point; we stuck to the rules we had set at the start of the grade and worked on a shot-by-shot basis. If we needed to remove camera bias we re-graded the full image to the natural or true look of the film which threw up some real challenges, especially during the scene where Hedwig Höss (Sandra Hüller) walks her mother on a tour of the garden and the sunlight was constantly changing throughout the scene.
The film’s innovative use of thermal cameras prompted extensive research into repurposing industrial and military cameras for cinematic use. Footage transfer and grading capabilities of various non-standard cameras were tested and Dirty Looks worked closely with VFX company, One Of Us to create pin-sharp images that stand up next to the quality of the Sony Venice camera footage. The thermal sequences required extensive grading and blending of multiple VFX versions to create as sharp and detailed an image required for the Director’s vision.
Dirty Looks streamlined the VFX pulls and created a tailored workflow system for tracking and pulling VFX shots for edits and re-conforming VFX pulls.
Dirty Looks completed the conform, finishing and full theatrical, HDR & SDR delivery to A24 (Including all archive deliverables) and delivery also to Film4.
Senior DI Producer, Sarah Morowa said, “We are immensely proud to have been part of this creative collaboration, working with Jonathan and the entire team to bring this important film to the big screen.”
The film was released in the US on 15th December 2023 and in the UK on Friday, 2nd February by A24.
Credits
Director – Jonathan Glazer
Cinematographer – Łukasz Żal
Colourist – Gareth Bishop
Head of DI – Tom Balkwill
DI Producer – Sarah Morowa
Conform Operator and Deliverables Manager – Joe Fisher
Flame Team – Róisín & Margo Lazarenko