Glazer

The couple’s ordinariness is conveyed in a series of scenes that were sometimes scripted, sometimes improvised and filmed on small, static cameras concealed throughout the house and garden. The actors were not aware of exactly where the cameras were positioned. Glazer and his crew remained off-set throughout, watching the results on a bank of screens in a separate building. The result is a cinema of ultra-naturalistic candid surveillance that Glazer jokingly describes as “like Big Brother in the Nazi house”.

The reason that I was not on set was because I wanted to stand back from the characters and look at them anthropologically. I wasn’t interested in their dramas. I just wanted to watch them in as unimpeded a way as possible to see how they behaved and acted, to see who they were.”

The film became about the proximity of the horror and the happiness, how one person’s paradise is another’s hell.”

We already know the imagery of the camps from actual archive footage. There is no need to attempt to recreate it, but I felt that if we could hear it, we could somehow see it in our heads.”