László Nemes: “Is it now trendy for 17-year-olds to be neo-Nazis?"

László Nemes, a worried man with the tight features of a student in a Dostoevsky adaptation, is talking me through the stunningly uncomplicated financing of Son of Saul. It's a story that may chill the bones of our own State funding bodies.

“We didn’t have any funding other than the Hungarian Film Fund,” he explains.

Let me process that. Nemes’s debut feature was financed entirely by the state? “All the other potential financiers or co-producers just fled from the project. There were potential funders, but they eventually all turned us down.”

I suppose one can understand why Son of Saul may have scared off potential investors. Shot on 35mm film in narrow Academy ratio, the picture follows the efforts of a Sonderkommando – one of those concentration camp inmates charged with assisting the mass murders – to arrange a Jewish burial for his son.

No doubt some of those potential funders now regret their decision. Son of Saul won the Grand Prix at Cannes and took the Oscar for best foreign language picture.

“Even in the darkest hours of mankind, there might be a voice within that allows us to remain human. That’s the hope of this film,” Nemes said at the Academy podium in February.

Still, this remains troublesome material. Géza Röhrig is brilliant as the emotionally deadened Sonderkommando who is shaken from torpor by the sight of his own child being pulled from the gas chamber. The script makes no effort to address the protagonist’s moral dilemma. He is there. He is doing what he does to survive.

“Those are postwar conceptions made from your armchair,” Nemes says. “People ask why the Jews went to the gas chambers, thus implying they were weak. When you are in the middle of that, it is a very different experience. Your humanity has been taken away from you. You have closed yourself from humanity. The blame should not be put on the victims. It should be put on the perpetrators. There has been a tendency to blame the victims.”

Nemes raises an uncomfortable issue. In recent years, we have read much about the rise of anti-Semitism in Hungary and neighbouring nations. Yet Son of Saul has been celebrated in its home country. Are we getting a skewed impression?

“Anti-Semitism is not confined to Hungary,” he says with polite firmness. “But it has always been there. It hasn’t been rising. It is just that it’s become more visible. The question is whether it’s now trendy for 17-year-olds to be neo-Nazis.”

Is Nemes implying that this is happening? “Yes. I think it might be. Had Hungary come to terms with the destruction of its own people, it would have a better future. But hatred is everywhere. You don’t need Jews for that.”

Nemes, son to a Jewish mother, was born in Budapest and moved with his family to Paris when he was 12. He was one of those film-mad kids who shot horror movies on cheap cameras in the basement. Later, after graduating from college, he spent time working with the great, famously glacial Hungarian master Béla Tarr.

“He taught me a lot about the art of collaborating,” Nemes says. “He puts incredible effort into preparation.”

It seems that Tarr also taught his protege a love of celluloid. The younger man is positively evangelical in his opposition to Satanic digital media. Son of Saul was the only film in the 2015 Cannes official competition to be projected in traditional fashion.

Easy filming

“Digital is the first regression in the history of cinema,” he says. “It is the kiss of death of television. You can detect a change in directorial approaches allowed by digital technology. Inflation of shots. Endless point of view changes. Decision-making process happening after the shooting instead of before. That should be the essence of film-making: making those decisions.”

He’s picking up steam now.

“You don’t have the same light and darkness. It’s like TV. I don’t know why people would pay to see TV in a public place.”

Dare I suggest that many people can’t tell the difference between the images?

“Well, do we go the whole way and lessen visual culture to the extent that people can’t tell the difference between a cat and a dog because they’re so dumb?”

Not only do Nemes and his cinematographer, Mátyás Erdély, stick with 35mm film, they also shoot in the narrow 1.37:1 ratio that became close to obsolete in the mid-1950s. As the camera bounces behind Röhrig while he stomps about the camp, the effect is to shut out some of the chaos that surrounds him.

“Yes, we wanted a narrower screen because we didn’t want to draw too much attention to the background.”

There is indeed a sense that many of the most appalling atrocities are happening just off-screen or just out of focus.

“If you show these things directly in a frontal way, you ultimately diminish the emotional impact,” Nemes says. “As an audience, you seek to understand it and you then have a sense of controlling it. Here, you have this man as a reference point. But you see very little of what’s surrounding him. The force of suggestion works on your brain. It’s the sense of less is more.”

There is also the question of taste. We can’t possibly depict the real horror of the mass murders. So, it is, perhaps, offensive to try. Suggestions flicker at the corner of frames.

“Yes. But ‘taste’ is also to do with morality,” he says. “If you only suggest, then you hint at the true enormity. You can’t possibly tell the whole story.”

Now 39, Nemes seems dauntingly in control of his own destiny. To land your debut in the main competition at Cannes is something special. Securing what is essentially the second prize is more remarkable still (it was the first time a debut had been so positioned in nearly 30 years). So acclaimed was Son of Saul that the Oscar ended up seeming like a formality.

“I do try and keep control,” Nemes says, nodding thoughtfully. “I am trying to do a Hungarian film next. It’s a coming-of- age story.”

Has he been approached by the Americans?

“Of course. All of them are there. It’s safe to say I could go and make big films.”

He nods impassively and says no more. I can’t see László Nemes being easily corrupted.