The Grey Zone: Director's Notes and Screenplay

Nelson's 2001 film, in which a Nazi doctor and the Sonderkommando (Jews who were forced to work in the crematoria of Auschwitz) find themselves in a moral gray zone, garnered a National Board of Review Award. This record of Nelson's travails tells how the director researched the history surrounding the drama, assembled the cast (which includes David Arquette, Steve Buscemi and Harvey Keitel) and reconstructed the crematoria in Bulgaria. Nelson admits he's not a scholar or a historian, yet his meticulous representation of the predicament faced by the Sonderkommandos deserves recognition. He describes the grisly details of how he portrayed life at Auschwitz and the attempted rebellion that is at the movie's core, and his shooting strategy (although the film is quite violent, he didn't want to seem""to be detailing that violence as entertainment""). In addition to the script and film stills, this volume also shares a powerful excerpt from Primo Levi's The Drowned and the Saved.