To experience the Ghetto through Jan instead of taking the point of view of, this is the ghetto, this is the deprivation and the poverty and the sickness, I think it really speaks to what it must have been like at the time. To play all of that on the face of an actor as gifted as Johan Heldenbergh is all you need.
Jan went into the ghetto and got people out by hiding them in trash cans, which is so specific. The circumstances themselves were so unusual. I don’t want to build suspense out of sentimentality or predictability. I’m very interested in an emotional connection. Daniel and Jessica do a great job with their facial expressions. I noticed that, when you build suspense, you focus on the actors and their eyes. The two of them made a very beautiful and balanced couple. He ran the zoo, he was a doctor, but she was the heart and the instinct and the soul of the zoo. She was very subservient to her husband in many ways. He seems to respect her more than the typical husband at the time respected his wife. The Żabińskas feel almost like a modern couple. I definitely felt a responsibility to show the Holocaust and the Żabińska’s story faithfully. The bar was set pretty high on this one because it’s a true story. The events are obviously horrific, but they also make the Żabińska’s story that much more remarkable and worthy of attention. Yeah, it’s all very exciting in the… filmmaking department. This is an inspiring but also ugly real-life story, and as a storyteller, the tragic moments must excite you as a storyteller. But they knew that, if they should hear the piano being played in the daylight hours, danger was coming.
At night time, when all of the Germans had gone, she would play her piano, and all of the guests, these refugees from the Ghetto, would come out of the basement and, from midnight to six am, would live a somewhat civilized and luxurious life with art and music and books and conversation and the comforts of a home. The suspense builds itself.Īntonina devised a crude but effective way of communicating where she would play the piano. You’ve got an ordinary Polish couple who choose to liberate those they could out of the Warsaw Ghetto under very unusual circumstances and hide them in the cages of their zoo whilst are walking around from six o’clock in the morning to midnight. The suspense is built-in because the zoo was being used by the German army to store guns. Then, you have a zookeeper couple who, for no other reason than it was the right thing to do, chose to shelter people in the basement of their villa and in the empty cages of their zoo. The first thing that happens is that a zoo is bombed, the cages exploded, and the animals ran away into the city. Immediately, you have a very unusual, very exotic point of view of the second World War. Warsaw was bombed at the beginning of the war, but when they bombed Warsaw, they also bombed the zoo. We all know the story of the second World War. What was your approach to building suspense? It’s almost inevitable that movies about what were called “Jew harborers” involve scenes of suspense, in which Nazis comb a house or hideout for Jewish people. In an exclusive interview with PopMatters, Caro discusses her filmmaker’s approach to suspense, her faithfulness to the Żabińskas’ story, Jessica Chastain’s kind words about the film’s large number of female crew members, what needs to change in the studio system to ensure gender equality, and more. Jessica Chastain stars as Polish animal lover Antonina Żabińska who, with her husband, Jan (Johan Heldenbergh), gave shelter and protection to hundreds of Jewish people from the Warsaw ghetto, hiding them in their basement and in animal cages left vacant following the German bombing. But this week, she shares with the world The Zookeeper’s Wife, about one of the unlikeliest, most astonishing stories of heroism to come out of World War II. She then directed 2005’s acclaimed North Country and is now set to helm Disney’s live-action rendition of Mulan next year.
New Zealander filmmaker Niki Caro has been a major female voice in the movie industry since her breakout debut, 2002’s Whale Rider.