What can I say? This is - I felt totally the right guy to do this. ROHRIG: Well, Robert, life is unpredictable. SIEGEL: How did that happen? How did you end up playing a character in your friend's movie never having been in a film before? I mean, so far, this is your acting career in the movies. SIEGEL: Of course, the face that we're looking at is your face, and we've never seen it before in the movies. And it's much easier to identify and put yourself into the shoes of one person, just one other person like you. And I think by focusing on one man only and especially on his face - when a person and the world meets, it's always a human face. We want to speak about genocide in general, which, I believe, (unintelligible) by the frequent genocides after the Holocaust, you know, in the past few decades, that it's some - it's still very much a permanent possibility. We are what - we wanted to speak about human cruelty. But we really never say the word Auschwitz. I mean, you know, people call it - and I understand why this is a Holocaust movie. ROHRIG: Do you think the fact that your character, Saul, dominates the foreground of this movie so much and what's happening behind him is the work of Auschwitz, is what it did - do you think that makes the story more universally acceptable, that we can think of the individual in some other circumstance other than Auschwitz? So we wanted to make a movie about the first, too, the norm, not about the exception, but the norm, which was death. And, simply, I felt it's dishonest, you know? I think anybody who survived is - any survival is due to a systematic error. And only the lucky third is the one who's making it into the Holocaust movies. GEZA ROHRIG: Two out of 3 Jews were murdered in Europe during the Holocaust. Geza Rohrig says his friend, the director, Laszlo Nemes, set out to make a film that is not about the fortunate minority who survived the Holocaust but about most of the Jews who encountered it, the ones who perished. For me, 'Son Of Saul' gets to what the Holocaust was about without flinching, without an overlay of redeeming sentiment. SIEGEL: There's a cacophony of languages - bits of German, Yiddish, Hungarian, French. They're being stripped naked, herded into gas chambers.

While Saul dominates the foreground, behind him and around him are the crowds of victims, often out of focus, their words indistinct. SIEGEL: He's been selected for the Sonderkommando, the work crew charged with herding their fellow Jews into the gas chambers and cleaning up after the killing. Rohrig's character, Saul, is a Hungarian Jew at Auschwitz.

Rohrig is a poet and rabbinical student, and in the movie - this is his first - the camera is nearly always trained on him, often close up. To watch the Hungarian movie 'Son Of Saul' is to watch the face of actor Geza Rohrig framed by hellish scenes of evil at work.

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