When director Niki Caro first began working on a film adaptation of The Zookeeper’s Wife close to seven years ago, she had never heard of the woman referenced in the title, Antonina Zabinska.
“It does occur to me that maybe I hadn’t heard of [Antonina] before because she’s a woman,” Caro tells The CJN. “Historically, women’s stories have been considered not as relevant.”
Antonina and her husband, Jan, helped save nearly 300 Jews during the Shoah, sheltering them in the cages and hidden passageways, as well as the family villa of the Warsaw Zoo.
In the Zabinski villa, the Jews hid in the basement and could only come upstairs after midnight, since German troops were patrolling and storing armaments at the zoo.
Today, the Zabinskis are recognized as Righteous Among the Nations for their heroic efforts.
The Zookeeper’s Wife, adapted from a non-fiction book by Diane Ackerman, will play in theatres nationwide beginning March 31.
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Oscar-nominee Jessica Chastain and Johan Heldenbergh (the Belgian star of The Broken Circle Breakdown) play the Zabinskis. Daniel Brühl rounds out the film’s supporting cast as Lutz Heck, the chief Nazi zoologist who had a crush on Antonina.
As Caro explains, Chastain was the first and only choice for the title role.
“She had really been craving to work with animals, and that’s the really unique thing about this movie,” she says. “[Chastain’s] spooky and otherworldly, animal whispery trait [is one] she shares absolutely with the character she’s playing.”
There are many animal wranglers listed in the film’s closing credits, and working with a variety of zoo inhabitants could have been a challenge. In one especially intense scene, set during the early days of the Nazi occupation of Poland, much of the Warsaw Zoo is obliterated in bombings.
Nevertheless, capturing these elephants, monkeys and other zoo residents required a crew that was sensitive and quiet.
“It was all about training the crew to just ‘gentle up,’” Caro says, praising the crew’s calm during the film’s more technically ambitious sequences.
Ackerman’s 2007 bestseller was compiled from her intensive research into the period, including many stories collected from Antonina’s diaries.
To depict several years of the war onscreen, Caro and her crew, as well as Chastain, got to spend time with Antonina and Jan’s daughter, Teresa. (Teresa even has a small role in the film, during an early cocktail party scene.)
Chastain also visited Auschwitz to prepare for the role. Meanwhile, many in Caro’s crew watched documentaries of the Warsaw Ghetto to prepare for the sequences in The Zookeeper’s Wife that unfold within that location.
In these scenes, Jan and his son, Ryszard (played by Timothy Radford), enter in a transport truck and fill it with garbage the Nazis think is meant for the zoo’s pigsties. However, the garbage is a cover to hide Jewish residents escaping from the ghetto.
The severity of the subject matter did take a toll on the creative process, Caro says.
“It was not uncommon for me to walk into any of the offices of my team and find people crying,” she tells The CJN.
“When you look at those photographs, you really have to commit to their level of pain, and [realize] what human beings are capable of doing to one another.”
Meanwhile, as the film began production in Prague, the European migrant crisis was headline news. The Zookeeper’s Wife was transformed from a historical drama about sheltering Jews during World War II into a drama with more contemporary resonance.
Caro says that steeping herself and her crew in research during the many years of pre-production was worth the journey.
“It’s tremendously satisfying to be able to bring [Antonina’s] story out into the light, and celebrate her and her husband and their contributions to history.”