The Air Crash Inspector: An Interview with Martin Amis

A never-before-published interview with Martin Amis, on the Holocaust as literary terrain, that my wife Ferne Pearlstein and I conducted in 2014.

In October 2014, my wife Ferne Pearlstein and I interviewed Martin Amis for The Last Laugh, our 2016 feature documentary about humor and Holocaust. At the time, Amis had just published The Zone of Interest, a novel set in Auschwitz, which — surprise! — was generating a fair amount of controversy for its bold and iconoclastic treatment of the Final Solution.

(It was actually his second Holocaust novel to do that, following 1998’s Time’s Arrow. You don’t get to be an enfant terrible without being terr-eeb once in a while.)

As usual, Amis was ahead of the curve. Today, in the age of Jo Jo Rabbit, and an ousted American president who aspired to Reifenstahlian heights, sensibilities may have changed. A feature film adaptation of The Zone of Interest, directed by Jonathan Glazer — director of Sexy Beast, Birth, and Under the Skin — premiered at the Cannes Film Festival this past May and will soon be released theatrically by A24.

The interview was filmed — on Kodak Super 16mm motion picture film — in the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where Mr. Amis lived. Contrary to his prickly reputation, he could not…