Director is proud of sexy, alien thriller
‘Everyone really came together and that is the reward right there’
When Jonathan Glazer unveiled his debut feature Sexy Beast at the Toronto International Film Festival in the year 2000, he was writhing in disappointment. His gangster-heist movie starring Ray Winstone and Ben Kingsley was a complete success, earning critical raves from just about everyone, but Glazer hated it.
“I still hate that movie,” he says, 13 years and two films later. “Well, I don’t hate it as much as I’ve learned to live with it, as you learn to live with the things you’ve done over the course of a lifetime. While doing it, you’re never sure if it’s going to turn out, and if it will mean anything to anyone else, but that’s what makes it all so interesting.”
Glazer says his new film, Under the Skin, starring Scarlett Johansson as an alien seductress, pushed him against the same wall of doubt: “I can’t tell you I am happy with the film,” he says, with an earnest sigh, then a laugh. “You know I can’t be happy with it.”
Given the film’s long list of positive reviews, one might accuse Glazer of false modesty.
But his tone has nothing of an “aw shucks” arrogance to it. He’s just a man who needs to be naked — emotionally and creatively — and this purity of purpose defines his work, regardless of how alienating it may prove to a viewer.
For instance in Birth, his 2004 followup to Sexy Beast, he cast Nicole Kidman as a woman who finds the soul of her dead husband in the body of a young boy.
Everybody flinched at the possibilities, and the film was carefully tucked back into the collective subconscious.
Under the Skin is Glazer’s first feature since, and while it’s not in his nature to be happy with any creative undertaking, he is exceptionally proud of the effort made by the entire team, who had to endure the bone-chilling dampness of a Scottish winter in order to get the right angle on what it means to be warm-blooded.
“Everyone really came together and that is the reward right there. We made a film that is open-ended and true to itself. It’s not trying to ingratiate itself to anybody. I feel there are people out there who will connect with it if they bring something to it. It’s like a piece of music. People will connect with it or they won’t, but if it’s made wholeheartedly, there is value in that.”
Glazer says he stuck with Under the Skin for the better part of the past decade because it speaks to us as human beings. “There’s no moral or anything, it’s an exploration of our existential unease.”
For Glazer, that sense of unease seeped into every frame of the movie, and every part of the creative process.
“Part of doing anything like this is you have to be prepared to fail. And you have be working with people who are okay with that — people who understand you are trying to do something unusual. So it was a big risk for everyone involved — but at the same time, no one wanted to be anywhere else — no matter how cold it got.”
Though it’s a rather bleak and emotionally distilled story of an alien who wears a human skin to seduce victims, Glazer’s third film is already earning a place in film history as a result of its leading lady: Johansson may end the year as the most powerful woman in Hollywood as a result of starring in Captain America, as well as her own action vehicle from Luc Besson, Lucy, due out later this summer.
“We totally bonded,” says Glazer of the soaring star.