Jonathan Glazer first found fame after his revolutionary pop videos for Radiohead’s ‘Street Spirit’ and Jamiroquai’s multi-MTV-award-winning ‘Virtual Insanity’. His work on commercials such as the groundbreaking Guinness ‘Surfer’ (1999) further marked him out as a supremely gifted visual stylist.
With his feature debut Sexy Beast (2000), Glazer earned a BAFTA nomination and created a work that entered the lexicon of modern British crime movies. The tale of a retired criminal living the good life in Spain but reluctantly coaxed back to the UK for one last job, the film displays a gift for visual set pieces and a talent for working with leading actors, an often underlooked facet of the director’s work.
This facet was again at the fore when Glazer worked with Nicole Kidman, Danny Huston and Lauren Bacall on Birth (2004). An unsettling story of a young boy’s attempts to persuade an emotionally scarred woman that he is her deceased husband reborn, the film has an eerie otherworldliness that presaged Glazer’s next direction.
Marked by a lengthy pre-production process and Glazer’s perfectionist streak, Under the Skin finally emerged some ten years after Glazer began working on it. An adaptation of the Michel Faber novel, the film jettisons all but the title and the central concept of an alien woman arriving on earth in search of prey. It’s a bold and brilliant vision that effectively captures the sense of what it must feel like to look at the world from an alien’s perspective. Scarlett Johansson shines in the central role. Mica Levi’s electronic score is similarly effective.
It ended up taking ten years to make Under the Skin. Can you talk about the process of bringing it to the screen?
It certainly took a long time to find a way of doing it that we liked. Over the years, the screenplay became a lot less similar to Michel Faber’s source novel. The pillars of the screenplay are similar but the way the story is told is very different. We wanted to make it a story very much told from the alien’s perspective.
There was a kind of phase one, where we had a script written by Walter Campbell. We then had a script co-written with Walter that we were prepared to go out into the world with. However, there was then a second phase where we realised that we would be unable to make the film as it was written because of how much it would cost. We then took the decision to strip the script – to distil it to an almost documentary aesthetic, focusing solely on a particular character.
What attracted you to making a film about Earth from an alien viewpoint?
We’re slightly limited by the fact that we are inhibited by the human imagination. It’s a lovely idea but difficult to achieve. What we tried to do is find a way that represents or evokes this concept of an inscrutable identity – and in our case a slightly malevolent one. I wanted the alien to be like a force and an all-consuming appetite. What I then tried to do was emphasise the difference between this alien entity and us, so I incorporated scenes that attempt to dramatise that. I wanted to depict a slow, osmotic change in the character, towards a more human sensibility. We employed an extreme emphasis on colours and sounds to do that.
You play around a little with the idea of predatory behaviour. The alien is initially the predator, but then you show that humans have predatory instincts too.
I was interested by the idea that for someone – or something – to love, something else has to die. On top of that is the dispassionate nature of things. The alien is very much the conduit for this subject. There is also a sense of the hunter becoming the hunted at the end. It’s at the point that the alien becomes more human – when she is vulnerable to the men she has exploited before. There’s a certain irony in that, I suppose.
One of the turning points of the film is the scene involving Scarlett Johansson and Adam Pearson. The alien seems to become alerted to the notions of compassion and kindness.
It’s a big scene and certainly key in terms of the journey. It is a turning point, but other key moments have also unfolded prior to this scene. I see it as a more gradual drift, and by the time the alien meets the character played by Adam it is ready for some kind of deeper connection. Maybe what she sees is someone like her, an outsider. She doesn’t judge his appearance, as others do, because she isn’t at all interested in what he looks like. It’s also important that the character played by Adam grows more comfortable by the very fact that he doesn’t feel rejected.
People tend to categorise you as a primarily visual director, perhaps because of your work in advertising, but this overlooks your work with actors such as Ray Winstone and Ben Kingsley on Sexy Beast, and Nicole Kidman on Birth.
Thank you very much! I think it’s important when you film something to think about everything the audience is going to see, and, of course, the actor is very much at the centre of that. In many ways, the actor is the reason why you are there, and you have to believe in them. I also recognise that if I don’t believe in the actor then I can’t expect anybody else to either. It is perhaps the most vital aspect of the film.
This is a very brave performance from Johansson.
Scarlett was in our orbit for a while for the role. I met her quite early on and then stayed in contact as the script went through various changes. As soon as I had finally arrived at the film I wanted to make, it had to be Scarlett. There was a point where I did consider the part uncastable, because it was so difficult to believe that someone we had seen in other films or on magazine covers could play this role. We did, for a brief period, think about casting an unknown, but then we just decided to go for it and make Scarlett the star.
It also helps extend the idea of alienation. I would imagine that, for Scarlett Johansson, driving around Glasgow in shabby clothes in a transit van is not an everyday experience.
It’s interesting because now I am asked quite regularly if she was recognised. You don’t expect Scarlett Johansson to be driving around and asking those questions, so we got away with it pretty much all of the time.
There is a vérité aesthetic – you film for real in real-life situations with hidden cameras.
There is an interesting dichotomy between the creative excitement of doing this and the reality of filming it. There was a concern that we may not capture the ‘happy accidents’ that we need to drive the narrative forward. Or what would happen if Scarlett was constantly recognised and the spell was broken? However, our confidence grew the more we filmed. The first shot we tried was in a busy Glasgow shopping centre on Saturday lunchtime, and once this worked we knew the set-up would be okay. For the nightclub scenes, which were filmed on a Friday and Saturday night in a real Glasgow nightclub, we had to have signs up outside – as we did in the shopping centre – to cover us legally. We also avoided lingering on any specific faces. For the driving scenes we had to get the people that were filmed to sign a release. Most people did, but a few didn’t. Regrettably, one of the best moments involved a couple breaking up, which Scarlett interacted with. Not surprisingly, the couple didn’t want to sign a release form.
The opening sequence with the eye locking into place is terrific.
We spent a year in a warehouse and shot pretty much the entire construction of a human being. Once we began to strip the film down we realised that we needed only one element and, as the film is very much about looking, we decided to concentrate on the eye formation. The eye is also an intensely human thing, so it felt like the right step-off point.
The Mica Levi score is very impressive, especially as a first score.
Mica was actually suggested by our music supervisor Peter Raeburn and his colleague Jay James. Peter has worked with me throughout my career, and they played me various pieces of music. One of them was from Mica’s Chopped and Screwed. I was immediately struck by it.
Joanna Hogg (photo: Ellis Parrinder)