This week sees the release of a film that quite a few people have been talking about, Under the Skin, starring the brilliant Scarlett Johansson as an alien from another world.
Glazer is well known for directing the brilliant Sexy Beast, videos like Radiohead’s Street Spirit and brilliant Guinness adverts. Over the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival, we got to sit down with the film’s director, Jonathan Glazer, to chat about the brilliant Under the Skin.
The film is based on a book of the same name. Glazer was particularly excited about the project when he read the book: “Well, it’s hard to remember all of these things that excited me about the book, but it was obviously her and this idea of seeing the world through an alien lens, which just struck me as a fantastic opportunity for a filmmaker.”
In terms of audition for the lead role of the alien, which eventually went to Scarlett, Glazer saw quite a few actresses: “There were other auditions for the role, but it was really while we were still writing. We were still looking and we really weren’t sure what that film was meant to be. We were just trying to find things that locked together. The way I work, I try to keep everything as fluid as possible. We wanted to keep the idea in flux the entire time. It’s all open. So you audition while you are still writing. You want to keep real life flooding in.”
It wasn’t until the script began to make sense to us and that Scarlett became the only candidate for it. That came from meeting a few times over the various interpretations of the script. It wasn’t until very late on that the script was ready for us to give it to her. She read it and we talked on the phone about it, really enthusiastically, like she just read a book she loved. She was just talking about it like there wasn’t an agenda. I met her in New York and we chatted and I said this is going to be what is required of you and she said, that’s what I want to do. She never wavered.”
When the film was initially viewed on the film festival circuit, it caused quite the stir, particularly at the Venice Film Festival. However, Glazer doesn’t feel like this was putting pressure on the project. The film really divided critics: “It’s a bit early to say! We’ll have to see how that goes…”
In terms of location, the book was also set in Scotland, but Glazer had no intention of setting the film anywhere else: “The book wasn’t set in Glasgow though, it was much more of a setting on rural roads. The book was written around the A9 and on lonely empty landscape. It felt more like to us it should be in the city. You know, put the fish where the fish are. When she flees, she goes into the wilderness and we go into the wilderness with her. It always felt like it should be shot in Scotland. I always loved the fact that the book was set in Scotland.”
Under the Skin certainly isn’t a walk in the park, there are more than a few difficult scenes that viewers will find difficult to watch, particularly a certain scene on a beach: “Well, that is the reason why that scene is there. If you feel that way, it’s a human response. That’s all of our responses. Her response is, she doesn’t respond. It’s in scenes like that, you see the alien because you can measure the difference between what you feel and what she doesn’t feel.”
With the film, Scarlett’s character begins to discover herself as not only beginning to experience emotion, but also experiencing this as a woman: “It’s very present in the way you think about her, of course it is. There is gender involved, it’s not just about being a human. It’s her belief that the body she is in, she’s human. She sees herself as something, she begins to believe in that identity. That goes beyond the gender aspect of herself, but clearly the fact that she is a woman, gender is involved. If she were a man… (drifts off) I think what’s exciting about that role and Scarlett in that scene in particular, it’s almost like she de-eroticizes that. It’s not about sexual objectification. What I get from her is that she reclaims her sexuality.
“That last scene was an uncomfortable sequence to film, the beach was an uncomfortable sequence to film. They’re the kind of scenes where you want to feel the walls shake a bit. They are happening at a higher frequency.”
Glazer took what had seemed like a break from the film industry, but was mainly just trying to get the Under the Skin project off the ground: “This has taken a long time to get going, to film, to think about, to re-think about, to re-write, to finance, to make, to cut. This has occupied me for that length of time.”
In terms of the rest of his projects, including music videos like Radiohead’s or adverts for Guinness, Glazer doesn’t really separate them: “they are all similar. There’s a different rhythm to a film. I guess I get more creative satisfaction out of making a film; it’s a longer process. The collaboration is more intense. Discoveries are more eureka-ish. Film is something you can live with as you make one.”
Under the Skin will be in cinemas this weekend. Here’s the trailer.
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