Loving the Alien: Interview with Jonathan Glazer

Director Jonathan Glazer describes himself as obsessive. When he tells you he’s worked on his latest fi lm for over 10 years, the truth of this self-diagnosis becomes clear. Bitingly intelligent, he speaks slowly, softly and with a slight air of distraction, as if trying to articulate complex ideas in a way mere mortals will comprehend. All the while you suspect he’s composing intricate “visual symphonies” in his head.

Which, as it turns out, is exactly what he does while making a film.
“You start with a feeling, a spark,” the director muses. “The thing that instantly connects with you is a very palpable feeling. It’s also intangible – you can’t even put images to that feeling. But then, that’s exactly what you try to do. Once you put images to it, you try to make sense of those images and fi gure out where they’re going, how they rhyme. Suddenly those images become a scene. It’s a unique process – certainly for me. It makes more sense to me listening to how people write music or paint. I understand that kind of engineering or articulation of some innate intuitive vernacular far more easily than I understand someone sitting down and saying, ‘Right, let’s write a three act play.’”

Glazer’s ability to create individual visual vocabularies elevates everything he touches. That’s the case whether it’s music videos for Jamiroquai and Massive Attack, or his gorgeously ambitious ads for Guinness and Stella Artois. His latest feature is by far his most startlingly original. Loosely adapted from Michel Faber’s novel, Under The Skin is a psychosexual sci-fi fi lm that sees an alien (Scarlett Johansson) roaming Scotland, looking for lonely young men to seduce and subsume. Glazer wanted to pare Faber’s novel down to its “molten core” – the experience and viewpoint of his striking, near-silent alien.

“You don’t set out to be opaque, you set out to be as lucid as you can. Committing to telling the story from her point of view means that the result is going to be alienating, as we have to discover things with her. There’s a fi erce logic to everything in the fi lm. It’s her logic, and the audience has to surrender to that.”

The film has proved divisive, with some audiences enraged by its lack of exposition or explanation. Then, Glazer is no stranger to controversy. His last film, Birth, also evoked discomfort in its portrayal of intimacy between Nicole Kidman’s character and a ten year old boy. Glazer says that he doesn’t deliberately set out to unnerve. Still, he doesn’t shy from it, either.

“I’d much rather someone said that they hate the thing, than they didn’t merely like it. That’s okay with me. It’s not about consensus, it’s about the story. Under The Skin clearly isn’t trying to ingratiate itself with an audience. It’s focused on finding out what comes next for the character. My interest lies in telling that journey as truthfully as I can. Empathy can only follow truth.”

At the core of this unique fi lm is Johansson, whose stoic, refrigerated performance marks new terrain. From her emotive vocal performance in Her to this stoic, almost-silent role, Johansson seems to be deliberately moving past the arguably vapid roles of her earlier career.

“Scarlett has been objectifi ed so much that it makes it more interesting,” Glazer says. “There is nudity, but it’s not sexualised – and there’s a democracy of nudity in that men are naked too. There’s a scene where she looks at herself in the mirror, and takes control of that moment. She is the owner of that, and herself – looking at her body and de-eroticising it. For Scarlett to do that adds a layer to the scene which I fi nd brave and interesting.”

Like Birth, the film seems to subtly delve into the world of female sexuality, birth and death. Still, Glazer isn’t trying to reveal his inner psyche just yet.

“I’m sure that is there. Interpretations and themes tend to come through the cracks of what you make like flowers in a pavement – but you don’t set out to put them there. I’m always surprised by what people see in my work. It takes a long time before I have enough distance before I can watch it and interpret it myself. Maybe that’s what I’ll do – re-watch all my films in years to come as a form of self-psychoanalysis!”