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Alien Surveillance
After opening with lightness at the Grand Budapest Hotel, Glasgow Film Festival closes in darkness with Under The Skin, a tale of an alien seducing and killing men on this city’s streets. We spoke to its director, Jonathan Glazer
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t’s always reductive to glibly compare one filmmaker to another, but if I were to commit that cardinal sin for Sexy Beast director Jonathan Glazer I would evoke the late, great Stanley Kubrick. Glazer has literally cribbed from Kubrick in the past (see his Clockwork Orange-inspired promo for Blur’s The Universal), but more subtly the pair share a steely control over their images. This is most clearly seen in Glazer’s 2004 masterpiece Birth, which calls to mind the likes of Eyes Wide Shut and The Shining in the way its camera glides around the Manhattan home of the wealthy family at the heart of the film. Unfortunately for fans of his work, Glazer also seems to have developed Kubrick’s production snail’s pace. His third film, Under the Skin, has been over a decade in the making. When I speak to Glazer by phone ahead of the film’s long-awaited release, the 48-year-old is in a London editing suite. “I’m cutting a TV commercial,” he says sheepishly. “Paying the rent, you know.” If he sounds embarrassed about his involvement in the advertising game he shouldn’t be. It is Glazer’s bracingly inventive commercials of the late 90s and early 00s that have most effectively seared his distinct vision on to our collective consciousness. Think of his Guinness ad in which surfers tackle a giant squall of stampeding white horses, his Levi’s ad in which a young man and woman demonstrate the jeans’ flexibility by running at breakneck speed through walls, and his Sony TV ad that features candy-coloured globs of paint exploding all over Glasgow tower blocks. Under the Skin sees Glazer back in Glasgow with a
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very loose adaptation of Michel Faber’s 2000 novel of the same name, in which an alien disguised as a female motorist abducts strapping male hitchhikers. From the moment he read the darkly comic novel he was “absolutely struck” that he wanted to make it into a movie. So why’d it take so long to get to the screen?
“The booing and clapping combination is, to my ear, a phenomenal sound” Jonathan Glazer “When you’re doing it you don’t think of it in those terms,” he explains, “you’re just in it and it takes what it takes.” A large reason for this extended preproduction was Glazer’s figuring out how to visualise the material. “There were ingredients to it that were very powerful to me,” he says, “and I needed to find out what they were, and once I understood those, that’s the film I wrote and made.” The chief ingredient became the psyche of the alien. “I suppose that was the molten core of it all: the idea of being really in her point of view and seeing human beings from her angle.” Through her eyes, Glazer paints the human race as grotesque and perplexing. When she drives around the streets of Glasgow in her
Interview: Jamie Dunn
Transit van scouting for prey, it’s the chain-smoking, mobile-phone-obsessed natives who look alien. The casting of Scarlett Johansson in the lead adds credence to this fish out of water scenario. In Faber’s novel, there are tell-tale signs that his protagonist is not of this world – massive eyes hidden behind spectacles with milk-bottle lenses, long scarred fingers and a short torso. In Glazer’s version, Johansson’s glamour is equally conspicuous: “There’s something exotic about [Johansson] there,” explains Glazer. “I used to think of her like an exotic insect on the wrong continent. Like her character, she stood out but she was desperately trying to blend in at the same time.” This friction is accentuated by the sly techniques Glazer used while filming. Many of the men whom Johansson’s character approaches to pick up in her van were unaware at the time that they were flirting with a Hollywood A-lister and performing in a sci-fi film. Using a combination of hidden cameras and distant camera crews with long lenses, Glazer observes Johansson as she walks and drives the streets of No Mean City interacting with its oblivious inhabitants. Continues on p2... Tonight’s closing gala is sponsored by Auchentoshan Single Malt Scotch Whisky and New Arts Sponsorship Grant, supported by the Scottish Government in conjunction with Arts & Business Scotland
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