The return of Jonathan Glazer: How the Sexy Beast director became Britain’s least prolific visionary

The maverick British director Jonathan Glazer is back at the Cannes Film Festival next month with his first new film in 10 years, The Zone of Interest, based on Martin Amis’s 2014 novel. Glazer is an admired and cult figure although, or perhaps partly because, he has only made three films in 20 years: Sexy Beast (2000), Birth (2004) and Under the Skin (2013).

Audiences know that his movies will always contain moments which startle, confuse and terrify them, make their flesh crawl, or reduce them to helpless nervous laughter. In Birth, a widow (Nicole Kidman), about to remarry, is convinced that the 10-year-old boy who turns up at her engagement party is the reincarnation of her late husband whom she loved very deeply.

The alien woman (Scarlett Johansson) protagonist in Under the Skin is seen in a white van eyeing up passers-by on the Glasgow streets because she is, quite literally, a man-eater. She needs them for nutrition. Sexy Beast has a famous scene of ageing British gangster (Ben Kingsley) on a plane, having a fag, before take off. He is asked to put it out. He refuses in his usual torrent of expletives. When he is arrested, he comes up with such a bizarre story about being sexually assaulted by the stewards that the authorities immediately let him go.

These are all typically jarring moments in Glazer’s work. He is one of UK cinema’s least prolific but most idiosyncratic and visionary talents. It can take him up to a decade to hatch a new movie but, when it finally arrives, it is always an event.

“Here’s to waiting” was one of the slogans in Glazer’s famous late 1990s Guinness commercial, Surfer, often voted the greatest ad of all time. It used apocalyptic imagery of white horses and surfers riding giant waves to make Irish stout seem sexy to younger drinkers.

Waiting has been the watchword throughout the director’s career. There tend to be very long lulls before each new Glazer movie finally comes crashing down. Now, with very little fanfare or advance publicity, Glazer’s new film is about to hit us – and it promises to be more controversial than all of its predecessors put together.

The Zone of Interest, which receives its world premiere in the main competition in Cannes, is set in Auschwitz and was shot close to the death camp. Five years ago, when he appeared on podcast A Dash of Drash with his close friend, Rabbi Marc Soloway, Glazer, who is Jewish, reflected on just what the Holocaust meant to him. As a boy of 12 or 13, he had first seen “those awful images of Jews cleaning the streets with toothbrushes or being hounded out of this house or that house”, after Kristallnacht in 1938. This was when Nazis vandalised and ransacked Jewish homes and properties.

“The thing that struck me, I suppose, after watching the horror of what was being meted out to these people, I remember being very taken by the faces of the bystanders, the onlookers, the complicit, ordinary Germans,” Glazer told Soloway. “I started wondering how it would be possible to stand by and watch that happen and, on some of the faces, to enjoy it, the spectacle of it and the circus of it. That really haunted me.”

Those images that troubled him then have now driven him to make his own Holocaust movie. The Zone of Interest has been filmed in German and Polish with a European cast. Cannes festival director Thierry Frémaux describes it as “quite a challenging film”, which sounds like a huge understatement. The director has said that the protagonist of the film is “Auschwitz itself, the culture, the environment”.

Glazer is treading on very sacred ground. In his 2016 documentary, Austerlitz, the Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa observed – and deplored – the growth of Holocaust tourism. “Why does a love couple or a mother with her child go on a sunny summer day to look at the ovens in a crematorium?” the director puzzled over the morbid attraction that sites of historical mass murder have come to hold over the public.

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Critics have also often questioned earlier Holocaust-themed movies which contrive redemptive and upbeat endings, slip into sentimentality, or try to explain just why the genocide happened. “He made a feel-good movie about the ultimate feel-bad experience,” critic J Hoberman claimed in a famous attack on Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993).

The alternative, though, is overwhelmingly bleak. Unflinching documentaries like Death Mills (1945), made to confront the German people with evidence of the atrocities committed in their name, and German Concentration Camps Factual Survey (1945), which uses horrific footage shot by the Allies in the newly liberated concentration camps, or Night and Fog (1956), with its imagery of piles of dead bodies stacked up like logs of wood, are so grim as to be almost unwatchable.

How will a film-maker like Glazer deal with one of the most unspeakable events in recent human history? The justification that Glazer gave Soloway for even embarking on such a project is that the Holocaust was “leaving living memory now” and that most audiences aren’t ready to sit through the nine hours of Claude Lanzmann’s interview-based Holocaust documentary epic Shoah (1985) or to read deeply about the subject. His film, he suggested, would be for “a new generation…[the story] has to always be told and each generation has to tell it – and no doubt they will tell it differently from the previous generation because they are that much more removed from it”.

Glazer is as close as contemporary cinema comes to a Stanley Kubrick figure. Like the reclusive American, he is a visual perfectionist whose work is startlingly original. He doesn’t give many interviews and an air of mystery clings to him.

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The director’s vision is often very disturbing. His 2019 short The Fall, commissioned by BBC Films, showed a masked, anonymous mob shaking a solitary man out of a tree in a forest and then hanging him. After they catch him, they stop to pose for a selfie. They put the noose around his neck and drop him down a huge chute or well beneath the gallows. He somehow survives and is last seen clambering upward like an insect toward the light.

Glazer cited “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters”, an etching by Francisco Goya, as the main inspiration behind the short that he made when he was already working on his Holocaust project. The film explores mob justice, vigilanteism and the macabre, exhibitionistic pleasure crowds take in violence.

Not that the director’s work is always this dark and forbidding. Jean-Luc Godard famously began his 1963 film Le Mepris with a widescreen image of a naked Brigitte Bardot. The first shot in Glazer’s debut movie Sexy Beast is of a near-naked Ray Winstone, roasting himself in the sun beside the swimming pool of his Spanish villa as the Stranglers’ lecherous ballad “Peaches” plays on the soundtrack. It’s an arresting opening – bawdy, ironic and surreal. Glazer’s camera frames Winstone as if he is an object of beauty, when he is really a middle-aged English man abroad in absurdly small yellow swimming trunks and whose pudgy body is beginning to go to seed. All of a sudden, a gigantic boulder bounces down the hill and almost squashes him before landing with an enormous splash in the pool.

Sexy Beast was slick, funny and full of menace. It had several virtuoso sequences, which could have been taken from one of its director’s commercials. Glazer brought something fresh and arresting to the hackneyed British gangster movie that you don’t find in the work of Guy Ritchie. He also managed to make Ben Kingsley, the Oscar-winning star of Gandhi previously known for his placid persona, seem so terrifying on screen that Winstone quails in his presence. Kingsley plays Don Logan, the psychotic gangland boss who prises Winstone’s character, Gary Dove, out of retirement for one of those fateful “final” heists.

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Glazer didn’t write Sexy Beast. He said afterwards he didn’t feel a strong sense of personal identification with the film, which was scripted by Louis Mellis and David Scinto. The director told Sight and Sound magazine that he was “seduced by their dialogue” and fascinated by the character of the mobster, Logan, whom he described as “funny and tragic and puritanical, like a parking attendant putting a ticket on a windscreen”. The film made money and turned into a cult success but Glazer wasn’t satisfied. Asked if there was anything he would have liked to change in the movie, he replied “everything bar two shots”.

On his next feature Birth (2004), the director was dealing with US financiers who were expecting a very different – and presumably far more mainstream – film. “That was horrible and I learned from that.” In his recent work, he has found less interfering support from his patrons at Film4. The Zone of Interest is also backed by A24, the US company behind Oscar winners like Moonlight (2017) and Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022).

One obstacle Glazer will have to overcome is the Amis hex. The novelist may be a towering figure in literary history but movie adaptations of his work have tended to end very badly. Damian Harris’s version of Amis’s 1973 novel, The Rachel Papers (1989), was a damp squib. While the verdict of one UK newspaper on the 2000 screen version of the novelist’s book, Dead Babies, directed by William Marsh and starring Paul Bettany, was “boring, embarrassing, nasty and stupid”. The 2018 adaptation of the author’s murder mystery novel London Fields, starring Amber Heard, was a debacle, “quite simply horrendous – a trashy, tortured misfire from beginning to end” as The New York Times put it. Carol Morley’s 2018 Out of Blue, based on Amis’s novel Night Train, was respectfully reviewed but died at the box office.

It remains to be seen how closely Glazer’s film will cleave to Amis’s book. The novel is written from the point of view of three different characters, a womanising Nazi officer called Thomsen, the camp commandant Doll and a Sonderkommando, a Jewish prisoner assisting at the death camp, called Szmul. It deals with the fall-out after Thomsen falls for Doll’s voluptuous wife, Hannah.

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The most disturbing element of the novel is the matter-of-fact way its protagonists cope with the death and squalor around them. At one stage, Doll, who spies on his wife, draws a comparison between the way she hides the stubs of her Davidoff cigarettes, which she is forbidden to smoke, with his own struggles to dispose of the charred remains of the gas chamber victims. “To be perfectly direct about it, corpses are the bane of my life,” Doll grumbles, adding that Hannah “does what she does out of wrongness and weakness. And I do what I do out of rectitude and indomitable might!”

How do you depict such depravity on screen without seeming crass or exploitative? Glazer has spent a decade preparing The Zone of Interest. “It is certainly not a subject I have gone into lightly,” he has said of a project bound to introduce a very solemn and disquieting note to the festival hoopla and frivolity of Cannes next month.

‘The Zone of Interest’ premieres at the Cannes Film Festival, 16 to 27 May