GLASGOW FILM FESTIVAL
Under the Skin is a startling new fi lm from British director Jonathan Glazer. Paul Gallagher speaks to him about casting Scarlett Johansson as an alien predator travelling through Scotland
the Skin is nothing
U nder if not accurately named: once seen, it will burrow into your consciousness. It has been described as both sci-i and horror, but the word that most accurately captures its unsettling tone is ‘alien’. That’s apt, because in the i lm Scarlett Johansson plays an extra- terrestrial predator in human form, travelling around Glasgow and then rural Scotland, picking up random men and enticing them to a thoroughly disturbing fate.
The self-confessed ‘twisted mind’ behind the i lm’s unique look and feel belongs to Jonathan Glazer, the London-based director of Sexy Beast and Birth. Adapted from Michel Faber’s cult Scottish novel, Glazer describes Under the Skin as a ‘companion’ to the book, but also ‘very much its own thing: a very “found” i lm.’ He goes on to explain: ‘I didn’t want to make an illustrative version of the story. There was something about it, a deeper aspect that was more interesting than the plotting of the book, and it was really about her.’
This ‘her’ is the enigmatic alien character, named Isserley in the book but never referred to by name in the i lm. Glazer and his co-writer Walter Campbell decided to strip away much of the novel’s story and focus solely on the alien’s experience, to create a i lm that offered a genuinely ‘other’ perspective on humanity. ‘I wanted there to be a freedom and a randomness, because our commitment was to her point of view. This was all fresh to her, so it needed to be fresh to us.’
To achieve this ‘randomness’, Glazer decided to put Johansson in character in public spaces and i lm with hidden cameras. ‘There was something enticing about the idea of Scarlett in disguise in Glasgow; having her looking as she did, coming from where she does, inhabiting this character, immediately felt like an alien.’ Locating the story initially in Glasgow was also a key change to the novel. ‘The book wasn’t set in Glasgow but I didn’t just want it to be about lonely roads. I wanted it to be about a community: her among us.’
Glazer’s intention was to capture ‘something that we were maybe not seeing for the i rst time, but we were “re-seeing”.’ For Glasgow audiences, this may prove to be the i lm’s most striking aspect. While the city has recently hosted several in each instance its own unique qualities have been disguised to allow it to pass for another large-scale i lm shoots,
location. In Under the Skin, the opposite is true; the i lm offers a portrait of Glasgow that is truly ‘unadorned’ (Glazer’s word), showing the rough edges of the city and its people in a way that is uncannily authentic, and may not delight the Glasgow City Marketing Bureau.
‘It was about witnessing rather than i lming,’ says Glazer. ‘Somebody said to me, “I bet the people of Glasgow aren’t going to be happy about how you’ve presented them”, but I don’t think I’ve “presented” the people of Glasgow at all; they’ve presented themselves. This is what the cameras were pointing at; there’s nothing that you see that was put there [by me]. It was witnessed. And I think the beauty is in that unadornment, that unselfconscious presence. That’s what I found.’ Contrasting with its jarringly real vision of Glasgow, Under the Skin’s most startling imagery comes in surreal sequences where Johansson’s character ‘seduces’ her victims. One stunning moment envisages a body suddenly losing all of its mass, the empty skin left l oating and stretching in space. The image recalls the i lm’s title and points to its undertone of existential enquiry.
‘The human skin in their [alien] eyes is similar to a carrier bag of shopping,’ says Glazer. ‘It’s a vessel, it’s nothing. So this thing that we worship, the beauty of that skin that we judge everything on, for them the absolute opposite is the case.’ But as the i lm progresses we see Johansson’s alien becoming more fascinated by and connected with her human form. ‘She (or rather ‘it’) believes that ‘it’ has become a ‘she’ because of what it sees in a mirror. The evidence it has is physical, and it begins to believe in that identity as its own.’ Taking the alien perspective allows Glazer to explore what it means to live in a body, and the result is a palpable tension – Johansson’s alien is both fascinated and disgusted by her body’s limitations. ‘I like the idea of the limitation of the body, this idea of uncontainable spirit,’ says Glazer. ‘But I also read a theory about how human beings are like the universe’s way of being able to look at itself; to stop and turn back and see itself. The universe sees itself through our eyes, and I always thought that was an interesting idea.’
Under the Skin closes the Glasgow Film Festival at GFT, Sun 2 Mar; limited release from Fri 14 Mar. See review, page 55.
HOW DID THEY DO IT? Under the Skin producer Jim Wilson reveals how they i lmed Scarlett Johansson driving through Glasgow in a transit van attempting to pick up unsuspecting men
‘One of Jonathan n Glazer’s dreams was to have Scarlett carry out the action of the i lm spontaneously and improvising, and you couldn’t t do that with a camera visibly attached to the vehicle.
So, the task was to create a way to i lm scenes in a vehicle, driving around, so that there are no cameras visible anywhere on the van, so that potentially she could pull up and persuade a bloke to get in.
To cover every angle, we needed multiple
small cameras (in the end we had eight), that needed to be small enough to be concealed in the van so as not to draw attention to themselves. And they also had to be good enough to shoot a cinematic i lm on. One day we did just have Scarlett driving
around improvising, talking to people in the street. And in fact one man actually got into the van, he didn’t know he was being i lmed, and that’s the i rst main scene in the i lm – her i rst interaction with a human being was an electrician from Govan!
An assistant director had to jump out and go on the chase for anyone we’d spoken to and explain they’d been i lmed. One guy we had been driving with for about 20 minutes wanted to be dropped off somewhere. The AD jumped out after him and he ran off because he thought he was being chased! When we got hold of him and explained what was going on, he couldn’t believe it. We thought people would recognise that it was Scarlett Johansson, a super-famous movie star, in a van in Scotland, but nobody did.’ (Interview by Gail Tolley)
20 Feb–20 Mar 2014 THE LIST 13