"Under the Skin" with Director Jonathan Glazer

After nine years, British filmmaker Jonathan Glazer returns to the director’s chair for his third feature film, “Under the Skin.” Starring Scarlett Johansson, the film is an adaptation of Michel Faber’s novel of the same name, and it follows an alien in the body of an attractive woman as she travels throughout Scotland seducing men and abducting them to harvest their organs. While Glazer’s initial adaptation remained faithful to the narrative of Faber’s novel, the final film turned out drastically different, with a larger thematic focus on the gradual individuation of Johansson’s character. “In this case, the thing that was most exciting to me was that journey, that kind of existential unease of the character,” Glazer says. “And then we created a new journey, watched her journey unfold, and watched her change and drift and be almost infected by human impulse.”

In order to capture the rawness of our human world through an alien perspective, Glazer sought to escape the artificial qualities imposed by conventional filmmaking. “It wasn’t about a movie set. We didn’t want to create a feature film in the way you’d contrive or construct those realities,” Glazer says. Much of the film was actually filmed in secret, with Johansson driving a van around Scotland and interacting with complete strangers. To tackle the technical problems of filming these strangers without their knowledge, the production crew actually had to construct cameras that met a very unique set of specifications. “We had to build them because the cameras out there were too small,” Glazer says. “Either the ones that were small enough weren’t good enough quality, or the ones that were small enough weren’t good enough to hide, so we built our own for those purposes. We found a way of hiding them depending on the circumstances we were filming.”

In one scene, Johansson walks down an urban street in Scotland when she suddenly falls to the ground. Although this incident was actually documented by paparazzi following the actress in December 2012 (later to be transformed into a viral Internet meme), Glazer had secret cameras filming the entire time, unbeknownst to the world. “We had three cameras positioned in the way you would if you were to have full control, precisely where you wanted them,” Glazer says. “Out of the window of somebody’s apartment, the closest camera to her was filmed through the window of a shop, and the other camera where we can see her being pulled to her feet was being filmed through a hole in a suitcase.” Glazer’s devotion to cinematic realism doesn’t end with this scene—many of the people who appear in the film weren’t cast, and even one scene at a packed nightclub was entirely filmed in secret. “[It’s] all real—there are no extras,” Glazer says. “Some people in the film are cast and some aren’t cast. And the people who were cast beforehand were cast to sort of blend in invisibly with the people who weren’t.”

During production, Glazer also consciously avoided blockbuster-type film scoring, instead choosing first-timer Mica Levi of the British avant-pop band Micachu & The Shapes to compose for the film. “Sometimes music is used to kind of prop something up or manipulate an emotion or be there in place of one, and often a film score can be used to manipulate someone in ways that are forced. And I think that what we tried to do here was to really create the character’s voice,” Glazer says. “There’s very little [dialogue]. The music’s very simple [yet] very sophisticated.” According to the director, three themes really dominate the film: an “alien loop” embodying the character’s initial hive mind, a “perfume” that appears when she captures her victims, and a final “burgeoning consciousness” in the film’s third act. “The music of the film is the blood of it, really,” Glazer says.

Perhaps most prominently, music reflects Johansson’s character’s state of mind during a sex scene where she discovers the sexuality of her human body. “The music that Mica wrote for the love scene…is kind of deluded, this abuseful [sic] love. And it’s twisted and it’s searching,” Glazer says. Although sex plays a prominent role in the plot, the film manages to bring a unique sense of innocence and purity to even the scenes where Johansson appears fully nude. “By trying to position the nudity and sexuality of the film and make it more of a study, the camera is not excited by the nudity,” Glazer says. “Her nudity is about anatomy and the body as a craft, and the idea of looking at her body as this new craft and de-eroticizing it in the way that she looks at it.”

By emphasizing the individuation of Johansson’s character, Glazer aims to ultimately make a profound statement about human notions of identity. In the film, all of the human men are harvested for their organs and discarded, while Johansson’s character and the other aliens are indecipherable entities with unspoken, mysterious motives. “All of [the mens’] insides are removed—we thought of the skin in the film as a kind of shopping bag, and the contents of the shopping bag were the things that this entity were interested in,” says Glazer. “The skin, the thing that we hold so much store by and scrutinize and judge, for them is just a plastic bag to be discarded.”

—Staff writer Alan R. Xie '16 can be reached at alan.xie@thecrimson.com.