Director Jonathan Glazer is one of the true visionaries to have emerged in cinema since 2000. After all, his ultra-stylized 2000 gangster film “Sexy Beast” turned heads for its visual palette and a now-legendary Ben Kingsley performance which could only be described as "savage." However, since then, Glazer has only given us two more films, the highly underrated “Birth,” starring Nicole Kidman, which has aged like fine wine over time, and his masterpiece: “Under the Skin,” starring Scarlett Johansson as a roaming alien sent to London to feed off of innocent and pathetic male pedestrians. That film is one of the great achievements of this last decade, even being named just this year in our critics poll as the 12th best movie of the last 10 years.
Needless to say, its been 5 years since "Under the Skin," and Glazer seems to be taking all the time in the world to make his next film. Which is why today's news that he is working on a new project for A24 is cause for celebration. According to Deadline, Glazer has agreed to write and direct an untitled World War II film that will use the Holocaust setting to tell its story. The film is based on author Martin Amis’ novel “The Zone Of Interest.”
The Playlist has this synopsis:
“The book tells the story of a Nazi officer that finds himself falling for the wife of the camp’s commandant. The story follows their torrid, secretive love affair, while the spurned husband begins to suspect his wife.”
Speaking a few months ago on the A Dash of Drash podcast, Glazer confirmed the project was a Holocaust film set in Auschwitz. The director mentioned being horrified by pictures of the Holocaust as a child. “I remember being very taken by the faces of the bystanders, the onlookers, the complicit, you know? Ordinary Germans,” he said.
“I started wondering how it would be possible to stand by and watch that. Some of the faces actually enjoy it. The spectacle of it. The kinda circus of it,” he continued.
“A lot of the stories I’ve seen, I do sometimes think they could be set anywhere actually,” Glazer says. “As soon as you define a plot, you’re sort of somehow relegating Auschwitz as a place and it becomes a context. For me, I don’t want to do that. I just felt that was wrong.”
“Now, I’ve spent four or five years working entirely on this project.”
Glazer is Jewish and attended a Jewish school, but he wouldn't just be focusing on the concentration camps it seems. No, it looks like he would be tackling the outside zones, the citizens that knew what was going on, but let it slide.
Filming on the as-of-now untitled film should happen next summer and the film could be released in 2020.
That $100M budget is a steep investment for a movie without conventional A-list headliners — unless Lily James and Pierce Brosnan fit that description for you.