Director Jonathan Glazer is one of the seminal visionaries to have emerged in the film circuit the last decade. After all, his ultra-stylized 2000 gangster film, “Sexy Beast,” turned heads for its stunning visual palette. However, Glazer only got better after that, giving us two films since then: the highly underrated “Birth,” and his masterpiece: “Under the Skin.”
”Under the Skin” was one of the great achievements of this last decade, even being named the 12th best movie of the 2010s in our mega critics poll. Needless to say, it’s been 7 years since that movie, and Glazer seems to have taken his time to make his next one.
Today I learned an exclusive, that Glazer has been in a unique post-production phase on his film. In a nutshell, Glazer is, at the very least, considering the idea of multiple cuts for his upcoming “The Zone of Interest.” Perhaps not just different lengths, but maybe also different POVs.
I have no idea what distribution avenues those would take, but it sounds absolutely intriguing. No other details were given to me.
Glazer shot “The Zone of Interest” in Auschwitz, Poland. What we do know about this new project, a holocaust-set story, is that Glazer has been working on it for nearly five years, with A24 attached to produce. The film is said to be based on author Martin Amis’ novel of the same name.
Amis’ book tells the story of a Nazi officer who finds himself falling for the wife of the camp’s commandant. The plot follows their torrid love affair, while the spurned husband begins to suspect his wife.
Speaking a few months ago on the A Dash of Drash podcast, Glazer 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.”
Glazer is Jewish and attended a Jewish school, but it seems as though he won’t just be focusing on the concentration camps alone, but, also on the outside zones, the citizens that knew what was going on, but let it go on, turning a blind eye.
This is set to be Glazer’s first film since 2013’s critically-heralded “Under the Skin.” Lukasz Zal (“Cold War”, “Ida”) is credited as the DP on that one. Glazer is known to take his time in post-production. There was almost a 24-month timeframe between the 2011 shoot of “Under the Skin” and its 2013 world premiere at Telluride.