Jonathan Glazer

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For the actor and comedian, see Jon Glaser.

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"Strasbourg 1518" redirects here. For the historical event, see Dancing Plague of 1518.
Jonathan Glazer
File:ZoneIntrestBFILFF121023 (7 of 31) (53255110321) (cropped) 2.jpg
Glazer in 2023
Born (1965-03-26) 26 March 1965 (age 60)
London, England
Education Nottingham Trent University (BA)
Occupation
  • Film director
  • screenwriter
Years active 1993–present
Notable work <templatestyles src="Plainlist/styles.css"/>
Spouse(s) Rachael Penfold
Children 3

Jonathan Glazer (born 26 March 1965) is an English film director and screenwriter. He began his career in theatre before transitioning into film, directing the features Sexy Beast (2000), Birth (2004), Under the Skin (2013), and The Zone of Interest (2023).

His work is often characterised by depictions of flawed and desperate characters, explorations of themes such as alienation and loneliness, a bold visual style that utilises an omniscient perspective and dramatic use of music. Glazer has been nominated for six BAFTA Awards and two Academy Awards. For the historical drama The Zone of Interest, he won both the Grand Prix and the FIPRESCI Prize at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, and has been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay.

Glazer has also directed numerous music videos for Radiohead, Massive Attack, Richard Ashcroft and others. For his work, he received nominations for the MTV Video Music Award for Best Direction twice, consecutively for his work on Jamiroquai's "Virtual Insanity" and Radiohead's "Karma Police". He has also directed commercials for Kodak, Sony, Nike, Barclays and Alexander McQueen, among others.

Early life and education

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"There were all these fantastic characters, who were in and out of my house when I was a little boy. Many of them were East End Jews who had moved to the suburbs for a better quality of life, not super-intellectual people, but incredible entertainers – vaudeville musicians, writers and the like. As a child, I loved and absorbed the richness of that culture."

– Glazer about the artistic Jewish community in which he was raised[1]

Jonathan Glazer was born on 26 March 1965 in London, England,[2] and is of Ashkenazi Jewish descent.[1][3] His ancestors were Ukrainian Jews and Bessarabian Jews who fled the Kishinev pogrom and arrived in the United Kingdom in the 1900s.[3][4] He said: "My great-grandparents were born in Vilnius and Odesa. One was a tailor. His wife, a seamstress."[3] Having grown up in Hadley Wood, near Barnet, his family was Reform Jewish: "Synagogue three times a year, and Friday-night dinners every week."[4] He attended the Jewish Free School which was then located in the borough of Camden where he still lives.[5] During his childhood, he participated in the Givat Washington programme in which pupils are sent to Israel and spent five months in a youth village, a combination between a boarding school and a kibbutz dedicated to educating children close to nature.[5]

His late father was a cinephile with whom he frequently watched David Lean, Sidney Lumet, Sydney Pollack, and Billy Wilder movies.[4][6] After graduating with an emphasis in theatre design from Nottingham Trent University, Glazer began his career directing theatre and making film and television trailers.[6][7]

Career

1993–1999: Early work and short films

In 1993, Glazer wrote and directed three short films of his own ("Mad", "Pool" and "Commission"), and joined Academy Commercials, a production company based in Central London. He has directed acclaimed campaigns for Guinness (Dreamer, Swimblack and Surfer) and Stella Artois (Devil's Island). Since the mid-1990s, he has directed a number of significant music videos, and was named MTV Director of the Year 1997. He named his video for Radiohead's 1996 single "Street Spirit" as a "turning point" in his work: "I knew when I finished that, because [Radiohead] found their own voices as an artist, at that point, I felt like I got close to whatever mine was, and I felt confident that I could do things that emoted, that had some kind of poetic as well as prosaic value. That for me was a key moment."[8]

2000–2013: Breakthrough and acclaim

In 2000, he directed his first feature, the critically acclaimed British gangster film Sexy Beast, starring Ray Winstone and Ben Kingsley, the latter of whom received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.[9] In 2004, he directed his second feature film Birth, starring Nicole Kidman in the United States.

In 2001, Glazer directed the "Odyssey" spot for Levi Strauss jeans.[10][11] In 2006, he directed the second Sony BRAVIA TV advertisement, which took ten days and 250 people to film. It was filmed at an estate in Glasgow, and featured paint exploding all over the tower blocks.[12] Later the same year, he was commissioned to make a television advert for the new Motorola Red phone. The advertisement, showing two naked black bodies emerging from a lump of flesh rotating on a potter's wheel, was due to air in September 2006 but was shelved by Motorola. The advertisement was to benefit several charities in Africa.

In 2013, he directed Under the Skin, a loose adaptation of Michel Faber's science fiction novel of the same name starring Scarlett Johansson. The film premiered at the 2013 Telluride Film Festival and received a theatrical release in 2014, garnering critical acclaim.[13] The film was named the best film of 2014 by numerous critics and publications,[14] was included in many best-of-the-decade lists, and ranked 61st on the BBC's 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century list, an international poll of 177 top critics.[15] Under the Skin is the subject of a 2019 non-fiction book entitled Alien in the Mirror: Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Glazer and Under the Skin by author Maureen Foster, an in-depth analysis of the film scene-by-scene and behind-the-scenes.[16]

2019–present: The Zone of Interest

In October 2019, it was reported that Glazer was working on a new feature film based loosely on Martin Amis’s novel The Zone of Interest, to be co-produced and distributed in the US by A24. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2023 to widespread critical acclaim.[17] The film competed for the Palme d'Or,[18] and won the Grand Prix and FIPRESCI Prize.[19]

Academy Awards acceptance speech

At the 96th Academy Awards, accepting the award for Best International Feature Film for The Zone of Interest, Glazer stated:[20][21]

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All our choices are made to reflect and confront us in the present. Not to say, ‘Look what they did then,’ rather ‘Look what we do now.’ Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present. Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization — how do we resist?

Glazer's speech generated controversy within the Jewish community. Jewish filmmaker Boots Riley praised Glazer "for speaking out against the atrocities in Gaza." IfNotNow, an American Jewish organization that has accused Israel of genocide and called for a ceasefire, stated that "More and more Jews are making clear that their Jewish values lead them to speak out against Israel".[22]

Other Jewish people condemned Glazer's speech. Jewish columnists John Podhoretz and Batya Ungar-Sargon criticized Glazer for using the words "men who refute their Jewishness".[23] The Anti Defamation League's sitting and past directors, Jonathan Greenblatt and Abraham Foxman, also condemned Glazer for those words, with Greenblatt accusing Glazer of "minimiz[ing] the Holocaust". Foxman’s objection was based on the misinterpretation that Glazer was actually rejecting his Jewishness.[24] Both Israel's Minister of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, Amichai Chikli, and the director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center Israel Office and Eastern European Affairs, Efraim Zuroff, called Glazer "a useful idiot".[25][26]

Responding to the criticism, Dave Zirin, who is also Jewish, supported Glazer, writing in The Nation that Glazer "is actually reclaiming his culture from the pampered pro-Israel media prizefighters who argue that Judaism and Zionism are one and the same".[23] P.J. Grisar said that "[t]hose misunderstanding what Glazer said — or willfully distorting it — are only proving his point" about "what we might choose to ignore for the sake of our own comfort".[27] Yonah Lieberman, the co-founder of IfNotNow, said that Glazer "clearly meant they refute the way their Jewishness has been hijacked," and denounced those "twisting Glazer’s words."[28] Political commentator and TV host Chris Hayes, supported Glazer, tweeting "It was [a] little awkwardly phrased, but he’s clearly saying he refutes his Jewishness being hijacked. Not refuting his Jewishness".[28][29]

Personal life

Known to be discreet about his private life,[30] Glazer is married to visual effects supervisor Rachael Penfold.[31] They live in Camden, North London with their three children.[1] He is Jewish.[6][32]

Glazer has often named Stanley Kubrick as his favourite film director and said he was close to Italian and Russian cinemas.[1] His artistic influences include Ingmar Bergman, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Federico Fellini, and Pier Paolo Pasolini.[30]

Filmography

Feature films

Year Title Director Writer
2000 Sexy Beast Yes No
2004 Birth Yes Yes
2013 Under the Skin Yes Yes
2023 The Zone of Interest Yes Yes

Short films

Year Title Director Writer Notes
1994 Mad Yes Yes Also producer and editor
1997 Commission Yes Yes
2019 The Fall Yes Yes
2020 Strasbourg 1518 Yes Yes TV short
First Light: Alexander McQueen Yes No

Music videos

Year Title Artist Notes
1995 "Karmacoma" Massive Attack
"The Universal" Blur
1996 "Street Spirit (Fade Out)" Radiohead
"Virtual Insanity" Jamiroquai
1997 "Cosmic Girl" Cancelled
"Into My Arms" Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
"Karma Police" Radiohead
1998 "Rabbit in Your Headlights" UNKLE ft. Thom Yorke
2000 "A Song for the Lovers" Richard Ashcroft
"Money to Burn" Cancelled
2006 "Live with Me" Massive Attack
2009 "Treat Me Like Your Mother" The Dead Weather

Commercials

Year Title Company
"Husband to Be" Kodak
"Linda 2" Pretty Polly
"Shock of the New" Mazda
"Chief Executive's Wife" AT&T
"City" Club Med
"Sales Director" AT&T
1996 "Frozen Moment" Nike
"New York" Caffrey's
1997 "Parklife" Nike
1998 "Swimblack" Guinness
"Lamppost" BT Easyreach
1999 "Surfer" Guinness
2000 "Kung Fu" Levi Strauss
"Last Orders" Stella Artois
"Devil's Island"
"Protection" Volkswagen Polo
"Whatever You Ride" Wrangler
2001 "Dreamer" Guinness
2002 "Odyssey" Levi Strauss
2003 "Evil" Barclays
"Bull"
"Chicken"
2004 "Bar"[33] Band Aid 20
"Double Don"
"Rant"
"Razor"
2006 "Ice Skating Priests" Stella Artois
"Paint" Sony BRAVIA
"Clay"[34] Motorola Red
2010 "Temptation" Cadbury's Flake
"Kaka"[35] Sony 3D
"Last Tango in Compton"[36][37] Volkswagen Polo
2013 "The Ring"[38][39] Audi
2019 "Flight" Apple

Idents

Awards and nominations

Award Year Category Nominated work Result Ref.
Academy Awards 2024 Best Adapted Screenplay The Zone of Interest Nominated [41]
Best Director Nominated
Best International Feature Film (accepted for United Kingdom) Won
BAFTA Awards 2001 Outstanding British Film Sexy Beast Nominated
2015 Under the Skin Nominated
2024 The Zone of Interest Won
Best Film Not in the English Language Won
Best Direction Nominated
Best Screenplay (Adapted) Nominated
Boston Society of Film Critics 2023 Best Adapted Screenplay Won
Best Director Won
British Independent Film Awards 2001 Best Director Sexy Beast Won
2013 Under the Skin Nominated
Camerimage 2023 Golden Frog The Zone of Interest Nominated
Cannes Film Festival 2023 Palme d'Or Nominated
FIPRESCI Prize Won
Grand Prix Won
Chicago Film Critics Association Awards 2002 Most Promising Filmmaker N/A Nominated
2014 Best Adapted Screenplay Under the Skin Nominated
2023 The Zone of Interest Nominated
European Film Awards 2023 Best European Film Nominated
Best European Director Nominated
Best European Screenwriter Nominated
Florida Film Critics Circle Awards 2023 Best Director Nominated
Gotham Awards 2014 Audience Award Under the Skin Nominated
Best Feature Nominated
2023 Best International Feature The Zone of Interest Nominated
Best Screenplay Nominated
Independent Spirit Awards 2002 Best International Film Sexy Beast Nominated
2015 Under the Skin Nominated
2024 The Zone of Interest Nominated
MTV Video Music Awards 1997 Best Direction "Virtual Insanity" Nominated
Best Editing Nominated
Best Special Effects Won
1998 Best Direction "Karma Police" Nominated
Satellite Awards 2002 Best Director Sexy Beast Nominated
2024 The Zone of Interest Nominated
Best Adapted Screenplay Nominated
Venice Film Festival 2004 Golden Lion Birth Nominated
2013 Under the Skin Nominated

References

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External links

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