Interview: Jonathan Glazer

Glazer manages a very successful assault on the worlds of commercials, music videos and – ever since his feature film debut ‘Sexy Beast’ – cinema.

Oct 26 2004

The American screenwriter Milo Addica is staring out of a window in Jonathan Glazer’s production company headquarters, a sprawling open-plan office that nestles one floor above a nightclub in the West End. It’s from this base that Glazer manages his very successful assault on the worlds of commercials, music videos and – ever since his feature film debut ‘Sexy Beast’ in 2000 – cinema.

‘I remember that restaurant, that coffee place, that McDonald’s,’ laughs Addica, the young writer whose first project was ‘Monster’s Ball’ (2001), which won Halle Berry an Oscar. ‘I remember peering out of this window during all those nights I spent in this office with Jonathan, just writing and talking together.’

During those long nights, Addica and Glazer were working on ‘Birth’, a subtle, intoxicating and meditative piece that stars Nicole Kidman and Danny Huston and explores themes of lost love and reincarnation among a well-to-do family in Upper Manhattan. Kidman plays the newly engaged Anna, whose charmed life implodes when a 10-year-old boy called Sean (Cameron Bright) appears out of the blue in the upscale apartment of her fiancé’s family claiming to be her dead husband.

‘Birth’ is not a ghost story, but it’s certainly ghostly – a mood that prevails from the film’s opening sequence, where Glazer’s camera slowly follows Kidman’s husband jogging through Central Park to an early death in an underground walkway. The performances are entrancing, as is the camerawork, not least when the lens lingers on Kidman’s face for several minutes as she sits watching an opera performance and is gradually swamped with emotion. It’s an ambiguous film that, refreshingly, begs more questions – about the story and about storytelling itself – than it ultimately answers.

‘Birth’ wasn’t Glazer and Addica’s original plan. They first teamed up to collaborate on a film of Michel Faber’s ‘Under the Skin’ (which is Glazer’s next project). But Glazer’s idea captured their imaginations, kickstarting an intense period of writing that continued even as Glazer was shooting the film in early 2003 (indeed, the pair even recorded a new voiceover for the film just days before the film premiered in Venice this September).

Another, highly revered writer completed the creative triangle. Jean-Claude Carriere, the 73-year-old French screenwriter with over 120 films to his name (including Luis Buñuel’s ‘Belle de Jour’), helped Glazer with the story and acted as script consultant.

‘I was in my kitchen with a friend,’ says Glazer, recalling the moment when he first thought of ‘Birth’. ‘I was walking over to the kettle, talking about something completely unrelated, when I said to him: “I just had a really good idea for a film. There’s this little kid and he tells a woman he’s her dead husband – and he’s ten years old.’ Soon, Glazer was off to Paris to discuss the idea with Carriere, at his producer’s recommendation.

‘Carriere had this book about love stories in the movies, with stills from all kinds of films. I remember him flicking through it, looking at all these different images. He then closed it and said “No, it’s not in there.” He told me that such a film hadn’t been made for one of either two reasons: it can’t be done or nobody had thought of it before. For about eight months, I was then going back and forth to his flat in Paris pretty much every weekend, turning one paragraph into three acts.’ The film went through 21 drafts as Glazer and Addica wrangled with their story. Then, at the last minute, just weeks before the shoot was due to start, and to the horror of their producers, Fine Line Features, they decided to refocus the entire film.

‘The script we arrived with in New York was about the boy, Sean,’ Addica explains. ‘And the film we eventually made was about the woman. A lot of things started crystallising the closer we came to the shoot. We were writing scenes the day before they would be shot, giving them to Danny and Nicole on the actual day we were shooting.’

Hollywood doesn’t appreciate such guerrilla methods – especially when a lot of money, and stars such as Kidman and Lauren Bacall (who gives an excellent, bitter performance as a Manhattan matriarch), are involved.

‘We were making a film for an American studio,’ Glazer explains. ‘This is not how it usually happens. We had sold them a draft, cast the film… And then we told them that we were going to rewrite the entire piece as we were going along.’

‘We snuck it past them,’ Addica adds. Glazer shakes his head, relishing the complicity between him and Addica.

‘There were a lot of unhappy people. It was really vicious... But to be honest, we could still be writing that film. It’s a non-stop series of conundrums. We were constantly adding layer upon layer.’

‘Birth’ opens on November 5.

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