Under alien skin

In the space of 12 years and three feature films, director and co-writer Jonathan Glazer has established himself as a director of style and innovation. His debut, Sexy Beast, invigorated the British gangster movie by infusing a tense London heist story with dark shades of Jacobean tragedy, with Ben Kingsley as the film's sociopathic villain. The follow-up, Birth, took similar liberties, this time with the ghost story starring Nicole Kidman as a woman who believes her late husband has been reincarnated as a young boy.

In Under The Skin, Scarlett Johansson plays an alien, looking for suitable specimens that can be turned into a type of meat, to be sent back to her starving homeland. Michel Faber's 2000 novel of the same name is paced thoughtfully and slowly, until the heroine's identity is revealed.

Producer James Wilson read the book and was immediately smitten. "I was taken with the central conceit of that character," he recalls, "that this alien, in the form of a female human, is on Earth to catch people. In the novel, the idea is that we are the food source for this alien species, and I thought it was a really compelling story idea - a really cinematic idea, one that lent itself to cinematic interpretation because it was about senses and sensations, both visual and auditory."

Playing bold

Glazer decided to play bold with the novel's twist, revealing the girl's extra-terrestrial origins right at the beginning. Wilson admits that this decision to was not immediately embraced. "I remember thinking: 'Why would you do that?' he says. "But it was Jonathan's idea to make it a virtue - to say: 'Let's tell the audience right away that she's synthetic, that's she's not real, and that will inform everything we see from that point on.' Because you'll know you're looking at the world from the point of view of ... " He laughs. "Well, you might not know quite what it is, but it's certainly something that's not human."

Adds Glazer: "The book relied on a twist, which is very effective in a book, but in a film it only works once. I didn't think people would return to the film and enjoy it again if we were relying on a twist in the same way. So it felt obvious that we should be upfront about it. So then you can sit back and enjoy her perspective, knowing that you're looking at the world through alien eyes."

Johansson was the best of both worlds

For Glazer, Johansson was the best of both worlds. "I understand the need to cast somebody who means something in the marketplace - it's the law of the jungle, isn't it? But while you're making a film, you don't want to be aware of any of that. I certainly don't want to make a film with half an eye on the box office. I'm not interested in that, I'm interested in fulfilling a journey, an idea, and it soon became clear that she was the best candidate for the role. She had a real appetite to do something risky, and she threw herself into it. This is not the Scarlett Johansson as you might see her in a glossy magazine - this is an actress who's fully committed."

"What originally drew me to the project," says Johansson, "was this idea of putting on another skin and completely transforming into someone almost unrecognisable - but without being completely unrecognisable. I found that to be endlessly intriguing. And eventually this story evolved into what it is now, which is a story that really only follows one protagonist - it's a 'she' but it's really an 'it'. Then there's the transformation, as Jonathan would say, from an 'it' to a 'she', and that's what I think the film, at its core, is really about."

Says Johansson: "It's very rare to come across an opportunity like this to play a character who goes through the kind of transformation that Laura does. The transition she makes is like that of a butterfly - she starts off as this kind of amoeba, part of a mass, and she's cocooned. Then suddenly she transforms into this colourful creature who is experiencing all these new and different things. It's such a beautiful, poetic story, and it's incredibly touching to me."

Crime of passion

Whenever the girl picks up a human male, she takes him back to a house, where the victims are expecting to have sex. In Faber's novel, the holding area was a familiar, if primitive, variation on battery farming, with multiple victims packed into low, underground pens. But when Glazer came to approach those scenes he realised, once again, that less would be more. "I wanted to feel the horror," he explains.

Instead of a cage, the girl's victims find themselves in another dimension, in a darkness that engulfs them. "One minute they're in the street then they're in this black space above the floor, then in this black space below the floor," says Glazer. "There's a different sound, a different light, a different atmosphere, then all their innards are sucked from the skin and everything else discarded. The trophy, the treasure, is what's inside - the skin to the aliens is just a plastic bag."

"That room was interesting to me," he continues, "because it became about what that space implied - this alternate dimension. That's the horror of it, I think. The whys and the wherefores of that are not interesting to me. I wanted it to be something you would have to intuit. I didn't want it to be literal. I wanted to feel lost in that space. I didn't want to have any barometer, any compass, or to feel like I knew where I was. I wanted to be in an alien space. And so we ended up creating a kind of dreamscape for that, because the furthest we can get away from our reality is in dream space.

The hardware of alien life

"Now, I enjoy films that show me the hardware of alien life - spaceships and so on - I really do," he says. "But it just didn't feel to me that this film would benefit from being so direct in that way. I wasn't trying to be opaque. It was very much about having the ambiguity of the alien in this film. I didn't want to show the nuts and bolts of it. I wanted it to feel right, rather than get caught up in the technology of it. It was the blackness that inspired me - it felt to me like that's where they're from. They are made manifest through that blackness, whatever they are."

In essence, the film is a delirious meeting of two very different worlds: the mundane and the fantastical, both presented with a commitment to their respective realities. Says Wilson: "Genuinely, my feeling about the film - being as objective as I can be - is that it is a very distinctive film in the true sense of the word: distinctive in terms of the feeling of the film, the personality of it. The worlds that it moves through, from the intensely naturalistic and almost documentary-like observation of our world to the completely heightened, nightmarish hallucinogenic world of the alien - the butting of these two tectonic plates - that's something I don't feel I've ever seen before."

As for the girl, Glazer feels that, although there are certain ambiguities about her life and motivation, there is definitely an emotional payoff to her journey. "You see a flame ignite and extinguish," he says. "You see the beginning of something, the burgeoning of something conscious. You see a light. You see a flicker. You see the presence of something beautiful, short-lived. You see her born, you see her live, you see her die. You hate her, love her, miss her. You see it all."

Read more about the film and other new releases at www.writingstudio.co.za/page1037.html