Under the Skin Director Jonathan Glazer Is Prepping His Next Film, an A24 Holocaust Drama
Photo by Tim P. Whitby/Getty Movies News Jonathan Glazer
Six years after the release of his indelible, Scarlett Johansson-starring sci-fi mesmerizer Under The Skin, English auteur Jonathan Glazer is moving ahead on his next project, an untitled Holocaust drama to be released in U.S. theaters by A24, as first reported by Deadline. Glazer plans to shoot his fourth feature in Poland in 2020, and has been developing it since Under The Skin’s 2013 release.
Though the details of Glazer’s new film remain mostly murky, Deadline describes the project as being “loosely inspired” by The Zone Of Interest, the acclaimed 2014 novel from English author Martin Amis—set in Auschwitz and named for the camp’s gas chambers, the book centers on a Nazi officer who becomes infatuated with the wife of the camp commandant, with the officer, the commandant and a Jewish Sonderkommando serving as the story’s viewpoint characters. No word yet on who will play any of these characters in Glazer’s adaptation.
The typically press-shy filmmaker, who is himself Jewish, first spoke to his forthcoming project on the A Dash of Drash podcast last July, explaining, “I remember being very taken by the faces of the bystanders, the onlookers, the complicit, you know? Ordinary Germans. […] I started wondering how it would be possible to stand by and watch that happen. Some of the faces actually enjoy it. The spectacle of it. The kind of circus of it. That really haunted me.”
Glazer’s new film reunites him with A24, who also distributed Under The Skin in the States, as well as producer James Wilson (You Were Never Really Here) and the U.K.’s Film4, the latter of whom also had a hand in Glazer’s 2000 directorial debut Sexy Beast. Ewa Puszczynska, producer of Oscar winner Ida and nominee Cold War, rounds out the new film’s team—perhaps this one won’t go ignored by the Academy, unlike Under the Skin.
Stay tuned for further updates on Glazer’s latest, and keep an eye out for Paste’s forthcoming ranking of the decade’s best films, on which Under the Skin will all but certainly appear.