The return of Jonathan Glazer: How the Sexy Beast director became Britain’s least prolific visionary

The British director, who hasn’t made a film since 2013’s ‘Under the Skin’, is back at Cannes next month with his new Holocaust movie, ‘The Zone of Interest’. Geoffrey Macnab looks at why he’s such a cult figure having made only three films in 20 years

Ray Winstone in Jonathan Glazer’s debut film, ‘Sexy Beast’, in 2000 (Kanzaman/Kobal/Shutterstock)

The maverick British director Jonathan Glazer is back at the Cannes Film Festival next month with his first new film in 10 years, The Zone of Interest, based on Martin Amis’s 2014 novel. Glazer is an admired and cult figure although, or perhaps partly because, he has only made three films in 20 years: Sexy Beast (2000), Birth (2004) and Under the Skin (2013).

Audiences know that his movies will always contain moments which startle, confuse and terrify them, make their flesh crawl, or reduce them to helpless nervous laughter. In Birth, a widow (Nicole Kidman), about to remarry, is convinced that the 10-year-old boy who turns up at her engagement party is the reincarnation of her late husband whom she loved very deeply.

The alien woman (Scarlett Johansson) protagonist in Under the Skin is seen in a white van eyeing up passers-by on the Glasgow streets because she is, quite literally, a man-eater. She needs them for nutrition. Sexy Beast has a famous scene of ageing British gangster (Ben Kingsley) on a plane, having a fag, before take off. He is asked to put it out. He refuses in his usual torrent of expletives. When he is arrested, he comes up with such a bizarre story about being sexually assaulted by the stewards that the authorities immediately let him go.