How Jonathan Glazer became Britain’s most mysterious filmmaker: ‘He always takes things to the edge of beyond’
Ray Winstone wanted to go to bed, but Sexy Beast was on the telly. “I said I’d watch 10 minutes then head off,” he remembers. At least until his retired gangster is lying there in his Speedos, browning in the Andalucían sun like a Cockney lamb shank. “But it just kept drawing me in.” He ended up watching the whole thing – the safe-cracking, the orgies, Sir Ben Kingsley at his most foul-mouthed. “Why aren’t all films made like that?” Winstone asked himself. “Probably because there’s not too many Johnnys about.”
Johnny, John, or – as Winstone calls him more than once in conversation – “old Johnny-boy” is Jonathan Glazer: madman, mystery and Britain’s greatest living filmmaker. Glazer’s movies live on the far reaches of convention; delicious, disconcerting spins on genres we think we know. Released in 2000, Sexy Beast is a guns-and-gangsters Britflick chimera, as gorgeous and heartsick as it is grotesquely violent. Its follow-up Birth (2004) is an aberrant fairytale, Nicole Kidman teasing the thin line between grief and. Nearly a decade later, with the Scarlett Johansson-fronted alien invader movie (2013), Glazer airdropped a Hollywood star into a Glasgow at its most unglamorous, making her ride the bus, collide with hen-dos, and walk past Clintons Cards.
