Filmmaker Jonathan Glazer is someone that has been garnering attention in Hollywood since his first feature film back in 2000, “Sexy Beast.” However, since then, the director has only two more films to his name, “Birth,” starring Nicole Kidman, and the incredible “Under the Skin,” starring Scarlett Johansson. Needless to say, Glazer is the type of filmmaker that takes his time and doesn’t rush into his next project. And after hearing him talk about his upcoming film, you can understand why it’s been half a decade since we’ve seen any of his work.
Speaking on the A Dash of Drash podcast, Glazer was asked what he’s working on next, as his follow-up film to 2013’s “Under the Skin.” The director says he’s working on a Holocaust film set in Auschwitz. But this isn’t your typical Holocaust film. Glazer said his inspiration didn’t come necessarily from the struggle of the Jewish people during that time but from a different source.
The director said he remembers, as a child, looking at pictures from World War II, and being horrified by specific imagery. “I remember being very taken by the faces of the bystanders, the onlookers, the complicit, you know? Ordinary Germans,” he said.
“I started wondering how it would be possible to stand by and watch that. Some of the faces actually enjoy it. The spectacle of it. The kinda circus of it,” he continued.
He does say that the setting of Auschwitz is more than just a setting, but it’s the main character. “A lot of the stories I’ve seen, I do sometimes think they could be set anywhere actually,” Glazer says. “As soon as you define a plot, you’re sort of somehow relegating Auschwitz as a place and it becomes a context. For me, I don’t want to do that. I just felt that was wrong.”
He doesn’t go into too much detail about the actual plot of the film but does admit that this is the project that has been taking up all his time in the last several years. He said, “Now, I’ve spent four or five years working entirely on this project.”
However, not all of his time on the project has been focusing on the film, itself. Glazer comes from a Jewish background, and attended Jewish schooling, so he says he didn’t want to tackle the Holocaust “lightly.” He said that a lot of his research has been about the “ethics” of doing a film based on the subject.
No specific release date is set, but Glazer says that filming should happen next summer with a projected 2020 release.