How Jonathan Glazer and Paul Watts made a cinematic legacy
The relationship between the director and editor is one of the most important technical collaborations in film. In the cutting room, the narrative can be re-shaped. Beats and moments not present in the screenplay can be discovered. With a director like Jonathan Glazer, whose power of storytelling lies in the abstract, the atmosphere and the general tone, cutting the film is quite probably the moment where he finds out what the film he’s making is truly about.
Glazer’s newest film, The Zone of Interest, premiered on the first weekend of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival in its official competition. Loosely based on the novel by the recently deceased author Martin Amis, whose death happened to coincide with the day of the screening, it paints a portrait of a family living right next to the Auschwitz concentration camp at the height of the Holocaust.
It marks the second feature collaboration with his editor, Paul Watts. Their first film, Under The Skin (2013), was a relentlessly uncompromising and genre-defying character study, part science-fiction, part horror, part kitchen-sink drama. With very little dialogue and even less of a concrete narrative to latch on to, the story was alluded to through powerful expressionist imagery and a staggering musical score by Mica Levi, which is now considered one of the greatest soundtracks of all time.
In the ten years that have passed between these films, however, Glazer and Watts have been quietly forging a distinct cinematic legacy. Under The Skin wasn’t the first thing they worked on together, but since that film, Watts has cut everything Glazer has directed, and their joint efforts have borne some of the most singular work out there.
Their first collaboration was on a Stella Artois advert, ‘Ice Skating Priests’ (2005), and it’s more cinematic than a commercial has any right to be. Striking monochrome cinematography aside, Glazer and Watts manage to convey a rich and textured tale with character, soul and energy, without any dialogue or diegetic sound, and in a run-time of two minutes.
This brand of storytelling continues into their short film work. The Fall (2019), a BBC-commissioned short inspired by the paintings of Goya, is an incredibly hypnotic six-minute film that ensnares the audience with a single visual premise. Strasbourg 1518, released a year later in 2020, based on a physiologically contagious mania that swept through the city 500 years ago, gives us an intense montage of contemporary dancers, again scored by Levi.
Picked up by A24 for distribution, we can hope to see The Zone of Interest in theatres later this year, and it will no doubt signify a major accomplishment for the director/editor duo. In the meantime, we can marvel at how they’ve established such a specific and potent cinematic trademark and hope that their third feature doesn’t take another ten years to reach us.
