Cover: Scarlett Johansson (A24, Photofest)

Back cover of Alien in the Mirror: Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Glazer, and Under The Skin (McFarland & Co. Inc., Publishers)

In Part III we take the style, motifs, iconography, and themes touched upon in Part I and more closely explore their powerful contributions to the film, as well as how they both connect to and distinguish it from its science fiction cousins: other movies that depict and explore aliens. In the Epilogue, as the film Under The Skin arrives — and amidst festivals, marketing, premiers, and release — we visit the response, as full of dialectics and emotion as the film itself. The Appendix is a full credits list of all the hundreds of folks who worked on Under the Skin.

Left:

Glazer and his team used the term chartiing her drift to describe Laura’s journey, which is not so much plotted as it is felt—by her, and in turn by the audience. In this scene in Quiet’s kitchen she hears the music on the radio, sees Quiet tap his foot to the rhythm, and begins tapping her finger on the table. The tune is Real Gone Kid sung by Glasgow’s Deacon Blue. © Maureen Foster

(photo courtesy StudioCanal and FilmNation)

Left: The Nervous Man (actor Scott Dymond), who was dazed by Laura’s beauty and by her eyes, is having second thoughts as he approaches her decrepit house. The sight of it—and likely his reappraisal of this unnerving scenario—cause him to look warily behind him (hence the moniker). Unlike the eager Footballer he requires a bit of coaxing from Laura. Art Director: Emer O’Sullivan. © Maureen Foster

(Courtesy StudioCanal and FilmNation)

© Maureen Foster

“ After college I began writing film reviews, and later, fiction — twin labors of love I supported by working as a script reader for Hollywood studios. Writiing both reviews and “coverage” of screenplays (synopsis and commentary) fanned my film desire, and what eventually surfaced was a longing to write something in much greater detail — maybe even a book about a single film. Years went by, I continued writing fiction, and now and then whenever I saw a movie I couldn’t stop thinking about, I wondered if it could be the one. After seeing Under the Skin in April of 2014, and chasing it from theater to theater until its first run came to an end, I knew the book I wanted to write.

After three novels I felt daunted as to how to go about my first non-fiction book. I was somewhere in the midst of my first draft when I went to a Writers Guild Event for the 20th Anniversary of Jerry Maguire, followed by a Q&A with the writer-director, Cameron Crowe. To one of many people in the packed audience who asked him for advice about screenwriting, Crowe replied, write the song that’s in your head. I took that advice.

Somewhere along the journey a friend asked me, why this movie? Wending my way to an explanation I landed on a reason that seemed to underlie all the other reasons, and I think it’s a simple one: my love for the character and her journey. I relate to her. I empathize with her.

I believe she has something to teach me.

This book is not an explanation of the filmmakers’ intent—except for in the places where they’ve stated that intent in interviews. But it is a book that ponders, explores, and deeply appreciates the film, and it’s for lovers of Under the Skin, present and future, It’s for fans of Jonathan Glazer and Scarlett Johansson, enthusiasts of science fiction and fantasy, and readers who enjoy the rabbit-hole journey of delving deeply into their experience of a film. Most of all, it’s for people for love movies. ”

© Maureen Foster

Shooting begins on Under the Skin in Glasgow in October 2011. (Photo courtesy of cinematographer Daniel Landin.) © Maureen Foster

Photos below from Part III ~. “The World of Under the Skin”

In John Sayles’s science fiction comedy The Brother From Another Planet (1984) actor Joe Morton plays the Brother, an escaped slave from another world who finds himself in Harlem, New York City, trying to make sense of an alien culture and using his superpowers to bring a boy back to life.

Photo: Cinecom International / Photofest. Copywright: Cinecom Int’l.

In Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011) protagonist Justine (Kirsten Dunst) suffers severe depression, and when a strange planet comes onto a collision course with Earth, she feels a compelling connection to it.

Photo: Magnolia Pictures / Photofest. Copywright: Magnolia Pictures

Laura’s ‘eye’ is among the first images in the film. There is something about her eyes, in the way her alien colleague searches them, and in the way Laura gazes into mirrors. (Courtesy A24 and StudioCanal).

Part II reveals the movie’s backstory: the novel by Michel Faber that is dramatically different from the adaptation; the business end of how the film was made; the long journey of screenplay drafts and reinventions; and finally, the shooting and post-production. We look at the many challenges Glazer and his team faced using unpredictable covert filmmaking that took the movie to unforeseen places every day, every moment. For the chapters on the shooting of the film I relied mainly on the voices and words of the people who made it.

On location director Jonathan Glazer “frames” his cinematographer, Daniel Landiin. Photo courtesy of Alexander O’Neal, Co-Producer.

Key to sketch of locations:

a) Tip of Loch Goil in Drimsyine, forest location of the film’s final sequence

b) Cabin where Laura naps, woodsy east shore of Loch Lomond

c) Rugged beach where Laura approaches the Swimmer

d) Town that seemed the idea place for Quiet to live

e) Club interiors shot at The Shed in Glasgow

f) Club exteriors at Club Earth - here a group of young women sweep Laura up and bring her inside

g) Ruins of Tantallon Castle where Quiet brings Laura

h) Celtic Park - Laura navigates her van through a crowd leaving the football game

Right: It’s in the second visit to the black space that we see what becomes of the men Laura brings there. Andrew (actor Paul Brannigan), even as he is sinking, seems unaware of his jeopardy. It’s only moments later, when he is fully submerged, that he begins to feel—and react to—his bizarre and frightening predicament. © Maureen Foster (photo courtesy StudioCanal and FiilmNation)

In the Preface I also talk about thoughts and experiences that led to the writing of the book. Here are a few:

‘A Science Fiction Rhapsody Laced With Thorns’

“ This quote has delighted and haunted my imagination since I first read it in 2014, months after Under the Skin made its controversial premiere. It’s from a review in the Village Voice by film critic Stephanie Zacharek, and as I write this I realize my response to the quote is a mirror of the quote itself—to be both delighted and haunted is to experience a ‘rhapsody with thorns.’

The poster for Under The Skin that lived outside my neighborhood theater tantalized me for weeks before the film opened. Designed by artist Neil Kellerhouse, it’s a portrait of Scarlett Johansson that beguiles the viewer in the same way that her character beguiles the man she stalks on the streets of Glasgow. A compelling and irresistible tension between darkness and light, fantasy and foreboding, melancholy and menace—these seductive dialectics drive the poster, Jonathan Glazer’s direction, Johansson’s performance, and every other aspect of this captivating film.

Johansson’s face and neck are partly eclipsed in shadow, partly tinted in a rainbow. This image and the. black background in which it floats are overlaid with a star-studded cosos, a fairy dust of tiny orbs across her face. At the time I knew nothing about the movie, and this gauzy portrait intimated a haunting story of an elusive love, a fantasy, a distant world—or maybe all of these.

The director’s narrative style in the film is to withhold more than he gives, playing on our sense of longing. What fans of this film have in common is that we value that longing more than knowing. We embrace the aesthetic of withholding. In presenting us with opposites that performa a ballet rather than a battle, Glazer robs us of our comforting black and white way of seeing, and refrains from offering what it is we think we want.

This powerful approach is both perfectly suited to the story it tells and responsible for the fervor the film inspires. Glazer and his team galvanize the rhetoric of opposites and the aesthetic of withholding to spin a spellbinding and most unconventional narrative about an otherwise conventional theme: a woman’s journey of self-discovery. The film is as much about alienation as it is about aliens, and it is ultimately a meditation on what it means to be human. In particular, a human woman. ”

© Maureen Foster

Kyoko (played by Sinoya Mizuno) and Ava (Alicia Vikander) are the AI offspring of genius Nathan (Oscar Isaac) in Alex Garland’s thriller Ex Machina, released the same year as Under the Skin. These two are in the same circumstances, and, like Laura in Under the Skin, Ava has outgrown her role and is ready for the human world.

Photo: Universal Pictures / Photofest. Copywright: Universal Pictures