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Sexy Beast

Glazer says he turned down glossier Hollywood projects to make the modest pic. \"The reason I did it, to be honest, is because I felt I didn\'t know how to work with actors,\" he told the Journal.
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June 7, 2001

“Cinema, synagogue, what’s the difference?” breezily quips director Jonathan Glazer. “You get fairly dominant Jewish personalities in both.”

The British director appears to be one of those personalities, at least on the cinema front. Like directors Spike Jonze and David Fincher, the music-video veteran has stunned critics with his feature film debut, “Sexy Beast,” which opens today in Los Angeles.

The dark comedy, written by Louis Mellis and David Scinto, begins as Gal (Ray Winstone), a Cockney ex-gangster, lolls by the pool of the pad he shares with his ex-porn-star wife (Amanda Redman) in the south of Spain. Winstone is forced out of his blissful retirement when a blast from his past arrives in the form of Don Logan (Ben Kingsley), a foul-mouthed psychopath out to recruit Gal for one last heist.

Glazer says he turned down glossier Hollywood projects to make the modest pic. “The reason I did it, to be honest, is because I felt I didn’t know how to work with actors,” he told the Journal. For him, the story had its charms, especially the character of Logan. “He’s such a wonderfully childlike villain,” Glazer said. “He absolutely seduced me. I hate him, but I also sort of want to give him a hug. He’s like all of us who leave the playground and find the real world to be a scary place. Don handles that by pretending he’s still on the playground — and trying to drag everyone back there with him.”

Glazer, now 35, spent his playground years at a Jewish day school and a Reform synagogue. At his home in North London, bookshelves sagged with film volumes, and his father, a magazine designer, talked nonstop about the movies. Small wonder that young Jonathan became obsessed with cinema and began directing videos for friends’ bands while still in his teens. By the late 1990s, he was directing cutting-edge commercials and winning MTV awards for his edgy work with alternative bands like Jamiroquai and Radiohead.

Glazer doesn’t particularly like gangster films, but then again, “Sexy Beast” breaks every rule of the genre. “The audience is lulled into thinking they’re watching a frothy romp, then they get something darker,” he said.

“Sexy beast” is British slang for “hunk,” but Glazer means the title to refer to the duality of his characters. “Everyone in the film is both alluring and repellent,” he said.

No one more so than Logan, the psychopath, who proved almost impossible to cast. After seemingly endless auditions, a producer suggested Kingsley; Glazer initially refused. “I thought, ‘Ben plays these earnest, noble characters. This is not gonna happen,'” he said. He changed his mind two minutes into Kingsley’s audition, when, he recalled, “Ben managed to make profanity sound like Shakespeare.”

Indeed, the screenplay sports obscenities that would make Quentin Tarentino blush — but the actors weren’t allowed to change a single four-letter word. “There was a precision to the script that denied any kind of improvisation,” Glazer said.

Nevertheless, the director is harshly critical of his feature debut. “The couple of times I managed to sit through it with an audience wasn’t easy,” he said. “I kept thinking, ‘Oh, God, look at that.’ … I felt it was a fraction of what I wanted to accomplish.”

Looking back, Glazer, who is known for his visual pyrotechnics, views “Sexy Beast” as an exercise in restraint. “I had to remember that the brutality is in the words, not the action,” he said. “That was the lesson.”

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