Jonathan Glazer

His ancestors were Ukrainian Jews and Bessarabian Jews who fled the Kishinev pogrom and arrived in the United Kingdom in the 1900s.

He said: "My great-grandparents were born in Vilnius and Odesa. One was a tailor. His wife, a seamstress."

Having grown up in Hadley Wood, near Barnet, his family was Reform Jewish: "Synagogue three times a year, and Friday-night dinners every week."

He attended the Jewish Free School which was then located in the borough of Camden where he still lives.

During his childhood, he participated in the Givat Washington programme in which pupils are sent to Israel and spent five months in a youth village, a combination between a boarding school and a kibbutz dedicated to educating children close to nature.

His late father was a cinephile with whom he frequently watched David Lean, Sidney Lumet, Sydney Pollack, and Billy Wilder movies.

After graduating with an emphasis in theatre design from Nottingham Trent University, Glazer began his career directing theatre and making film and television trailers.

Jonathan Glazer (born 26 March 1965) is an English film director and screenwriter.

Jonathan Glazer was born on 26 March 1965 in London, England, and is of Ashkenazi Jewish descent.

Since the mid-1990s, he has directed a number of significant music videos, and was named MTV Director of the Year 1997.

In 1993, Glazer wrote and directed three short films of his own ("Mad", "Pool" and "Commission"), and joined Academy Commercials, a production company based in Central London.

He has directed acclaimed campaigns for Guinness (Dreamer, Swimblack and Surfer) and Stella Artois (Devil's Island).

He named his video for Radiohead's 1996 single "Street Spirit" as a "turning point" in his work: "I knew when I finished that, because [Radiohead] found their own voices as an artist, at that point, I felt like I got close to whatever mine was, and I felt confident that I could do things that emoted, that had some kind of poetic as well as prosaic value. That for me was a key moment."

At the 96th Academy Awards, accepting the award for Best International Feature Film for The Zone of Interest, Glazer stated:

"All our choices are made to reflect and confront us in the present. Not to say, ‘Look what they did then,’ rather ‘Look what we do now.’ Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present. Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of this dehumanization — how do we resist?"

Known to be discreet about his private life, Glazer is married to visual effects supervisor Rachael Penfold.

They live in Camden, North London with their three children.

He is Jewish.

He began his career in theatre before transitioning into film, directing the features Sexy Beast (2000), Birth (2004), Under the Skin (2013), and The Zone of Interest (2023).

His work is often characterised by depictions of flawed and desperate characters, explorations of themes such as alienation and loneliness, a bold visual style that utilises an omniscient perspective and dramatic use of music.

Glazer has been nominated for six BAFTA Awards and two Academy Awards.

For the historical drama The Zone of Interest, he won both the Grand Prix and the FIPRESCI Prize at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, and has been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay.

Glazer has also directed numerous music videos for Radiohead, Massive Attack, Richard Ashcroft and others.

For his work, he received nominations for the MTV Video Music Award for Best Direction twice, consecutively for his work on Jamiroquai's "Virtual Insanity" and Radiohead's "Karma Police".

He has also directed commercials for Kodak, Sony, Nike, Barclays and Alexander McQueen, among others.

In 2000, he directed his first feature, the critically acclaimed British gangster film Sexy Beast, starring Ray Winstone and Ben Kingsley, the latter of whom received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

In 2001, Glazer directed the "Odyssey" spot for Levi Strauss jeans.

In 2004, he directed his second feature film Birth, starring Nicole Kidman in the United States.

In 2006, he directed the second Sony BRAVIA TV advertisement, which took ten days and 250 people to film.

It was filmed at an estate in Glasgow, and featured paint exploding all over the tower blocks.

Later the same year, he was commissioned to make a television advert for the new Motorola Red phone.

The advertisement, showing two naked black bodies emerging from a lump of flesh rotating on a potter's wheel, was due to air in September 2006 but was shelved by Motorola.

The advertisement was to benefit several charities in Africa.

In 2013, he directed Under the Skin, a loose adaptation of Michel Faber's science fiction novel of the same name starring Scarlett Johansson.

The film premiered at the 2013 Telluride Film Festival and received a theatrical release in 2014, garnering critical acclaim.

The film was named the best film of 2014 by numerous critics and publications, was included in many best-of-the-decade lists, and ranked 61st on the BBC's 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century list, an international poll of 177 top critics.

Under the Skin is the subject of a 2019 non-fiction book entitled Alien in the Mirror: Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Glazer and Under the Skin by author Maureen Foster, an in-depth analysis of the film scene-by-scene and behind-the-scenes.

In October 2019, it was reported that Glazer was working on a new feature film based loosely on Martin Amis’s novel The Zone of Interest, to be co-produced and distributed in the US by A24.

The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2023 to widespread critical acclaim.

The film competed for the Palme d'Or, and won the Grand Prix and FIPRESCI Prize.