'Under The Skin'

If a Hollywood star falls down in the street and nobody knows she's a Hollywood star, how do we know she fell down at all? Under the Skin, the new film from British director Jonathan Glazer, gave a celebrity twist to an unanswerable riddle when it put a wig on the Scarlett Johansson, sent her off into Glasgow city centre and filmed her performance with hidden cameras.

Under the Skin is the third British picture to play in this year's competition and provided the festival with its first genuine Marmite moment. Adapted from Michel Faber's 2001 novel, Glazer's film is a bizarre fable of lust and loneliness, casting 28-year-old Johansson as a vampire alien in search of fresh blood. Some saw it as a masterpiece, others as a bore. The film's closing credits played out to an accompaniment of booing."It's an amazing scene where my character falls over," Johansson recalled, following the picture's first showing at the Venice film festival. "We shot it on a street with the public, in about six or seven takes throughout the day, and the reactions were always different. Some people would stop and help, others would just look, and some took pictures on their camera-phones and then just carried on going. It was a very strange experience."

The film-makers explained that they had used prototype cameras in order to shoot portions of the drama covertly in Glasgow's nightclubs and shopping centres. "It was important that we were part of the environment we were looking at," said Johansson. "So we blurred the lines between reality and fantasy. Such is life. That's the way we interact with each-other anyway."

Under the Skin is only Glazer's third picture in 13 years, following 2000's acclaimed Sexy Beast and his unloved 2004 thriller Birth. He admitted that his idiosyncratic style risks being divisive. "I always enjoy film-making as a personal pursuit and I like to push the form as much as I can," he said. "I wanted to find a visual language to tell this story in an unexpected way and to follow the alien's journey from id to 'it' to 'she'. So I suppose it's experimental for that reason, but not for its own sake."

After shooting in the city centre, the production moved on to locations in the Scottish Highlands. Johansson conceded it had been an arduous shoot. "The forest was hell," she said. "It was cold and wet and terrifying. It was like Scotland was trying to spew us out."

Source: theguardian.co.uk