Budget : £8 million ( $13mill) - Under the Skin opened with a gross of £239,000 at the UK box office and opened in the United States with $140,000 in four theatres, earning it the highest per-theatre average out of all films in release throughout the weekend, above Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
Directed by: Jonathan Glazer
Budget:(£ 8 million) $13.3 million
Box office: $3, 772, 707
Produced by: James Wilson, Nick Wechsler
Screenplay by: Walter Campbell, Jonathan Glazer
Based on: Under The Skin novel by Michel Faber
Released: 29th August 2013 at Telluride Film Festival, 14th march 2014 in UK, 4th April 2014 in US
Starring: Scarlett Johansson
Scarlett Johansson is an American actress, model, and singer. She made her film debut in North (1994) and was later nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Female Lead for her performance in Manny & Lo (1996)
Production
Director Jonathan Glazer decided to adapt Michel Faber's novel Under the Skin (2000) after finishing his debut film Sexy Beast (2001), but work did not begin until he had finished his second film, Birth (2004). He and cowriter Walter Campbell initially produced a script about two aliens disguised as farmers, with Brad Pitt cast as the husband. Progress was slow; Glazer eventually decided to make a film that represented an alien perspective of the human world and focused only on the female character.
Many of the scenes where Johansson's character picks up men were unscripted conversations with non-actors, filmed with hidden cameras. Director Glazer said the men were "talked through what extremes they would have to go to if they agreed to take part in the film once they understood what we were doing
Critical response
Under The Skin received generally positive reviews from critics, with many praising Glazer's direction and Johansson's performance. The review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 86% based on reviews from 149 critics, with an average score of 7.9/10. The site's consensus states: "Its message may prove elusive for some, but with absorbing imagery and a mesmerizing performance from Scarlett Johansson, Under the Skin is a haunting viewing experience."
Theatrical release Poster
The theatrical release poster is marketed for this independent film, with Scarlett Johansson, who is starring in this film. Due to this film being a low budget of £8 million, the indie film has used a big American actress, to help target the audience.
This will help target the fans who enjoyed previous films with Scarlett Johansson in such as; Iron Man and the Avengers Assemble.
The release poster also has a pull quote and a star rating to help give evidence that there film is worth watching. This is a more popular convention, for independent films marketing strategy than big Hollywood blockbusters because they can rely on the special effects, Imax screening and franchises of films. Such as The amazing spider man 2, which is garunteed a large target audience.
This film is a sci-fi thriller, which is portrayed in the release poster, however there is not many clues given away to the narrative of the film, which helps engage the audience to finding out more about the new film by the director Jonathan Glazer ( who previously directed Sexy Beast an Birth).
Interview with the Director, Jonathan Glazer
With Under The Skin, it’s obviously a small budget but the film has a very epic feel to it. What’s your main tip for burgeoning directors to make a small budget seem a lot bigger?
I got some advice once from the first producer who ever wanted to work with me and I showed him some stuff that I made at the time and I had made because I thought that I wanted to make something epic. I showed him the stuff and he said this is all shit and you should do something that’s you, find you in the way you work and express that. It’s the wrong question for a filmmaker. The right question is how do I make something intimate. If it’s intimate then it will communicate and it will connect.
Looking back from Sexy Beast, your films have actually become less commercially focused as they’ve gone on. You must have been offered lots of conventional Hollywood films along the way. Was it something you were ever tempted by?
You never say never because something might occur to you that is a very commercial idea. I like the idea of people seeing the films that I’m fortunate enough to make and I’m not shy about that. I think the things that seem to have attracted me since Sexy Beast have been more personal and I think I’ve become more excited about the form of film, more than story. If you make a film then you’re going to spend quite a long time of your life doing so and you want to make sure that it never feels like work and it never feels like you lose interest. It has to be fertile enough to keep you interested for that length of time. I doubt I’ll ever make a standard sort of studio film but great writing, great stories of course, wherever they may come from, I’m interested in that.
Did you work with Michel Faber, the author of Under the Skin, at all during the adaptation or did you just take what he had and run with it?
I read the book. I’ve never spoken to the author at all. It wasn’t really intended to be a faithful adaptation or maybe it was to begin with. The earliest draft of the script was much closer to the book and it was really through doing that that I realised I didn’t want to do an illustrative adaptation. There’s something very powerful about the book that I became very connected to, sort of obsessed with I suppose, and that really was her journey, the idea of looking at the world through this alien lens. There’s certainly a spiritual connection between the book and the film but my intention wasn’t to make a film of the book
FILM BLOG - THE GUARDIAN
The arthouse hit
Reviews for Jonathan Glazer's Under The Skin were mostly wildly adulatory, but it was never certain that audiences would flock to what remains a challenging piece of cinema. UK distributor StudioCanal released relatively cautiously at 47 cinemas, thus making a strong screen average more likely. So it has proved: the Scarlett Johansson starrer debuts with a hefty £239,000 including £32,400 in previews, or £5,079 per cinema. Under The Skin is playing on 300 cinemas fewer than any other film in the top 10. Expansion from Friday is on the way.
The release exists in contrast to the UK strategy 10 years ago for Glazer's last film Birth, which debuted wide in 270 cinemas, beginning its run with £422,000. Over its lifetime, Birth reached £1.18m here, and it will be fascinating to see if Under The Skin's slow-and-steady approach can match that total
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