Director Study - Jonathan Glazer

Born in 1966, Jonathan Glazer grew up to direct films, commercials and music videos. After studying theatre design at Nottingham Trent University, Glazer started directing theatre and making film and television trailers.

In 1993 Glazer teamed up with producer Nick Morris at Academy Commercials, where he wrote and directed three short films, entitled MAD, POOL, and COMMISSION, before moving on to direct music videos and commercials. His work in the music video field includes promotions for Massive Attack, Blur, Nick Cave, and the mufti-award winning films for Radiohead and Jamiroquai.

In 1997 Glazer was named Director of the Year at the MTV Video Awards and Jamiroquai's Virtual Insanity was nominated for ten MTV awards. The video shows Jay Kay performing the song in a room. In a documentary, Glazer describes how the four walls move on a stationary grey floor with no detail, to give the illusion that the floor is moving. However, he does not reveal where the fourth wall is so in several shots, chairs and sofas are fixed to the walls so that they appear to be standing still, when in fact they are moving. In other shots chairs remain stationary on the floor, but the illusion is such that they appear to be moving. The moving walls were not completely rigid and can be seen in some shots to wiggle slightly. This can be seen when Jay Kay is dancing in a narrow corridor with other members of Jamiroquai.



His video for UNKLE Rabbit in Your Headlights picked an MVPA award for Best Foreign Video. The video uses a technique which Glazer would later use for the Richard Ashcroft song A Song for Lovers music video, being shot in real-time and allowing the diegetic sounds produced by objects and characters to be audible above the music. It differs from that video in that the music itself is non-diegetic.

More recently Glazer has concentrated on television adverts. In 2006 he directed an advert for Sony BRAVIA TV, which took 10 days and 250 people to film. It was filmed at a housing estate in Glasgow and featured paint exploding over the tower blocks.