Glazer has connected his admiration for Kubrick with a way of pursuing an idea. That acknowledgment doesn’t automatically turn every strange image in his films into a quotation.
The stated influence concerns an approach to the work
In DGA Quarterly in 2017, Jonathan Glazer explained that he was interested in Kubrick’s clarity of vision: getting to the essence of an idea and continuing to work until he achieved it. The statement identifies a demanding process. It doesn’t list borrowed shots or claim that his films should reproduce a particular visual style.
This distinction is useful because an influence can operate before a comparable image exists. Deciding what a scene should sustain, what information the audience needs, or when a solution departs from its initial purpose are questions of craft. The study of Kubrick’s preparation and revision helps put these questions in context without making perseverance a sufficient explanation for any result or an automatic justification for every filmmaking practice.
A finished film also doesn’t reveal on its own how it was made. The precision of a shot doesn’t tell us how many takes it took, and a restrained performance doesn’t prove a specific directing method. Glazer’s account establishes an acknowledged connection; describing his specific methods requires other documents. The comparisons that follow concern what can be seen and heard in the finished films, not a reconstruction of the work behind the scenes.
This case differs, for example, from a recognizable visual quotation, which preserves an identifiable motif from another work. It can also be compared with Nolan’s recollection of 2001: both acknowledgments speak of Kubrick, but they don’t have to describe the same kind of learning. Treating influence as a single, uniform relationship would erase precisely what each filmmaker says he found in it.
Under the Skin makes a seemingly familiar gaze strange
The opening of Under the Skin gradually constructs shapes and an eye before presenting a stable, everyday situation. This arrangement invites us to think of vision as something produced and adjusted, not as a neutral access point to the world. Comparing it with 2001 can be useful in terms of the experience of estrangement. It doesn’t prove that every abstract form comes from a specific passage in Kubrick.
In both films, the audience must learn to connect images before receiving a complete explanation. However, Under the Skin focuses on a figure who watches people, approaches them, and changes her relationship to what she encounters. The unknown is tied to a bodily experience and particular encounters. 2001’s vastness of time and space creates a different kind of distance.
The scenes in the black space in Under the Skin suspend familiar references to depth and surface. Bodies keep moving, but the setting doesn’t behave like a recognizable room. A productive comparison asks how the perception of the body changes, not which of Kubrick’s sets looks most similar. Estrangement can come from reducing information, while other scenes by both filmmakers work with an abundance of detail.
The relationship between looking and using others also offers a way into the machines and forms of dehumanization in Kubrick’s films. HAL watches and participates in a technical system; the central figure in Under the Skin has a different relationship with the bodies she encounters. Comparing their positions helps us ask when someone is reduced to a function. It doesn’t require us to declare that the characters are equivalent or share a single moral explanation.
Holding on to an image while moving violence outside it
Birth offers another possibility for comparison: Anna’s face during the concert remains the focus of sustained attention. The viewer observes small changes without receiving an immediate verbal translation of everything she might be thinking. The duration changes the face’s significance within the scene, but it doesn’t make every movement an unambiguous psychological clue.
That attention can be related to the silences and reactions in Barry Lyndon. In both cases, the audience has to work with partial information. The comparison doesn’t prove a shot-by-shot lineage; it asks what a performance achieves when the camera doesn’t quickly move on from its variations. Time allows us to perceive changes, though it doesn’t guarantee that all viewers will interpret them in the same way.
The Zone of Interest poses a different problem by placing a domestic routine alongside sounds and knowledge that point to the violence of the concentration camp. The visible space doesn’t contain the entire world of the film. The gap between what the characters attend to and what the viewer understands makes us examine a specific way of living alongside horror, without requiring an unbroken depiction of violent acts.
This distance can be compared with the separation between command and consequences in Paths of Glory, but the comparison must preserve their historical and formal differences. Kubrick shifts between spaces and makes different levels of the military institution visible. Glazer creates a different relationship among home, spatial boundaries, and sound. The absence of an image doesn’t necessarily serve the same function in both films.
The criteria for evaluating an interpretation help keep the claim in proportion: Glazer acknowledges a model of rigor, and his films invite reasoned comparisons with Kubrick. Statements about filmmaking and observations about scenes complement each other, but neither gives us license to reduce Under the Skin, Birth, or The Zone of Interest to variations on a single precedent. Specifying an influence also requires describing what the later work does differently.
References: Jonathan Glazer, statements collected by Robert Koehler in “Kubrick’s Outsized Influence,” DGA Quarterly, Fall 2017. Films compared: Birth (2004), Under the Skin (2013), The Zone of Interest (2023), 2001 (1968), Barry Lyndon (1975), and Paths of Glory (1957).
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