Before Directing ‘The Zone of Interest’, Jonathan Glazer Made the Best TV Ads You’ve Ever Seen

While having a recent conversation with my former film studies professor, we got onto the topic of Jonathan Glazer. I had just seen The Zone of Interest and was eager to share my thoughts on this tricky, unnerving, and technically astonishing drama. It’s only Glazer’s fourth feature, yet over the course of about 25 years behind the camera in the film world, he’s thoroughly established his visual style and fascination with themes of alienation and moral complexity. After my extended session of word vomit on Glazer’s latest, my former professor paused and replied, ‘He does make amazing Guinness ads.’ Usually, that would feel like a slam, but it’s true: Jonathan Glazer makes amazing Guinness adverts. Indeed, he made the greatest ones, commercials so legendary that they have their own Wikipedia pages.

Jonathan Glazer’s eclectic career makes him one of the only people with both an Oscar nomination for Best Director and an MTV Video Music Award on his shelf. Aside from Ridley Scott, he might be the only British filmmaker acclaimed by both the Academy and the Channel 4 2000 special on the 100 greatest ads of all time. Glazer’s ads are so legendary that you can buy them on DVD, alongside his music videos for the likes of Radiohead and Jamiroquai. Moving from music videos and ads to cinema used to be a more common pathway for aspiring filmmakers than it is nowadays. What makes Glazer’s vision so startling is how, even while working to sell a corporate entity or band, he retained his focus on the ideas that fascinated him and finding ways to explore him that didn’t necessarily concern themselves with retaining wide appeal.

In 1999, Diageo, the alcoholic beverage conglomerate that owns Guinness, wanted to promote its draught stout to UK audiences, with a focus on the length of time it took to pour a proper pint of the stuff (around two minutes.) Glazer was brought on to make a couple of ads. The first one is a humorous short film about an old guy’s annual swimming race from an offshore buoy to his brother’s seafront pub, each time hoping to beat the 119.5 seconds it’s said it takes to pour the perfect Guinness. It’s a sly short, funny and savvy in getting across the campaign’s message, ‘Good things come to those who…’ But it was the follow-up where things got opulent.

Simply titled ‘Surfer’, this ad was so legendary that it was voted the best ad ever one year after it premiered. A group of surfers face the waves, the white crashing water turning into horses which gallop to the shore and engulf the men, except for the one who waited for the perfect moment. The whole thing should be pretentious, from the painterly black-and-white cinematography to the voiceover evoking a made-up Moby-Dickquote. It’s not. It’s just genuinely thrilling, with a true sense of grandeur that invites the viewer into the experience. All that and it still looks gorgeous, nearly 25 years later. I don’t even like Guinness and it made me want to buy a pint.

Glaxer kept working in ads and music videos, even after moving into film with the acclaimed Sexy Beast. He got Samuel L. Jackson to soliloquy for some Barclays ads. He made priests ice-skate for Stella Artois. He engulfed an abandoned block of flats in a rainbow of paint for a giddy Sony ad that still makes me cheer like a schoolgirl.

It helps to have willing partners. Bands like Radiohead already fit Glazer’s sensibility, while Guinness was on a strange no-f*cks-given streak of experimentation that encouraged them to invest around $3 million into that iconic surfing ad. Not everyone was so eager. Cadburys shelved Glazer’s Flake ad, which they found a touch too esoteric thanks to the inclusion of a red-skinned Denis Lavant as what I can only describe as a Satanic rockstar in a Restoration-era wig flinging chocolate bars at orgasming women begging at his feet. His ad for a Motorola phone, featuring a couple melding together like clay on a potter’s wheel, made the company consider pulling the feature.

Throughout much of his work, particularly in music videos, his cinematic influences are evident. His Stanley Kubrick adoration is a feature in works for Blur and Jamiroquai, with the former being a homage to A Clockwork Orange and the latter’s dizzying moving set inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey. His love of monochromatic cinematography harkens back to the silent era, a quality shared by his willingness to keep things dialogue-free and rely on great faces or pure metaphor. He clearly has more belief in the audience to get it than most ad executives.

I don’t want to give all of these conglomerates too much credit for Glazer’s work. The ad companies may have been open to new ideas but they still prized profits above all else and that often hindered the director’s ideas. Capitalism is what it is and it often feels incompatible with art. I do, however, think it’s worth celebrating the ways that filmmakers, writers, etc, who work within these staid and increasingly limiting markets are still able to do something special. Consider how hard it’s gotten for even the best directors to make lightning strike while working on a Marvel or other franchise film thanks to studio interference and a non-negotiable requirement to stick to an established tone or style. It’s not impossible, as Barbie can testify to, which is what makes the exceptions so thrilling. There is certainly an argument to be made that we don’t want ads to be art, lest that value be diluted by its initial purpose or help to prettily disguise bad businesses (remember Errol Morris making ads for Theranos?) I don’t discount those ideas, but I don’t think they lessen the artistic impact either. Glazer took ads for jeans, booze, and phones and made the kinds of films that the vast majority of producers would balk at.

You can see the echoes of Glazer’s ads in his film work. The Motorola ad, with its morphing of the human form into something decidedly unhuman, feels like a clear progenitor of Under the Skin. The video for ‘Rabbit in Your Headlights’ by Unkle (featuring Thom Yorke) is as piercing a study of alienation and human cruelty as anything he’s put on the big screen. While Glazer is seldom seen as having a sense of humour in his movies (no surprise given some of their plots), the acidic nature of something like Sexy Beast shares a lot of DNA with those Guinness and Flake ads. This is a filmmaker with a full body of work because of his advertisement work, not in spite of it. If he wins an Oscar this year, I hope he sits it next to his MTV Moonman.