- Born
- Height5′ 11½″ (1.82 m)
- Jonathan first found fame for his revolutionary work on Radiohead's 'Street Spirit' and Jamiroquai's multi-MTV award winning 'Virtual Insanity' video.
In 1999 he directed the ground-breaking Guinness 'Surfer', which picked up 2 D&AD Black Pencils and the top spot at most of the other awards festivals that year. The film still heads many lists as one of the best commercials of all time. He has made iconic commercials for Stella Artois, Levis, Nike, Sony, Volkswagen, Channel 4, Wrangler, Apple and many others. His film for Alexander McQueen won a Grand Prix at the Ciclope Festival in Berlin.
In 2000 Jonathan directed Sexy Beast which was nominated for Best British Film by BAFTA. This was followed 4 years later with Birth, staring Nicole Kidman and Lauren Bacall. His 2014 film, Under The Skin stars Scarlett Johansson and is an adaptation of Michel Faber's 2000 novel of the same name. Under The Skin received 2 BAFTA nominations and won critical acclaim as a 'landmark in filmmaking'.
Later on, Jonathan directed work for the BBC in the form of 2019's 'The Fall', a short film influenced by Goya's 'The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters' and a hunting photograph of Donald Trump's two sons posing with a dead leopard; and 2020's Strasbourg 1518, a collaboration in isolation created during Covid, inspired by a unique plague striking inhabitants of the city who danced until their ultimate demise.
- IMDb mini biography by: Anonymous
- Directed one Oscar nominated performance: Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast (2000).
- He has directed one film that has been nominated for the Best Picture Oscar: The Zone of Interest (2023).
- [on directing Scarlett Johansson] She's like all actors: she's very confident and lacks confidence deeply at the same moment. She has a very strong sense of herself. She didn't go into this film without understanding why she's doing it. It was not strategic, it was about wanting to work with someone. We talked a few times over the years, and she kept a close eye on it. We were orbiting each other before committing to make it together You have to trust each other. If you don't trust and can't say whatever you think, there's no point in getting out of bed.
- [on the ten years spent to create Under the Skin (2013)] I am stubborn. You have to have a strong will to do anything, really, to stand by what you are trying to do. It's made a lot easier when you are inspired by something. Ten years? It was very easy to spend that much time on the film...I wanted to keep going until we were going to make something that in itself was a kind of experience that matched the perspective of the character.
- [on Krzysztof Kieślowski's Camera Buff (1979)] A great film about film-making and the nature and ethics of it. [2019]
- I believe cinema is a frontier. Absolutely. And the films I'm most interested in are the ones with that in mind. [2019]
- [on short films] Anthony Minghella said a short film should be like a perfect sentence. And I thought that was a really good way of thinking about them. [2019]
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