It's like learning an alphabet, then a language, then writing in it, then trying to write poetry in it.' His face falls. Glazer obsessed over how the world might really look to new eyes. 'It was like a big, extravagant rock band turning into PJ Harvey,' Wilson says. Elaborate special effects sequences were tossed. Glazer and Campbell took their 100-page script and deleted the 60 in which she played no part. Work focused on the female character alone. 'We took years to get there, and suddenly it was obvious.' What Glazer wanted, he realised, was to make a film representing, as purely as possible, an alien view of our world. Wilson says he grew 'convinced this just wasn't going to happen'. I don't think I ever meant it.' Others around him suggested he should. Eventually, the script revolved around a pair of aliens masquerading as a Scottish farmer and his wife. Three years in, one co-writer Milo Addica made way for another, Walter Campbell. It wasn't a hobby.' Days and nights slipped by. The longest phase in the process saw endless versions of a story assembled and dismantled. But I still wanted to make the book a film.' 'I knew then that I absolutely didn't want to film the book. Glazer liked this early script, with its rendering of Faber's carnivorous aliens. The first involved a faithful adaptation of the novel that producer Jim Wilson sent Glazer while the pair worked on Sexy Beast. The world wondered what was next.įor a decade, he vanished behind a door marked Under the Skin, where events fell into three acts. It was also booed at the Venice film festival. With Under the Skin shelved, he swept on instead to his 2004 film Birth, an uneasily gorgeous tale of a young boy who might be the reincarnated husband of a New York widow (Nicole Kidman). Sexy Beast, with Ray Winstone playing a saveloy-tanned safecracker retired to the Costa Brava, was hailed as a surreal-ish modern classic. To recap: at the dawn of the noughties, he was cinema's coming man, adored for his witty, ingenious ads for Nike, Guinness and more. 'I don't think I'm the right man to adapt a book,' he says.

Fair enough.' We talk about literary adaptations.

The boos don't matter: 'Some people love it, some are repulsed. You think, what do I love? I love this.' He puffs on an electronic cigarette. He has the fractionally dazed air of a rescued castaway. Interview phobia aside, Glazer is affable and open.

Under the skin by michel faber