The first time I met Brady Corbet was in November, at a screening of his latest film The Brutalist. Dressed in his trademark baseball cap and a black overcoat, he stood shyly to meet members of London’s high society at Soho’s Picturehouse cinema. The director, known previously in art house circles, suddenly found himself at the centre of attention thanks to the noise around The Brutalist, his three-and-a-half-hour epic starring Adrien Brody as a Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor who embarks on a new life in the United States. It had just made a splash at the Venice Film Festival, earning a 12-minute standing ovation. At our screening, Corbet immediately introduced himself as a film purist, requesting that we all applaud the projectionist. “You’re in for something special,” he said. “This is the 70mm version—how it was intended to be watched.”
The following day, with the film fresh in my memory, I spent some time with Corbet. First, during a visit to the Isokon building in north London, where he was photographed in the modernist block of flats, and then at a nearby gastropub with our mutual friend, and his fellow director, Fridtjof Ryder. That evening, Corbet was good company: witty and intellectual, well-read and opinionated. Frequent topics of digression include his favourite writer, the German WG Sebald (“I wanted to make a film like Sebald writes,” he notes) or the state of American politics post-presidential election (“This is like the first time in history where liberals are so conservative. It drives me insane.”)
We were on our third pint when the waitress finally asked: “Is he famous?” She did, after all, hear him say something about Adrien Brody while collecting empty glasses, and everyone knows Adrien Brody. “He’s a director. He’s going to be nominated for an Oscar,” I replied. “That’s nice,” she said, with an air of detachment. And then: “You know, I’m a musician myself.”
The remark made the 38-year-old director smile. After a long period of fighting to get his films financed, Corbet still relates to struggling artists. “That’s great,” he says, underplaying himself as he often does, “you need to believe in yourself.”
When we meet again in late January for this interview, on a video call, Corbet’s name is well and truly up in lights. He won a Golden Globe for best director and has been nominated for the same award at the Oscars. The Brutalist has also become the favourite to take Best Picture. “I was in my hotel room with my composer Daniel Blumberg when I first got the news,” he says, beaming. “We were cheering everyone on like a football match.”
To say The Brutalist surpassed even Corbet’s expectations is an understatement. The film was made for under USD10 million—peanuts in Hollywood—and the script was written with his partner and collaborator, Mona Fastvold. It took seven years to finance, shoot, and release; a process that was interrupted by the pandemic and casting changes. He agrees that the making of The Brutalist mirrors the film’s key theme: an obsessive artist drawn to completing his masterpiece, even if it damages him and those near to him. “This project,” he says, “is personal in that it’s about how many obstacles have been put in my path, in my wife’s path…”
Corbet was born to a single mother in Scottsdale, Arizona. When he was seven, they moved to Colorado and he appeared on his first film set as a child actor. “By 11, I was actively working a lot,” he tells me. “I didn’t have a before and after. I only had an after: a life in cinema.”
He pursued a career as a television actor before landing a role in Catherine Hardwicke’s big-screen teen drama Thirteen. Over the next decade, he went on to become a favourite of auteurs, appearing in works by Gregg Araki, Michael Haneke (for an especially show-stealing performance in Funny Games), Lars von Trier, Olivier Assayas, Mia Hansen-Løve, Ruben Östlund, and Fastvold, who directed him in her 2014 debut Sleepwalker. These experiences convinced him that he could become a filmmaker, too.
“I can’t remember what I consciously took from these directors,” he tells me. “But what I really remember were directors that I admired who had bad days. Days where they came up short, for being under the weather or losing a battle with production. This demystified the [filmmaking] process for me.” His directorial debut, historical drama The Childhood of a Leader, followed in 2015.
Corbet had another formative experience at 12, when he worked at a small bookshop in Aspen known for progressive literature and “their insane first editions”. As a child, he would read voraciously, feeding his curiosity to understand different subjects, whether on architecture or German literature. He was paid in books (some of which were first editions). Sadly, much of his collection was lost in an apartment fire in New York, where he and Fastvold live with their daughter. Around that time, after struggling to get the green light, his second feature film Vox Lux—a go-for-broke melodrama about a popstar played by Natalie Portman—also finally got its financing. “Destruction and regeneration,” Corbet says, referring to Sebald again, “are the things that are definitive of the lived experience”.
Those words are obviously relevant to The Brutalist. Ditto his current career trajectory. And, after spending some time with Corbet, I believe it is also the way he views filmmaking.
The Brutalist is a film about many things, among them taking risks. It follows Brody’s fictional immigrant László Tóth (based on real architects and artists, including László Moholy-Nagy and Marcel Breuer) and his obsession with building a Brutalist community centre in small-town Pennsylvania under the patronage of Harrison van Buren (Guy Pearce), while battling against financiers, personal traumas, and prejudice. Corbet admits that he sees himself in László, but every film he has made previously has been deeply personal, though wildly different in style. “You’ve got to keep pushing the bar,” he says. “My favourite filmmakers never rested on their laurels.”
Unlike his first two movies, The Brutalist has won over both art house and (relatively) mainstream audiences, thanks to its starry cast, brilliant marketing by cult distributor A24, and a plot that currently resonates politically. This postwar immigrant’s story is big, bold American moviemaking, reminiscent of The Godfather: Part 2 or Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America. While The Brutalist is being hailed for its depth and technical mastery, in an era dominated by CGI-bloated superhero blockbusters and biopics, it has had its fair share of criticisms. Most recently, there was controversy over the use of AI to enhance the Hungarian dialogue, though Corbet has clarified this, explaining in a statement that Innovative Respeecher technology was used in post-production to “refine certain vowels for accuracy”. For Corbet, the conversation has been an extraordinary boost of attention for the movie.
“I’m grateful anyone could believe in me,” he continues. “The box office results are way above anything we anticipated and that has to do with the prizes and nominations we’ve gotten.”
Despite the film’s success, he is still dedicated to his indie roots, he tells me. Going full Michael Bay isn’t Corbet’s style; his outlook is more old-fashioned and romantic. “Thanks to The Brutalist, I’ll have more access and support, but I’m not interested in changing my approach,” he says. “I know that I’m only going to retain the creative control I personally require if I still make movies for a reasonable amount of money.”
Corbet’s next movie, which he remains vague about, is a 1970s-set horror-western. “I’m sure it’s going to piss everyone off,” he says, laughing, “but that’s a good thing.” He is also the co-writer on Fastvold’s upcoming musical Ann Lee and is starting up a production company that will mentor filmmakers. It is very clear that Corbet enjoys that side of the industry. “We really want to produce for other people. The reality is, I’ll be lucky if I make 12 movies,” Corbet tells me. “This is a way of me giving back to a community that’s supported me.”
When we say goodbye, I wish Corbet the best for the Oscars, which took place in March. (The film took home the Oscars for Best Actor, Best Cinematography, Best Film Score; Anora clinched Best Picture.) “I appreciate it,” he says, with a broad smile, “but you know what? We have already won.”
The Brutalist is out now in theatres
Originally published on Esquire UK
If you like movies – and by movies, we mean stories that make you think – then you’ve undoubtedly heard of A24, a name that (arguably) singlehandedly brought original storytelling back to the people, and did it without the backing of big Hollywood studios who would have resorted to referring to filmmaking as ‘the content industry’ (barf).
From Uncut Gems and Ex Machina, to 2022’s Oscar winner The Whale, and now, more recently, the lauded Korean tearjerker, Past Lives, A24 produces movies that are cool. But as Alfred Hitchcock once said, “There are three things that make a good film: the script, the script and the script.”
So, if you’ve ever wanted to get your hands on not just a slew of the original screenplays brought to life by the minds at A24, but also want to plant a cultural flag on your coffee table, then we have the gift for you.
Consisting of not only the original screenplay, but a slew of original and BTS images, details about the film, crosswords, and more, this is the perfect addition to any cinephile or aspiring screenwriter’s living room.
“We started developing the first screenplay books in 2018 as we were expanding our merch offerings,” says the head of brand at A24. “We wanted to create something collectible, like a coffee-table book, that showcased how a filmmaker’s vision gets translated from script to screen.”
To remind you of A24’s excellent cinematic library, here’s a scene of Oscar Isaac tearing up the dancefloor in the eerily prescient, Ex Machina (which, obviously, is available as a screenplay in the collection).
Cop one here and follow A24 on Instagram.
Originally published on Esquire ME
When A24 debuted its brand of “elevated horror,” audiences lost their minds. Story and suspense? Metaphors and thrills? They said it couldn’t be done! But visionary directors such as Ari Aster and Robert Eggers begged to differ. For the past decade, modern horror masterpieces such as Hereditary, The Witch, and Midsommar have pushed the genre in a whole new direction. The big trade-off, mood-wise, is that constant jump-scares are replaced by long, unsettling moments of dread. Usually, it all leads to one of the most disturbing images you’ve ever seen. Toni Collete floating with the piano wire in Hereditary and Willem Dafoe going batshit in The Lighthouse are just a couple examples of images that are burned into people’s minds. If you know, you know.
A24 isn’t afraid to swing and miss. Aster’s Beau is Afraid and Alex Garland’s Men both received mixed reviews—but at least the distributor takes risks. Justin Long became half-human, half-walrus in Tusk. The biggest star of Lamb was a little girl with a lamb head! For better or for worse, whenever that A24 logo pops up, you know you’re about to see something you’ve never seen before. But if you want the best of the best that the brand has to offer, look no further. Below is your A24 horror starter pack.
In one of the scariest films in recent memory, Toni Collete stars as a miniature diorama artist who is grieving the loss of her late mother. Coupled with a grief demon and a horrifying accident that changes the family (and the tone of the film) forever, Hereditary created images that audiences will never forget.—Josh Rosenberg
Mia Goth stars as the titular Pearl in Ti West’s X prequel, honing their craft and turning in one of the best performances of the year. Goth capping off the slasher with a three-minute-long stare in the credits? Icing on the cake. —JR
Bodies Bodies Bodies might not be that scary but it’s a fun twist on the whodunnit genre. This star-studded film follows a group of friends who travel to a remote house for the weekend. Tensions rise when an unexpected guest arrives—and someone winds up dead.—Bria McNeal
Originally published on Esquire US
While researching her role for a new film Past Lives, Greta Lee watched a South Korean reality show in which a celebrity is reunited with a childhood sweetheart. Being confronted by your first love is, unsurprisingly, a physical experience. “It’s initial shock, terror, a look of death, then ecstasy, joy and a desperate, deep sadness, all within a matter of seconds,” says the 40-year-old Korean-American actor on a video call from Los Angeles, where she lives with her husband, the writer Russ Armstrong, and their two sons.
It was a specific feeling she needed to tap into for the romantic drama from writer-director Celine Song, which is out now in cinemas and was released earlier this summer in the United States to considerable critical acclaim. The film charts the story of two friends from South Korea: Nora, played by Lee, and Hae Sung, played by Teo Yoo, who were separated when Nora’s family emigrated to Canada. A couple of decades (and relationships) later, the pair reconnect for an intense week in New York.
Before Nora and Hae Sung’s reunion was filmed, Song asked the actors not to interact. “Admittedly, at the time I felt like, ‘Oh, this is kind of hokey and manufactured,’ but I’m glad we went along with the experiment, because it really helped me hone in on the biology of longing and what it does to your body,” says Lee. Yoo and John Magaro, who plays Nora’s husband Arthur, actually met for the first time on screen; for months, Lee had acted as a “conduit” between the two, a distance that Song encouraged. “She’s supremely manipulative,” Lee jokes.
Taking on Nora, a nuanced romantic lead, “felt really, really radical at the time—and very nerve-racking”, says Lee. While she was starting out as an actor, doing theatre in New York, the roles available for Asian-Americans were scarce and, as Lee points out, she wasn’t cut out for stereotypes: “I was not very good at playing a lab technician or a doctor.” Later, however, she proved very cut out for scene-stealing turns in Girls, as the clueless and cut-throat gallerist Soojin, and more recently as Maxine in Netflix’s time-bending hit Russian Doll and Stella in The Morning Show, which is about to start its third season. In 2025, she is set to star alongside Jared Leto in the third instalment of Tron.
Central to Past Lives, says Lee, is the Korean concept of in-yun. Not precisely translatable, it refers to the time-spanning connections between people: if you meet in this life, you encountered each other in a past life. “Now that I’ve done the movie, I can’t not see in-yun everywhere,” Lee says, with the air of a recent convert to a niche religion. “You and I have in-yun now,” she says, pointing to me. “You can have in-yun with a chair,” she adds, pointing at her chair. Wherever you stand on the idea—as Nora says in the film, in-yun is “just something Korean people say to seduce someone”—it’s an effective way to raise the romantic stakes; both balm and delusion. “It’s really a coping mechanism, isn’t it?” says Lee, cheerily. “We’re all just trying to make sense of the injustice that we only get to live once.”
This interview took place before the SAG-AFTRA strike.
Originally published on Esquire UK
Initially, Talk to Me, the new supernatural horror movie from twins Danny and Michael Philippou, was scheduled to be an eight-week production. But when the first-time feature filmmakers opted for promising young Australian talents over proven stars, the budget shrank. The shoot? Reduced to five weeks. Which was fine, doable enough—until the day of the big montage scene. In it, a group of Australian teens takes turns clasping a magical embalmed hand, which in turn makes them possessed by the dead. The Philippous intended to film a demonic party game with the rapid cuts and laughing gas of a drug trip. One issue was that they ran out of time to take all the pictures they needed.
“We wanted 50 set-ups and the first [Assistant Director] said, ‘It is mathematically impossible to get all these shots,’” says Michael.
The 30-year-old twins, though, didn’t think so. “We were like, ‘We need to shoot this Racka style,’" says Danny.
For the previous 10 years, the Philippous had been making exuberant Internet candy under the YouTube handle RackaRacka. You’ve very likely stumbled across their work. The channel has 6.8 million subscribers, and its videos—in which they imagine, for instance, faceoffs between the characters in Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings, or Ronald McDonald caught in a pizza delivery car chase—have netted over a billion views. Working as an all-hats DIY filmmaking duo, they learned to do it all—and quickly. Racka style.
So, the pair urged the assistant director to give them carte blanche over the set for a couple of hours. When they did, Danny says, “It was like a bomb hit the set: We had two cameras, and we were screaming orders and playing music.”
Suffice to say, they got the shots. Though, afterwards, a producer pulled them aside and said, in Danny’s words, "This is not how a feature film set is run.” The Philippous apologised and said they’d calm down moving forward. “But there's a certain magic in that chaos,” Danny says. “And I think you can feel that energy through the screen.”
ESQUIRE: You two are twins and you work together. For the unfamiliar, how do you distinguish Danny versus Michael?
DANNY PHILIPPOU: I'm the nerd twin. Michael's the jock twin. He's physical and I'm geeky. I'm the weak twin.
MICHAEL PHILIPPOU: I like travelling. Danny likes staying at home. When we're filming, Danny makes me get hit by cars while he films it.
DP: But I'm the smarter twin—he's the dumber twin.
In a lot of your RackaRacka YouTube videos, you make a huge mess—just destroying everything. When I watch videos like that I always wonder what the clean up is like—
DP: The worst part. You have so much fun destroying everything and then it's like, "Cut!"
MP: And a lot of people filming with you are like, "I'm going to go now."
DP: That was an amazing part of [filming] Talk to Me. Being able to destroy things and then be like, "Later!" and bail out of there.
MP: Sometimes, when it's funded or we've got demo houses, we make more of a mess because it's going to get knocked down. Once at our dad's house, we filmed and let off this little bomb—and the metal casing went through the roof. And we're like, "Oh shit." So we patched up the roof, but we didn't realise it had gone through the tiles as well. It was raining and my poor dad was reading the newspaper and there were drips of water. We looked up and the whole roof was sagging.
DP: Poor dad. We always fixed up what we destroyed. He was always nice about it, but poor dad. We really fucked his house up.
You guys started making videos at nine years old. Looking back, is there one that's near and dear to your hearts, where you can remember yourselves getting the filmmaking bug?
DP: All of them! I remember we did this movie called Evil Flamingo. It was a series of movies. We used my sister's flamingo doll to pretend it's murdering a bunch of people. We were probably 10 or 11. We started doing practical effects. We would put it in black and white, use tomato sauce as blood, we'd put fake eyes on my friend, and the flamingo was pulling the eyes out of this guy's head. We were so young. I remember being so obsessed with practical effects. We used to do it out of necessity. We didn't have any editing software. That was actually Evil Flamingo 2.
What was the inspiration for the Evil Flamingo videos?
DP: Chucky. I wanted to do my own killer doll movies.
MP: I think Evil Flamingo 2 was one of the first times where we were like, "Let's make it engaging the whole time."
Were you guys known as the crazy filmmaker kids in school?
DP: We used to differ between filmmaker kids and just delinquents. We were pretty aggressive kids.
MP: We weren't allowed in the same class in primary school. So I'd gather all these kids from my class, and Danny would from his class, and we'd meet on the oval and fight.
DP: But our friend Timani's older sister, Nelly, really steered us towards a more creative, fun path. We would always debut all of our movies and TV shows for her. And we hadn't seen her in like ten years, because she moved away when we were nineteen. Then we saw her for the first time at the Sundance premiere of Talk to Me.
How have you iterated, based on the feedback you’d get from friends and the Internet, as you were constantly making things?
MP: We never wanted to do YouTube. We kind of fell into making YouTube videos, because we were making these fake fail videos that were going really viral—and going on Jimmy Kimmel, Conan O'Brien—but no one knew who made them. A friend said, "You should make a YouTube channel just to say who's making them." So we made it and then there was one video that just took off. It was at 3,000 views, then we went to sleep and woke up and it was at 500,000. At the end of the day, it was 1.5 million, and we had 100,000 subscribers in that one day. And we're like, "What if we actually put effort into this?" From there, every video was an idea or sequence we always wanted to do. The more we created and it grew, we had the ability to do that with makeup artists, stunt performers, and VFX. It was a lot of fun, and that's why we did it for so many years.
DP: One of the reasons I stepped back from YouTube and wanted to do something outside of it was I couldn't be as vulnerable on the YouTube stuff. I couldn't be as personal. It was always specific content for a specific audience. The stuff we liked watching was very different than the stuff we liked making. That's why the film stuff was where we always wanted to be, and this felt like the right time to be like, Let's tackle this side of us we haven't shown yet. And that's with story and character.
MP: Before YouTube, I had a short film called Deluge that we'd shot. It was about a father and son in a suicide cult, and I was never going to upload that to RackaRacka. I was like, My audience is gonna fucking hate this. Stepping outside of that was the goal here.
What were you watching during that time?
DP: I remember my favourite TV show that I watched and rewatched was called In Treatment. It's an HBO show about a therapist just talking to his patients. I was so in love with that show.
MP: And then things like The Hunt and Memories of Murder—films that worked so well on a character level. It's got like a hundredth of the budget of a big Hollywood thing, but for some reason it's so much stronger. And it's just so well thought out in terms of character and story.
DP: In In Treatment, even just the buildup to a character throwing water on another character, it was like someone just got shot. Because you were invested that much into the character—something that small carried that much weight.
MP: Maybe we were drawn to that because we had done all the big fight stuff.
In Talk to Me, one thing I was struck by is how mean these kids are. All the Australian people I've met have been very friendly. Are Australian kids just really mean, then they're nice when they travel?
DP: [Laughs.] It depends on the friend group. In our friend group, the way we connect is by absolutely roasting each other.
MP: It's the most multicultural friend group. People from all over, all in the same network, and the way we connected is just by bagging the shit out of each other. And you grow closer because of that. Those people are still our best friends today. When I look at the film and you say they're really mean, I'm like, Are they? [Laughs.] I know they are. There are things that are so cruel from Hayley [played by Zoe Terakes], but some of the things Hayley says we laugh at.
DP: When you watch it with Australians, everyone just pisses themselves laughing. Taking the piss out of each other is an Australian thing.
During the film’s possession sequences, one of the characters has a sexual experience and makes out with a dog. Tell me about filming that.
MP: With that scene, we had everyone play through each other's possessions. Not kissing a dog, but going through the actions. And on set he's not kissing a real dog. It's all done through effects. But we've all had those [embarrassing] experiences growing up, and some are filmed and you feel bad for the people. It's not like back in the day where it can be talked about and forgotten. It's immortalised. Even just mistakes people have made. Which kind of sucks. Young people can't really grow safely or learn from experiences because it can always be shoved in their face.
Talk to Me deals with loss and grief. I read that you had a bad car accident when you were sixteen, Danny. What happened?
DP: I split my eye open and they thought I might've broken my spine. I was in the hospital afterwards and I couldn't stop shaking. The doctors would come in, turn on the heaters, and give me extra blankets. Then my sister came in, sat next to me, and held my hand. As she did that, the shaking just stopped. I was shaking not out of being cold, but out of being in shock. And the touch of my sister, someone I loved, brought me out of it. So human touch and the connections between people was always a really strong thing for me. Before we had the hand as a motif, it was just evident all the way through the film, and it just felt right to have the hand be the representation of it—this clingy, desperate hand needing connection.
Were you driving the car?
DP: No, I was in the car with three other friends, and I was sleeping in the back seat. They went through a red light and we got t-boned. I remember waking up and the car was spinning around. I was thinking my friends were dead, not understanding where I was. And I was so out of it that when I was asked my name, I was saying the street I lived on. The way Riley's face swells up in the movie was the way my face was swelling up. You could not recognise me. I was so deformed and disfigured.
In the movie, Mia [played by Sophie Wilde] feels guilt for being responsible for Riley's accident. Were those feelings drawn from that incident?
DP: Those feelings were drawn from our neighbours who we watched grow up. I remember their mom would ask me to drive them to school, and I was always terrified of doing that. I had this intrusive thought in my head of, What if I fucking crash the car and kill them right now and I have to go back and face their mom? All throughout the film, I was drawing from things that scare me personally.
And yet you guys both seem like daredevils. Michael is even a certified stuntman. So how did you push through that fear?
MA: I've always been drawn to doing something dangerous, especially when it's related to telling a story. If it's in my head, I'm just going to do it. I don't want anybody else to carry that risk. But it's something in me that's always just wanted to perform that stuff. Maybe it's the only time I feel present or something. And I'm scared when I agree to some stuff. We do these live events where I can get paralyzed or be killed, and beforehand I'm thinking about news articles if it goes wrong. But when you pull it off and you look back at the footage it's like, "Ohh, you survived that!" There's something about that that's so exhilarating.
DA: Even on a small scale, pushing through things is like that. Even the fear of doing a movie—in the daytime, I was so confident about it. But at night, all those doubts start to creep in, and you're like, I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. I've never made a movie before. I can't believe there's millions of dollars on the line. I'm just questioning and overthinking it. Then when the day comes, you just have to take the leap.
MA: It's like everything you want is at the edge of fear. And I feel like a lot of people don't pursue things because of how people will react initially, or they’re thinking about what will happen if they fail. But if you actually just push that aside and start, no matter where you end up, you're going to be so thankful that you did. The worst thing for me is saying, "What if…?" at the end of life. There's parts of my childhood where I'm like, "I wish I just did that." I think from an early age, I tried to just go for it.
Was there a specific moment where you learned that lesson?
MA: A few moments. It was something I saw from a friend who was getting bullied by three kids. He pushed a bully. Then at lunchtime, the three biggest, scariest kids in our grade came and beat the shit out of him until he was on the floor and bleeding. They beat the crap out of him until they were out of breath and then the bully said, "You had enough yet?" This kid got up and punched him in the face. And that defiance was so striking to me. There was a time when I was getting bullied and I used that as inspiration. I did this thing and got my ass kicked after, but I was proud that I stood up for myself and my friends.
From: Esquire Us
