‘The Brutalist’ Director Brady Corbet Celebrates This Year’s Oscar Nominees as “Very Radical, Daring, Original Movies”
This year’s five best director Oscar nominees — Jacques Audiard (Emilia Pérez), Sean Baker (Anora), Brady Corbet (The Brutalist), Coralie Fargeat (The Substance) and James Mangold (A Complete Unknown) — sat down for a conversation at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival on Monday to discuss their group of films, both separately and together.
In a chat moderated by The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg at the Arlington Theatre, Audiard kicked things off with a short discussion of Emilia Pérez, as he noted the film had a smaller budget than most American musicals and dubbed it, “a modest musical. It was my first time doing a musical, but it was also my first time working entirely in a studio, and that for me was both a shock and a tremendous discovery. I absolutely loved doing it because working in the studio allowed me to attain a level of stylization that I never could have had in real locations.”
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Baker then spoke about being drawn to telling the stories of sex workers, noting that for his work on 2012’s Starlet he became friends with some adult film stars and “kind of saw behind the curtain, the everyday, mundane part of their lives. I was like I would like to tell a story that focuses on them as people, and not their career, because that’s often how they’re defined and I don’t think that’s fair. So one led to the next — befriending sex workers, hearing stories; I heard a million stories. I never wanted it to be a shtick though; it really happened organically.”
Corbet explained his interest in the post-World War II era for The Brutalist, and mused, “I thought about how in the 1950s especially, you were not encouraged to express yourself — men especially, certainly not children — so I just thinking about all of that repression. It’s interesting to me that the 1950s is a period of time that the conservative agenda seems to wants to get back to. I find that very strange because of course it was a really miserable period in American history.” The filmmaker also gave his thoughts on the current film industry and how “people are making ‘safe bets’ and they’re easy to support in a staff meeting, and yet audiences are not coming out to see them because they’re so familiar. It’s a formula, it’s algorithmic content.”
“This crop of films this year are notably very radical, daring, original movies. I think whether people love our films or they don’t, I think it’s impossible to acknowledge this is one of the more interesting selections of contenders in a long time,” Corbet said of this year’s Oscar nominees. “It’s predominantly independent movies made by very radical filmmakers, and I think that’s very exciting. I’m not really a glass half-full kind of guy but I feel relatively, sort of, kind of optimistic — just tonight.”
During her conversation, Fargeat explained how when it comes to the ideas explored in The Substance, “Hollywood was just a symbol of what’s happening everywhere. I think this story is true in every country for every woman since the beginning of humanity.” She also joked about how the scene with Dennis Quaid’s character vigorously eating shrimp made so many men on set uncomfortable she was asked to tone it down, while the blood and gore was deemed fine.
To close things out — before the five directors united on stage to compliment each other’s films and discuss their post-awards season plans — Mangold said of A Complete Unknown, “the reality is I did want to explore the relationship of the person who doesn’t have that volcano [in Pete Seeger], who may be really creative, incredibly sharp, but just that’s not there for them [like for Bob Dylan]; also the people who want to commodify it or want to make money from it, the people who hate it, the people who fall in love with talent just to get closer to it.” He added that he realized through making the film when it comes to Dylan, “Oh, it’s awesome to be talented but it’s also lonely, because that means you’re separated from everyone.”
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