“All the money in the world isn’t worth being humiliated” - Four interviews with Brady Corbet

I’ve probably interviewed Brady Corbet more than any other actor or filmmaker, starting when he was 19 and working with Michael Haneke, then when he was promoting Simon Killer, which he co-wrote with director Antonio Campos, then on through his journey behind the camera with The Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux, the latter interview coinciding with the 20th anniversary of Columbine. He’s always been a great interviewee, and with The Brutalist confirming his status as one of America’s major filmmakers, it’s been heartening to see him vindicated for always sticking to his artistic principles. Versions of all these appeared in The Scotsman.

#1. “Thank God nobody saw Thunderbirds”

(Funny Games, October 2007)

Brady Corbet remembers the first time he saw Funny Games, Austrian auteur Michael Haneke’s harrowing meditation on screen violence. “I was about ten or eleven and I watched it with my mother. It was probably the first Michael Haneke movie I saw.” The 19-year-old actor is chatting about this particular viewing experience because he’s one of the co-stars of Haneke’s new, audacious, shot-for-shot American remake of the film. But if this memory also makes him sound like he was a particularly precocious child, it shouldn’t: it’s really just an indication of how different he is from most young actors of his generation.

For starters, he’s fiercely intelligent and articulate (think a younger Edward Norton), able to talk authoritatively about everything from the merits (and flaws) of Haneke’s work, to torture porn, to the vagaries of the film industry for child actors. Moreover, ask him who his favourite filmmakers are and he doesn’t just reel off the usual suspects list: Scorsese, Spielberg, the Coen brothers. He raves about Haneke, the Dardenne brothers and his personal favourite, Claire Denis. Movie stardom seems like the furthest thing from his mind.

Which isn’t to say he couldn’t be one if he wanted. Though slight of frame and sporting fuzzy, shaved hair when we meet at London’s Covent Garden Hotel, he’s got quite striking, almost angelic features, the kind that could easily be capitalized upon to turn him into a teen pin-up. But go online and you’ll find only aborted attempts to create dedicated fan-sites to him. He’s more interested in the work than the fame and one grievous early misstep aside (a starring role in the Thunderbirds movie), his short CV reflects this: a couple of inauspicious sitcom walk-ons quickly leading to a supporting role in controversial teen drama Thirteen and eventually to an astonishing performance as a delusional child abuse victim in Gregg Araki’s hard-hitting Mysterious Skin. He’s also had a short run as the son of Jack Bauer’s girlfriend in 24. And now there’s Funny Games, which finds him co-starring alongside Michael Pitt as one of two gentle-voiced, malevolent, motiveless sickos who terrorise a rich American family in their vacation home.

It’s a provocative piece, not least because Haneke’s determination to recreate his original almost frame for frame in an American setting ensures there are no surprises for audiences familiar with the earlier film. However, as the original was a serious attempt to make us question our own attitudes to screen violence, it’s a conceit Corbet reckons works well. “This is not a remake that’s in denial of the original,” he explains. “To remake a film about film is really asking an audience to further consider the ideas about cinema that Haneke is exploring. He meant the original to be a visceral experience, but this version is supposed to be purely intellectual. Of course, some people will think it’s pointless. But it’s really not, and I would never want to pat myself on the back or support a film just because I’m in it. I really feel no obligation to anything I do, but in this case I really do think the film is great.”

He’s not kidding about his lack of obligation to his work. Though he says he’s appreciative of nearly everything he’s done, get him onto the topic of the $70 million flop that was Thunderbirds – in which the then 14-year-old played the lead role of Alan Tracy – and it inspires nothing but contempt.  “It was never really my kind of thing, but at that point I thought that my thing was a little out of reach,” reflects Corbet. “I thought I had to pay my dues. Then, about half-way through that shoot, I realised that really wasn’t the case and that everybody had lied to me and I was doing something I really didn’t want to do.”

Having signed a three-picture deal, its failure was a blessing. “I’d have been stuck like those Harry Potter kids,” nods Corbet. “I’d have been fucked and I’d have been miserable, but that’s the thing that’s fucked-up about the way studios handle children. I was 14 and I was smart; I wasn’t a stupid kid so I kind of knew what I was getting myself into. But the kids that don’t – I don’t know how they’re not suicidal. Thank God nobody saw Thunderbirds.”

That still didn’t stop him feeling humiliated. He first watched it in London and was so embarrassed he walked out and went to see Pedro Almodovar’s Bad Education, which was playing in the cinema next door. “I was nearly in tears. I was 14 and you feel really fragile at that age and think that it’s going to haunt you for the rest of your life. Of course, it didn’t. But all I learned from it was that my initial instincts were absolutely correct and I should never have strayed from them. And I never have since.”

Indeed, 24 is the only thing he’s done purely to pay his rent, but even then he made sure he picked a show that was well-made and still somewhat credible. He certainly seems to be on path he’s happy with now. He’s already started making a move behind the camera, having recently completed the first part of an experimental triptych of short films with Funny Games’ world-renowned cinematographer, Darius Khondji.

Acting wise, he’s got a few things he’s considering, but nothing confirmed; he certainly no longer feels any pressure to do stuff just to keep his profile raised. “The good stuff, for the most part, it finds you or you find it,” he says philosophically. “It’s really hard to deal with people’s preconceptions but at the same time, you want to be human. I’ve really tried to stick to my guns. Even doing an interview, I try to be as honest as possible as far as speaking about my experience on a film or something like that. Otherwise it’s just bullsht. If it’s all soundbites then who cares?”

#2. “It’s rare to find people in American cinema making films in such a formal way”

(Simon Killer, October 2012)

Antonio Campos wants to get one thing straight. “Just because you make a film where a character likes a finger up his butt doesn’t mean you like a finger up your butt.” The 30-year-old director of the acclaimed festival hit Afterschool—and founding member of the radical New York production company Borderline Films (Martha Marcy May Marlene)—is making this particularly colourful analogy with a sex scene from his new film Simon Killer in order to illustrate the parameters that need to come into play whenever someone assumes he follows the old write-what-you-know edict to the letter. “You always begin an original story from a starting point that’s personal,” he says. “But then it becomes something waaaaaay different from what it started out as.”

Given that Simon Killer is a) a disturbing portrait of an American student who begins indulging in transgressive sociopathic behaviour while on a sabbatical to Paris to get over a break-up and b) disturbing precisely because of how stark and real it feels, it’s important to reiterate Campos’s last statement lest anyone read too much into the fact that, yes, he was going through his own break-up when he first came up with the idea.

"I was in depressed state," he says, but he's not willing to indulge that thing he’s noticed happening at Q&A sessions where certain audience members feel the need to project everything that’s in the story onto everyone that made it. “I understand why people do it, but it’s an unfair assessment.”

Actually, if anything, Simon Killer’s antihero, played by 25-year-old Brady Corbet, was inspired as much by the work of prolific Belgian crime novelist George Simenon. “Antonio and I both love George Simenon,” says Corbet, who is credited—alongside Campos and fellow star Mati Diop—as one of the co-writers of the largely improvised film. “Simenon’s stories are usually centred around a man having a midlife crisis: you meet him at a fork in the road and they’re sort of immoral tales. Antonio was like, ‘What would happen if you put a younger person in that scenario and you subvert the expectations of a coming-of-age story?’ That’s when we started talking about this as a story of someone who comes of age in a really terrible way.”

That happens in the film when the angelic-looking Simon becomes fixated on a young hostess (played by Diop) working in the city’s Red Light district. “Little by little he’s getting to a place where he could commit murder,” nods Campos. “Whether or not you think he’s committed a crime at the end of the film, you know he’s capable of killing. It’s an act of self-preservation in some ways. If he gets to a place where murder is an option in order to protect himself, he’ll do it.”

“I think that’s the way most violence plays out,” adds Corbet, best known for playing one of the benign-seeming killers in Michael Haneke’s American remake of Funny Games. “Some people have a certain aptitude for violence and their circumstances push them one way or the other.”

The seedier side of Paris proved an ideal location in this respect. The film is set in and around the brothel-lined streets bordered by the 9th and the 18th arrondissements—an anomalous area in centre of Paris that Campos knew relatively well having read about it in Simenon’s novels and lived on its fringes while studying at the Cannes-affiliated filmmakers lab, the Cinéfondation. “There’s just something very sexual in the air in Paris—something that would especially affect a young American graduate student like Simon who is trying to figure himself out. The mistake he makes is to bum around Paris a little too long. He gets desperate and starts going down the wrong path.”

It’s a side of the city one might expect local filmmaking authorities would be keen to avoid showcasing, but Campos found them very accommodating, not just when he wanted to shoot in Paris’s dodgier districts, but also when he wanted to film in the Musée d’Orsay. “That’s what I love about France,” says Campos. “They’re very aware of the bigger picture. They’ll make a lot of money off big-budget stuff, then help the smaller budget films like ours.”

It perhaps helps that Campos has a very European outlook to filmmaking. Indeed, there’s a bit of a Nouvelle Vague vibe about Borderline, the collaborative production company he formed with Marcy Martha May Marlene director Sean Durkin and producer Sean Mond after meeting as film students in his native New York a decade ago. “We’re young filmmakers, but we want to treat cinema with a certain degree of reverence,” says Campos of their decision to collectively make very raw, very experimental and very formal films that eschew the sloppy, guerilla tactics favoured by many low-budget indie filmmakers.

That’s certainly something that attracted Corbet to the group. Simon Killer marks their third feature collaboration (after 2010’s Two Gates of Sleep and Martha Marcy May Marlene). “It’s rare to find people in American cinema making films in such a formal way,” says Corbet. “What’s really nice is that while they make difficult films, they’re not difficult people. They’re really kind and we’re all really good friends.”

Given some of the extreme things Corbet had to do in Simon Killer (see the first paragraph) that must have been an advantage. “Because we’re so close, it’s very comfortable,” confirms Campos. “We can have honest conversations about things and we feel safe around one another. And that’s important when we’re doing something risky like this.”

#3. “Film programmers didn’t even think it was worth their while to show”

(The Childhood of a Leader, August 2016)

Every now and again Brady Corbet asks himself why he didn’t just do a superhero movie and be done with it. “There was a period when I definitely could have made a little bit more money,” laughs the 27-year-old American actor. “When my partner and I were having a baby I was like, fuck, why didn’t I just put on a cape or some horns or whatever. Nobody would care. But all the money in the world is not worth being humiliated.”

He knows of what he speaks. When he was 14 he was cast in the starring role of Alan Tracy in the Thunderbirds movie. Embarrassed by the results—but also quickly realising this type of filmmaking just didn’t fit his own sensibilities (his favourite director at the time was Claire Denis)—he turned his back on blockbuster fare altogether. “Until I was about 20 I was still getting offered pretty high profile, but kind of shitty, projects and it was actually hard to say no, especially when there was a dollar sign attached. But the thing is, that could be the last paycheque I ever make and it still wouldn’t be enough for a lifetime.”

In the handful of years since, Corbet has remained true to his word, working for the likes of Michael Haneke (Funny Games), Lars von Trier (Melancholia), Noah Baumbach (While We’re Young), Ruben Östlund (Force Majeure), Mia Hansen-Løve (Eden) and forming a close association with the New York-based Borderline Films, the cutting-edge production company behind Martha Marcy May Marlene and the Corbet-fronted Simon Killer.

When we meet in Edinburgh, though, it’s to discus his directorial debut, The Childhood of a Leader. A study in megalomania that chronicles the early years of a future fascist dictator in the aftermath of the First World War, it's as artistically audacious and uncompromising as the movies with which he’s thus far chosen to define his career.

Taking its title from a Jean-Paul Sartre story and its real-life inspiration from a childhood picture of Mussolini looking like a little girl, the film is structured as a series of “tantrums” involving the young son of an American diplomat. As his father (Liam Cunningham) works on the Treaty of Versailles and his mother (Bérénice Bejo) defers childcare duties to a series of paid servants, the boy (newcomer Tom Sweet) responds to the ensuing parental neglect and sense of isolation with small but increasingly transgressive acts of disobedience.

If these tantrums can seem a little abstract over the course of the film, especially as the finale jumps abruptly forward with a disorientating conclusion featuring a bald and bearded Robert Pattinson as the adult leader, that’s the point. “I was thinking about these kinds of things as they’re stretched over a period of time,” says Corbet, who wanted to tell a story about a vain young boy who is “metaphysically linked” to the events that would define the 20th Century. “What seem like inconsequential experiences might be just as important in dictating who you grow up to be as things that are a bit more evident or obvious. The film really became about trying to attach a trail of breadcrumbs, one where you have scenarios that suggest the possibility of causality, but primarily leads viewers to think about the prompting factors themselves.”

Making the boy American and blond might, of course, make audiences think of a more current leadership contender. “I’d been living in Europe for three-and-a-half years and it was only when I got back to New York that I realized that Trump was a real possibility,” sighs Corbet of the inevitable parallel. “If the film has anything to say—and I didn’t intend for it to be all that didactic—it’s that wherever these people come from is almost irrelevant, because in the end, it’s all down to the people that put them there.”

Artistically speaking Corbet is certainly fighting the good fight, though he remains a little despairing of the state of film culture in his home country. Despite winning two major awards at Venice last year, The Childhood of a Leader was rejected from every major North American film festival. “I’m not shocked someone disliked the film, but I’m a little shocked that a lot of film programmers didn’t even think it was worth their while to show.” Still, this isn’t enough to make him reconsider his anti-blockbuster stance – even if he has kind of made peace with Thunderbirds. “Now that I have a two year old I can’t wait to show it to her,” he laughs. “I’m going to try and blow her mind with it: ‘Look, your dad, at one point, was a very unsuccessful action star.’ There was even a little toy made of me so maybe she’ll play with that in a few years. Right now she’d just swallow it.”

#4. “There’s a desire to go out with a bang”

(Vox Lux, April 2019)

“It seemed like a major turning point in the culture,” says Brady Corbet. The actor-turned-filmmaker is referring to his decision to begin his second feature, Vox Lux, with a Columbine-style high school massacre. The film itself is something of a state-of-the-nation-style meditation on the anxieties of the 21st century digital age — a wild, pop music-infused odyssey starring Natalie Portman and Jude Law. But in setting the prologue in 1999, the film invokes the massacre of 12 students and one teacher by two Columbine high school seniors on April 20th of that year as the moment things all changed. “It was the new face of terror,” says Corbet. 

When I speak to Corbet, it’s actually two days before the recent 20th anniversary of Columbine. Coincidentally, it’s also the same day that an 18-year-old Florida woman, said to have been obsessed with the massacre, is found dead in the mountains west of Denver from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. A few days earlier she’d forced the closure of local schools — Columbine among them — after authorities became concerned that she might be on some kind of armed pilgrimage to the school. Clearly, then, the shooting still exerts a terrible hold on the collective psyche of the country.

Corbet, who grew up in Colorado a couple of hours’ drive from Columbine, thinks it’s a significant event for anyone around his age. “I was in elementary school when it happened,” says the 30-year-old. “I think anyone who was in elementary, middle school or high school was really rocked by that event because it did become more commonplace. It really left a major mark on my childhood. Now I have a daughter of my own and she participates in school shooting drills the way that I used to have fire drills when I was a kid. It’s something that has become very much a part of American life.”

Indeed, one only need check out Bo Burnham’s new film Eighth Grade to see the extent to which such drills have been normalised. In one of the funniest and most disturbing scenes in his coming-of-age comedy drama, his 13-year-old protagonists are pretty blasé about such drills, too distracted by what’s on their phones or what’s happening with their hormones to pay much attention to the military tactician with a replica gun giving them survival tips.

"It’s just part of their everyday life,” says Burnham, who at 28, is two years younger than Corbet. “We just tried to put the white noise of their lives in the background of whatever they’re struggling with. It’s typical kid stuff and what’s happening in the background is a very hyper-violent, hyper-sexualised culture.” Though Burnham doesn’t think this is all that different from how kids would have reacted during the duck-and-cover nuclear bomb drills that school kids in the 1950s endured, he does concede the whole process is scary and horrifying. “Columbine happened when I was nine and the spectre of a really violent act happening was always a part of my school life."

Corbet’s movie is more interested in looking at the bigger cultural picture, though. In line with new reporting standards, it doesn’t dwell on the perpetrators the way other films about mass killings have (see Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, Tim Sutton’s Dark Night or the found-footage films Zero Hour and The Dirties). Instead it focuses on survivors, following the character of Celeste—played as a teenager by Raffey Cassidy and as an adult by Natalie Portman—as she emerges from the trauma of the school shooting that opens the movie to become a stadium-filing pop star of Britney Spears/Lady Gaga/Taylor Swift proportions—a superstar who, by the time we catch up with her in 2017, is on the comeback trail having gone  spectacularly off the rails in the intervening years.

For Corbet, this merging of atrocity and its after effects with pop stardom and celebrity was a natural way to reflect on the first two decades of the 21st century. “When people talk about the early part of the new century,” he says, “I think that they are going to talk about school shootings, terrorism, 9/11 and, in equal measure, they will talk about Britney Spears and Taylor Swift and the pop-cultural sphere. And the reason that these things seem to overlap as the most iconic events of the 21st century has a lot to do with the news cycle. So when you open up your Apple News Updates, you have a headline about Kim Kardashian alongside a headline about 50 people dead in New Zealand. That’s unique to this generation.”

Part of what the film is exploring is the modern day desire to be iconic and be remembered at any cost. "The line between fame and infamy has really, really blurred,” says Corbet, who attributes this to both the corporatisation of celebrity and the way the rise of social media has encouraged ordinary people to market themselves as brands. But he also thinks this has changed the way terrorist atrocities like mass shootings are being perpetrated. If the 20th century was defined by what Hannah Arendt identified as  “the banality of evil”, Corbet—who explored Arendt’s ideas in his directorial debut Childhood of a Leader— thinks the 21st century is about the “pageantry of evil”. 

“Several weeks ago a man live-streamed himself shooting up a mosque,” he says, referencing the shooting in Christchurch again in order to illustrate what he means by the phrase. “It’s basically about the desire to be seen as you commit an atrocious act of violence. There’s a desire to go out with a bang,” he continues. “The young man who dressed up as the Joker a few years ago and shot up a movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado — I find something very disturbing about the pageantry of that gesture.” 

Corbet is careful not to suggest Vox Lux has any solutions; it’s merely his way of trying to make sense of the age in which he’s living and working. His protagonist, for all her monstrous behaviour in the second half of the film, is really suffering from ongoing PTSD— much like the nation as a whole.

“I think it’s a post-traumatic generation,” he surmises. “And the anxiety for this generation, it’s off the charts. They’re glued to their phones. There’s a sense that anyone could drop dead at any moment because we constantly have news updates about people who, for better or worse, you previously had never even heard of, but we are suddenly a part of that tragedy. How do we resolve that? How do we decide what to take in and what not to take in? You can’t just grieve all the time; you have to do some living too and be present for your kids. So it’s complicated. I think we’re all learning how this all works and how to cope with the moment that we’re living in.”