Brady Corbet Says ‘The Brutalist’ Made Him “Zero Dollars” & Fellow Oscar-Nominated Directors “Can’t Pay Their Rent”
Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, one of the favorites this awards season, did not bring in a single dime for the independent director.
Following a run of advertising gigs in Portugal that proved to be “the first time that I had made any money in years,” the director of Vox Lux made an appearance on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast yesterday to talk about the sweeping American immigrant epic, which has been nominated for ten Oscars.
Corbet, who directed The Brutalist based on a script written by himself and his wife and collaborator Mona Fastvold, claimed that the two “made zero bucks on the past two films that we made.” Maron was taken aback by the claim and repeated, “Yes. Zero, actually. We were forced to make do with a paycheck from three years prior.
“I have talked to a lot of filmmakers who have films nominated this year who are having trouble paying their rent,” he added. That is a reality, after all.
This is due to the fact that Corbet and other filmmakers like him are frequently occupied with a months-long international publicity tour that promotes their work without receiving compensation. “If you consider some of the films that debuted at the Cannes picture Festival, that was nearly a year ago. Our picture, for example, debuted in September. Since I do not have the time to go to work, I have been doing this for six months with no money. Right now, I am unable to even accept a writing position.
“A six-month interrogation” is how Corbet characterized the “everything all at once” and “boundless” promotion that preceded and followed the release during the campaign season.
In addition to traveling constantly, you work on Saturdays and Sundays. He claimed to have done “around 90 interviews last week” in a publicity run akin to a junket, adding, “I have not had a day off since the Christmas break.”
Corbet’s history as an actor and the film’s themes of masculine ego and the relationship between art and legacy were also discussed in the conversation.
“Brady’s big-swing, small-scale epics — The Brutalist chief among them — are transforming the way movies are made in our maximalist era of algorithmic content creation and franchise fatigue,” Natalie Portman, a former collaborator who starred in Corbet’s Vox Lux in 2018, wrote in a guest column for Deadline earlier today.
In addition to being nominated for Best Picture, Actor, Directing, and Writing, The Brutalist is tied with Wicked for second-most nominations, trailing only Netflix’s Emilia Pérez. The 215-minute story follows László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian Jewish architect who fled the Holocaust and immigrated to the United States in an attempt to rebuild his marriage, career, and life. After settling in a strange Pennsylvania and waiting for his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), the visionary is noticed by Guy Pearce, a wealthy businessman. The extensive story, which includes a 15-minute intermission, covers three decades of post-war America and scathingly examines the intricate relationships between alienation, exploitation, and innovation.
