The Brutalist director Brady Corbet said that he “made zero dollars” from the Oscar-nominated film.
Corbet’s comments come on the heels of the BAFTAs, where The Brutalist won four awards –Brady took home best director, Adrien Brody won best actor for his role as Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor, László Tóth, and the film also won best original score and cinematography.
Corbet and Brody both took home best director and best actor at the Golden Globes, in addition to winning best film.
The Brutalist has received a whopping 10 nominations at the forthcoming 97th Academy Awards, and has been considered a frontrunner on the awards circuit this year despite controversy over the use of AI in the film.
Appearing on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, Corbet said that he had been living paycheck to paycheck, and multiple filmmakers were in a similar situation.
“I just directed three advertisements in Portugal,” Corbet said. “It’s the first time that I had made any money in years.”
The Vox Lux director explained that he and wife Mona Fastvold, who co-wrote the screenplay for The Brutalist, “made zero dollars on the last two films that we made”.
Responding to Maron’s surprise, Corbet said: “Yes. Actually, zero. We had to just sort of live off of a paycheck from three years ago.”
Corbet went on, saying many other filmmakers are also struggling to make ends meet.
“I’ve spoken to many filmmakers that have the films that are nominated this year that can’t pay their rent. I mean, that’s a real thing.”
Explaining that filmmakers are “not paid to be promoting a film,” he continued: “If you look at certain films that premiered in Cannes, that was almost a year ago… I mean, our film premiered in September. So I’ve been doing this for six months. And had zero income because I don’t have any time to go to work. I can’t even take a writing job at the moment.”
On the long awards campaign and press circuit he’s currently on, Corbet said it felt like “a six-month interrogation,” and that he had just completed 90 interviews last week.
“It’s seven days a week,” he said. “It’s boundless. It’s constant travel, and you’re also working Saturdays and Sundays. I haven’t had a day off since the Christmas break, and that was also only four days.”
The Brutalist spans 30 years and explores the life of Hungarian Jewish architect László Tóth, who survives the Holocaust and, after emigrating to America with his wife, played by Felicity Jones, crosses paths with the mysterious Harrison Lee Van Buren, played by Guy Pearce, who changes the course of his life.
In a five-star review of The Brutalist for The Independent, Clarisse Loughrey wrote: “It’s not a film to devour, but to be devoured by. There’s such a weight to it that it creates its own field of gravity – which, coupled with the same fierce cynicism of Corbet’s previous films, The Childhood of a Leader (2015) and his pop star psychodrama Vox Lux (2018), turns a traditional historical epic into an existentially disturbing monster movie. The monster in question, of course, is America.”
