Honouring the best in Television and Cinema, the 82nd Golden Globe Awards were held tonight in Los Angeles. Leading the way in the Cinema categories was THE BRUTALIST taking Best Director (Brady Corbet), Actor (Adrien Brody) and Best Motion Picture Drama, strengthening its case for Best Picture at the impending Academy Awards in March.
But if anything, the race for Best Picture is as competitive as ever with Jacques Audiard‘s EMILIA PÉREZ also taking Best Motion Picture Comedy or Musical, Best Motion Picture Non-English Language, Best Original Song (“El Mal”), and Best Supporting Actress (Zoe Saldana).
Cinematic and Box Office Achievement would go to Jon M. Chu‘s WICKED, which also is in the running for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. The Film, released late November, already has grossed over $680 million globally.
FX‘s SHŌGUN dominated the Television categories, winning Best Television Series Drama, Best Actor in a Television Series Drama (Hiroyuki Sanada), Best Actress in a TV Series (Anna Sawai), and Best Supporting Actor in a Television Series (Tadanobu Asano).
In the Television Series Comedy categories, HBO‘s HACKS would dominate, taking Best Television Series Comedy and Best Actress in a Television Series Comedy (Jean Smart).
Some of the biggest surprises of the night include wins from THE SUBSTANCE star Demi Moore upsetting the Best Actress in a Motion Picture Comedy category, a category in which ANORA‘s Mikey Madison is seen as the frontrunner. Brazilian screen legend Fernanda Torres also would upset Best Actress in a Motion Picture Drama for her work in I’M STILL HERE, denying the likes of Nicole Kidman who has been lauded for her work in BABYGIRL.
Complete list of winners:
Our highlights on CBC News:
(Photo credit: Elevation Pictures)
By David Baldwin for Mr. Will Wong
Awards Season is in full swing, and if you have been following the buzz, chances are you have been reading or hearing all about THE BRUTALIST. The Film has been on the tip of many filmgoers’ tongues since its World Premiere at this year’s Venice Film Festival where its Co-Writer/Director Brady Corbet won the Silver Lion. The Film had its North American premiere at TIFF (read our Nicholas Porteous’ capsule coverage here) and is finally landing in Canadian theatres starting this week.
The Film centers on László Tóth (Oscar-winner Adrien Brody in one of his finest performances), a brilliant Hungarian-Jewish architect who has fled Europe for America following WWII. When he is tasked with building a community centre for wealthy industrialist Harrison Van Buren (the impeccable Guy Pearce), László envisions achieving the American Dream and the start of a new legacy. But as conflicts and competing egos arise, he quickly realizes there may not be any room for him or his art in his new country.
We had the incredible privilege of speaking to Corbet during a Zoom junket the day after he presented the film in 70mm at an Advance Screening at the TIFF Lightbox mid-December. Here are some of the things we learned during our candid and fascinating conversation:
What is your process or organizing principle when writing your Screenplays?
Corbet: I always start a project with themes as opposed to starting with characters. For me, each character is emblematic of an idea [or] is a mouthpiece for that idea. I think that that my wife [Co-Writer Mona Fastvold] and I write intuitively. We usually have spoken about a project for at least a year, if not two years before sitting down to execute a draft, so we know it very well. But before we put pen to paper…I’m constantly thinking about the defining events of an epoch. And all of my films are virtual histories and they’re concerned primarily with American culpability.
My first film, The Childhood of a Leader, is about how Woodrow Wilson and his team inadvertently paved the way for fascist uprising with their participation in in the Paris Peace Conference and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. Of course, Vox [Lux] is a film that is about 9/11 and Columbine being the sort of jumping-off point for the new Millennium [and how] the last twenty-five years having really been defined by those two events. And then [THE BRUTALIST] is a film about the post-war generation, which is a period of time [where] Conservatives in the US really romanticize[d] this 1950s Americana, when of course, everyone was processing the events of the 1940s [which] almost everyone in the world was affected by one way or another.
I think that I struggle a lot with Biographies, and I certainly struggle with most Biopics because they often represent history as being something linear. It’s a series of dates and figures. It’s cause and effect, cause and effect. Whereas I’m more interested in a sort of ambient tyranny. You know what is in the air? What’s in the water? What’s in the atmosphere that, you know is all contributing to these defining historical events and happenings?
How challenging was it to get THE BRUTALIST into production?
Corbet: I remember when we finished the Screenplay with this line from Zsófia as an adult saying, “In fact it is the destination, not the journey;” it dawned on us back in 2017, or whenever we first started, that it would probably be a long road. It was longer than we expected mostly because of Covid and the shutdowns. We were originally meant to shoot the film in Poland and the very day that my Crew was supposed to arrive to start pre-production, Poland shut their borders. And then the tax credit for a period of time became unstable a year later because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And so, we had to pivot and shoot the Film in Hungary…Finally we arrived at the top of 2022 and shot the Film in March. Then I was in post-production for two years. Primarily, because of the length of the picture. Also, for financial reasons.
How much did THE BRUTALIST cost to produce and did the budget cause any issues during post-production?
Corbet: We were continuing to raise money throughout the entire [production] because we actually started the Film with a budget of closer to $8-million. And it really didn’t fit inside of that box. I mean, you know $10-million was really the minimum and the maximum that the market would allow it to be made for…[The budgetary restrictions] mostly just affected our quality of life while we were making the Film. I believe it would have been the same Film [even] if we had an additional one and a half or two million dollars, I really do. But we wouldn’t have had to work seven days a week. We wouldn’t have had to work twenty-hour days. I mean, there was literally one day in the mix that was like twenty-three-hours long…I wouldn’t have wanted more [money] because with more money would have come more voices. More checks, more voices, more people – you know, more cooks in the kitchen.
And for me, when I pick up a novel, I don’t want to read a book that was written by twenty-four people. I certainly don’t want to read a book that was that was written by twenty-four executives at a streamer…A singular vision or singular point of view matters, and it’s something that we should encourage and foster culturally. Audiences actually do speak up. It seems to happen a lot in the world of these superhero films, where people hear about a Director’s Cut and start beating on a drum about it. But in fact, everyone should be beating on a drum for the Director’s Cut of absolutely every film.
The Film has more sexual content than many of its contemporary American brethren. Was that always the case, and has there been any pressure to remove any of it?
Corbet: Well, the Film was finally rated R, but I think it was kind of on the bubble for an NC-17. And you know, I just think it’s preposterous. I don’t know where [this Puritanism] comes from. It’s 2024 for Christ’s sake. And I mean this is how we all got here, so I find it odd to condemn the human body. I mean, you walk around a museum, and you know everyone’s fucking in every single painting.
I think that there’s a few things that are very important for this Film in particular, which is that this Movie is about a character that is trying to reclaim his body of work and about him reclaiming his body. We understand in the first ten minutes that he’s impotent following the war, and that even when he and his wife reconnect, it takes them a long time to physically reconnect. Imagine being away from your partner for seven to ten years – of course it’s like touching a stranger! You don’t know how to interface anymore. And so, it was very important to me to portray two survivors that are trying to reclaim their bodies for themselves again. Because they’ve been used and abused for over a decade at that point in the story. So yeah, I don’t know. I just don’t have…my wife is Norwegian and my in-laws are always skinnydipping and stuff during the holidays. I just I don’t think anything of it. It didn’t even occur to me that this Film might get an NC-17. And I’m very glad that finally it didn’t, because I never would have changed anything anyway. I don’t give a fuck.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Stay tuned for our full review!
Elevation Pictures release THE BRUTALIST exclusively in Toronto on
Wednesday, December 25, 2024 and throughout Canada starting in January 2025.
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