Director Brady Corbet has said he made “$0” from his Oscar-nominated movie The Brutalist during an interview highlighting the financial precariousness facing many filmmakers.
“I just directed three advertisements in Portugal … it’s the first time that I had made any money really in years,” Corbet said on the podcast WTF with Marc Maron.
“Both my partner and I made $0 on the last two films that we made … So we had to just sort of live off of a pay cheque from three years ago,” he said in an episode released on Monday (Tuesday AEDT).
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For his work directing The Brutalist, Corbet has won almost every major award this season so far – including the Golden Globes and BAFTA Awards.
His film, a sweeping three-and-a-half-hour-long epic that depicts fictional architect László Tóth, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor starting over in the United States, has been nominated for 10 Academy Awards.
Corbet said he isn’t the only filmmaker struggling with the financial state of the industry, adding that he’s spoken to many others who “have films that are nominated this year that can’t pay their rent”.
After their movies have premiered, directors embark on promotional tours and awards campaigns, which are often months-long, take up all their time and are unpaid.
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“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 work. I can’t even take a writing job at the moment,” Corbet said, detailing the “crazy” travel involved in promoting a film internationally and in the US.
“I haven’t had a day off since the Christmas break and that was only four days,” Corbet said of working seven days a week while promoting the film.
He laughed that among the career highs, “you look your worst and feel your worst”.
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For all its scope and ambition, The Brutalist – starring Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce – was made relatively cheaply by Hollywood standards, on a budget of about $10 million.
Still, it took Corbet seven years to make, and several attempts to piece together the financing required to fund it.
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