Please pay Brady Corbet!

The Brutalist director revealed something important in an interview last week: Some of your favorite filmmakers make little to money.

Image: A24

With the Oscars less than a week away, there was a surprise last week: Not a surprise awards precursor, but rather a revelation from an interview with an Oscar nominee.

Brady Corbet, the director of The Brutalist, appeared last week on the WTF with Marc Maron podcast and revealed that he and Mona Fastvold, his life and creative partner, have made “zero dollars” from their last two films, which were The Brutalist and 2018’s Vox Lux. The Brutalist has been nominated for ten Oscars, including Corbet himself for directing, producing, and co-writing.

Corbet also said that he recently went to Portugal to direct three commercials, marking “the first time I’ve made any money in years.”

Corbet added that he’s been out on the festival and awards circuit for the last six months or so, and not only is he not paid for that, but he hasn’t been able to take any other work — aside from those Portuguese commercials — while doing so. And even though The Brutalist has been successful at the box office, more than making back its $10 million budget, that doesn’t necessarily mean money in the director’s pocket.

A few thoughts on this:

• The Brutalist, regardless of how many Oscars it wins next Sunday, is a masterpiece and the best film of 2024. In a just world, its filmmaker should have profited handsomely from it.

• The parallels to the plot of The Brutalist, with Laszlo even waiving his fee for the building at one point, are obvious. The film was famously made for just $10 million despite looking way more expensive, so perhaps part of the savings came from the talent taking less than their customary quote.

• Once again, it’s often assumed, by the general public, that if someone is famous enough that you know their name, and you’ve seen them in the credits of a successful movie, and you’re watching them on a red carpet, then that person must have independent wealth. Not true!

• We can certainly hope, and possibly even expect, Brady Corbet, on the strength of The Brutalist, to get a bigger payday for his next couple of films. I’m not saying he needs to go out there and direct a Marvel or Star Wars picture. But now I’m feeling a bit guilty, having so judged Barry Jenkins for making that Lion King movie.

• Studios spend millions of dollars on these awards campaigns- might they be able to find some money in there to pay stipends for talent spending six months on the awards circuit? This might be something for the guilds to push for, next time their labor contracts come up.

At any rate, I recommend listening to Maron’s interview with Corbet, which followed an appearance on the same podcast last month by the film’s star Adrien Brody, in which he revealed he’s still really ticked off, more than 25 years later, that he was largely cut out of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line.