When Brady Corbet accepted the Golden Globe for best dramatic film on behalf of The Brutalist on Sunday, the 36-year-old American director made some off-the-cuff remarks about creative freedom.
“I just wanted to leave everyone with something to think about: Final-cut tiebreak goes to the director,” Corbet told the crowd, in what was his second speech of the night after winning best director earlier in the evening. “It’s sort of a controversial statement. It shouldn’t be. It shouldn’t be controversial at all.”
“Final cut tirebreak” is the idea that if a director and a financier disagree over a creative choice on a film, the director’s vision should be the one to prevail. It’s a contractual privilege that A-list Hollywood directors like Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg enjoy, but that most filmmakers don’t have, especially in the U.S.
Corbet’s remarks on behalf of creators reflect some of the core ideas in the storyline of The Brutalist, in which Adrien Brody plays an architect working with the financial backing of an abusive industrialist played by Guy Pearce (Brody also won a Golden Globe Sunday night for his performance in the film).
In his Globes speech, Corbet talked about the ways in which The Brutalist, an independently financed, less than $10 million epic that A24 released in the U.S. Dec. 20, rode out potential encroachments of his vision. “I was told that this film was un-distributable,” Corbet said on stage, of naysayers he encountered while setting up the film. “I was told that no one would come out and see it. I was told the film wouldn’t work. No one was asking for a three-and-a-half hour film about a midcentury designer on 70 millimeter. But it works. So please, just think about it.”
Corbet, who previously directed 2018’s Vox Lux and 2015’s The Childhood of a Leader, has alluded to experiences in his career in which he chafed at creative control. In November, during the taping of THR‘s directors roundtable, Corbet talked about experiences he and his wife, Norwegian filmmaker Mona Fastvold, his co-writer on The Brutalist, have had on previous films. “[The Brutalist] was written as a sort of exorcism and response to a lot of what my wife and I had been through,” Corbet said. “I don’t have a problem with the bottom line ever. I can make a movie with a shopping cart and a piece of string and two cups, no problem. But I don’t want to be told how to move sand around in the box. You give me that number, but don’t tell me how to spend it.”
On The Brutalist, a first attempt to set up the film in 2021 with a cast including Joel Edgerton, Mark Rylance and Marion Cotillard fell apart amid the expense of new COVID protocols, and when Corbet ultimately shot in the spring of 2023 in Hungary and Italy, it was with Brody and Pearce, and with Felicity Jones. Despite his fiery speech, Corbet has said he had a positive experience with the Brutalist producers, which include Brookstreet Pictures, Kaplan Morrison, ALP, Budapest-based Proton Cinema and Intake Films.
“My partners on this film were incredibly supportive, and I didn’t have any antagonists in this process,” he said, during the roundtable taping. “We didn’t have a lot of money, but we had a lot of faith.”
Golden Globes producer Dick Clark Productions is owned by Penske Media Eldridge, a joint venture between Penske Media Corporation and Eldridge that also owns The Hollywood Reporter.
