Michel Mann, An Interview and An Essay

 

 

Michael Mann’s Thief received mixed reviews and only modest box-office success when it opened in 1981, but it has since become acknowledged as a classic. This is nothing new for Mann, some of whose films have taken years, even decades, to find their audience. But the cosmic influence of Thief — which came out on 4K from the Criterion Collection earlier this month, and is among a collection of Mann films streaming on the Criterion Channel right now — was felt not long after its release. With its waves of electronica, its foregrounding of style, its pendulum swings between romanticism and alienation, the movie turned out to be one of the harbingers of what many deemed the MTV aesthetic.

But there is more to Thief’s achievement. Mann saw the film as a decidedly political work, showing how an independent, high-end thief, Frank (James Caan), was co-opted and exploited by the notorious Chicago Outfit. Frank, who has spent much of his life in prison, initially resists these mob bosses’ overtures. But he’s got a plan for his life, and it involves marrying Jessie (Tuesday Weld), a woman he’s just started dating and who agrees to start a family after an unforgettable late-night coffee-shop conversation (one of several long, iconic coffee-shop scenes that dot Mann’s oeuvre). Which means that now, all of a sudden, Frank needs more money. So, he agrees to work with the Outfit in order to get bigger scores. These men in turn try to run his life and keep most of his share, so they can invest it in new shopping mall developments. Mann has always said that Thief’s central dynamic of labor and exploitation could easily be transposed to other workplaces. Frank effectively quotes Karl Marx’s labor theory of value when he tells Leo (Robert Prosky), the alternately avuncular and demonic Outfit boss who seeks to control him, “I can see my money is still in your pocket, which is from the yield of my labor.” When I interviewed him in 2023, Mann noted that he saw that line pop up on pickets during that year’s WGA-SAG strike.

This is also why the contemporaneous criticisms of the picture as style over substance ring so hollow today. Watching Thief, yes, we’re naturally mesmerized by its nocturnal compositions, its lovely sense of melancholy, its almost abstract robbery sequences filled with sparks and flames bursting off steel vaults. But there are emotional, political, and narrative undercurrents at work here. “You’re making big profits from my work, my risk, my sweat,” Frank tells Leo. And we see Frank’s work, his risk, his sweat: The film spends an unusual amount of screen time portraying how he and his partners prepare for their scores, gathering and building the right equipment, evading alarm systems and police; then it spends even more time showing the jobs themselves, as these men lug giant pieces of equipment (all real tools used by the professional thieves Mann hired as consultants on the film) into bank vaults and exhaust themselves drilling holes in safes. Mann dwells on these scenes not just because they’re spectacular and hypnotic to watch — they are — but because he wants to convey the fact that this is all, in fact, labor. By the time Frank sits down in front of his handiwork to take a deep breath and light a cigarette, we feel his exhaustion, his relief, his sense of a hard job well done. And, of course, we feel his frustration when the yield of that labor is taken from him.

I’ve spoken to Mann a few times over the years about his work. But we’d never really gone deep on Thief specifically. The occasion of this 4K release seemed like the right time to do so. (And yes, I did ask him about Heat 2.)

Thief was such a visually arresting film for its era. Was there a lot of visual research you did for it — films, photographs, things like that?

 
Not affecting the visualization. The visualization of it was: How do I want you to feel about Frank relative to the city he’s operating within, the circumstances of his life? I wanted you to see and feel that city from within his perspective. For Frank, Chicago is not this flat city built on the Great Plains. It’s a three-dimensional matrix. It’s a maze that he has to operate in and also decode and pursue. So, I took advantage of what Chicago looks like when it rains. Because as the black streets get reflective and the lights reflect off them, you feel like you’re driving through a tunnel, not like you’re driving on top of a surface. We wet down the streets at night so they would be reflective, and that became the camera perspective, as well as him having that black ’71 Eldorado and seeing the lights reflected all over the car as he moved through it.

This sense of him moving through a tunnel also highlights his loneliness, which feels crucial to the fact that he then falls in love. 

 
I don’t know that he’s lonely as much as alone. He views life very much as an outsider, and he’s aware of it. I thought of him as a certain kind of conventional character in literature, which is the wild child. Somebody who, because of his circumstances, has grown up outside of society. In Frank’s case, he has been in prison from when he was 18 to sometime in his late 30s. He didn’t have TV. Then he’s suddenly dropped into this society and its mores, the values, the culture — this matrix of life as it is in 1980. How does he prepare himself? Who will I be? How should I conduct myself? What should my life be? So, he’s using sources like magazines and newspapers to put together that collage. Okay, I’m going to have a car. What kind of car should I have? I’m going to have a house. What kind of house should I have? Should I have a wife? Should I not have a wife?

He also, like a lot of convicts that I met, used the time in prison to read. It was reading and researching how life is for an extremely pragmatic purpose: “Why should I not commit suicide and just end this?” That goes back to experiences I had with some convicts in Folsom when I was casting The Jericho Mile. I had guys quoting Immanuel Kant to me. One guy was quoting the labor theory of value. He had become a Marxist and a Buddhist at the same time, because he needed to get an answer to the question: “What is my life to myself?” This was a guy with a sixth-grade education. They’d go into libraries and say, “I’m doing time. Give me a book on time.” I cast 28 convicts in roles in The Jericho Mile. There’s a guy I tried to cast who said, “No, man, I like what you said you’re doing here and everything, but I can’t be in your movie.” I asked him why. And he said, “Because if I allowed myself to be in your movie, I would allow you to appropriate the surplus capital of my bad karma.” And he wasn’t being cute. Inherent in that answer was the fact that he saw the time he was doing as his labor, and that the reason he was doing time was because he had bad karma in the first place, i.e., he got caught.

This idea of labor runs throughout Thief. It’s there in the opening scene: You show that the work Frank does really is work. The heavy equipment, the long hours, the patience required to stand there and drill a hole forever. I’ve seen a million heist movies, but I’ve never seen one that actually says: This is someone’s labor. 

 
By the way, the prep they do is kind of like how you make a movie, in a funny way. How efficiently you prepare, research, plan what you’re going to do. How are you going to bypass the alarm systems, how are you going to go in, how are you going to monitor the date, the time. If it’s something in the northwest side of Chicago, it would be great to do it during the daytime, during a Cubs game because all the cops are at Wrigley Field. What’s the composition of the safe? Because safe manufacturers are very clever in what they do. You can’t just drill a hole through a piece of metal. You have to know where the lockbox is. You have to know how this particular safe manufacturer put different layers of metals within what you want to drill through, because there’ll be some that are designed to bind the drill. There’ll be others that are very hard. There may be a glass wall on the inside that if you shatter it, it sets off a secondary alarm that you didn’t know about.

And among guys who are proficient like that, it is labor. It is work. The detectives who go after them, who are really good, are respectful of those thieves who are good. It doesn’t affect their drive and their motivation to intercept them one iota. Charlie Adamson is in the movie as a detective. He’s the guy who says to Frank, “Why you got to come on like such a stiff prick? We got ways here to round off the corners.” Charlie in real life is the guy who killed Neil McCauley in 1963, and who told me the story of his meeting with McCauley, which I used as the basis of the relationship in Heat.

John Santucci, who was a professional thief, was a source for me in Thief. All the burglary tools that we had weren’t props. They were John’s burglary tools. Later, he became a continuing character on Crime Story. But the most fundamental realization I had from my contact with Santucci was a very profound understanding that his life is just like yours and mine. He’s got domestic concerns. He’s got two kids, he’s got some marital issues with his wife. I had to liberate myself from the inherited stereotype and archetype of who thieves are. Who is he as a person? What’s he thinking? What’s he feeling? What’s his outlook on the world? All of that led to the construction of the screenplay.

Santucci and Chuck Adamson were both advisers on the film, along with other people who had been thieves and some who had been cops. What was that like, having all those people on a film set together?

 
It was hilarious! First of all, they all knew each other, even though they were on opposite sides of the fence. So, you know, “You pain in the ass, we were there when you were taking down the Wieboldt’s store,” and “We’ve been trying to get you for …” This is some of the dialogue that was happening in bars over drinks. It was very Chicago, if you like. It was very Brechtian in a way, because Chicago is a very Brechtian city, at least it was then.

Some of them, like the guy who played Leo’s number two, Bob Prosky’s number two, the one with red hair, Bill Brown, he was on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, I don’t know, 20, 30 years after the movie. I don’t think they ever got him. And then Dennis Farina and I connected on the work in Thief, and we became very close friends the rest of our lives until he died tragically a number of years ago. He worked with Santucci when we were doing the pilot and then the Crime Story series.

What do you mean when you say Chicago was a Brechtian city?

 
Chicago had a kind of democratic corruption when I was growing up in the 1950s. Everybody had the inalienable right to have a $20 bill parked behind their driver’s license when they got stopped running a red light. You didn’t have to be Standard Oil of New Jersey to round off the corners, in other words. In the same way that every alderman had X number of jobs they could hand out, kind of no-show jobs — you work two days, you get paid for five. If there was a blizzard Wednesday night and your street wasn’t plowed by nine o’clock in the morning on Thursday, you called your alderman and a plow was out there in 30 minutes. There was a certain healthy, I think, urban cynicism about the systems, and yet the systems worked, in a funny way. Well, some of the systems worked. There was institutionalized racism. And Chicago was also extremely Balkanized. The only city with more Poles in it than Chicago was Warsaw. So, you had Polish bakeries and everything else. Same thing with the Ukrainians, the Irish, the southwest side and everything.

 

 

The coffee-shop conversation with Tuesday Weld is one of the greatest dialogue scenes ever. Obviously, these kinds of conversations show up in other films of yours. What’s the secret to creating a long dialogue scene like that?

 
I asked myself the question, Can I really tell an entire story within this scene? It’s one reel, back when filming movies used to be on reels — a ten-minute-long scene. And so right in the middle of this feature film, I stop and tell this entire origin story. There was some risk inherent in it to me. I was concerned about whether it would work. It was key to understanding who Frank is, his desperation, and these two untethered lives coming together.

That particular booth is a booth I sat in with the woman who became my wife. One time when I was driving her home, we stopped for a cup of coffee and sat there and talked for, I don’t know, probably six hours. This coffee shop on a span over the Tri-State Tollway, I don’t even know if it was a Fred Harvey’s at the time. And something about the way the cars were constantly moving, that became visually analogous to a bloodstream. Life’s moving through. People are going places. There’s motion all the time. All these myriad lives that are passing you by, coming towards you, going away from you, and you’re in a span over it. And he’s telling her in the most urgent way about this yearning that he has. And off of it, he elects to make a mistake: He drops a coin and tells Leo he’ll work with him at the end, which is the ironic twist.

There’s another thing about this scene that really strikes me now. Caan is showing Weld his vulnerability, he’s opening up in this really sincere way. And conversely, she’s showing him how tough she really is. There’s that great moment where she says, “Where were you in prison? Pass the cream, please.” The back-and-forth, the collision of these two characters, develops in a fascinating way throughout. Was that all scripted?

 
It’s totally scripted, absolutely. You have this recounting of one’s life. “Here’s who I’ve been, and this is why I am the way I am right now and I want you to be part of what I’m trying to construct, which is outside all the societal norms and values. But the two of us can have something.” From the point of view of writing it, when you’re faced with that, you start thinking there needs to be some other things going on for it to stay real. It can’t decay into speechifying. It has to be dramatic. So, you’re looking for those helpful impediments to the flow of the narrative so that you have not a leitmotif, but a micro motif. “You’re having coffee?” “Pass the cream.” “Pass the sugar.”

When I was writing TV, when I first began as a writer, I used to work at an all-night restaurant in Los Angeles called Canter’s. I used to sit in a booth. Sometimes, I would wind up sitting there for 24 hours drinking a lot of coffee. I became very friendly with all the waitresses. There was a fantastic waitress named Jeannie who put two sons through medical school working at Canter’s and playing poker in Gardino. She was kind of a favorite, so I brought her out from L.A., and she’s the waitress who shows up with the cream. When she says, “What’s wrong with it?” And he says, “What’s wrong with it? It’s cottage cheese.”

This scene helps develop these two characters, but it also serves a specific narrative purpose. Once he realizes that this woman is willing to start a family with him, he decides to go to Leo and accept his offer of working for the Outfit, because now he needs the big scores — and then it really becomes a story of labor exploitation. 

 
One of the fundamental things in Frank’s profession as a thief, particularly in Chicago and particularly in those years, is: “What should my relationship with organized crime be, with the Chicago Outfit?” That comes from my research. I talked to professional thieves about their relationship. Ideally, as a professional thief, you don’t want to be hooked up with the Chicago Outfit because you’ll have to down your merch to Outfit fences, and you’re going to get 30 cents on the dollar instead of 50 cents on the dollar. And you’ll be asked to do things you may not want to do. You don’t want to be working for the man. You don’t want to be an employee.

You’ve said in the past that American critics didn’t really get the political and ideological aspects of Thief. Why do you think that was?

 
I can’t explain why, but it is a cultural perspective, if you like. It wasn’t the case in Europe. In Europe, the film was perceived as, “Oh, this is about the labor theory of value.” Frank quotes it.

I wonder if in the U.S. we sometimes shy away from political readings of films, almost because we’re afraid to touch it. And in Europe, people understand the politics latent in the drama. 

 
Yeah. I lived in Europe. I went through graduate film school for two years in London in the late ’60s. I’m very much a product of the ’60s, so the film has an overtly left perspective. I wrote the film in the late ’70s, and here I am in 1980 doing it, so it was not very far removed from all the issues that everybody was living through in the ’60s and ’70s.

What are your memories of James Caan? You guys did the commentary on the film back when it first came out on Blu-ray, and it sounds like you really got along. 

 
He was terrific. He was down for the cause. He wanted to master all the skill sets that his character should have. Because he knew that it would affect his speech. He knew it would affect how he picked up a glass. It would affect everything. Most importantly, the fact that you can do all these things in real life imbues you with a confidence. For example, when you feel an inner rage and something’s about to come out, but then because of the scene, you’re supposed to repress it, but you then also have to figure out, “How am I going to get out of this office having pulled a .45?” The wariness of it. Everything about what he’s doing is informed by the fact that Jimmy could do every single thing in reality that his character could do.

Any good film, we’re connected to it and moved by it; we’re in the scene with the actors. The heart of that connection is that we’re very smart animals, and every part of our brain is believing what we’re seeing, because of the authenticity. That other human being, James Caan in this case, he is Frank. It means all the training that Jimmy did, where he was drilling safes. We did time out at a place called Gunsite, Arizona, with a guy named Jeff Cooper on training with weapons. Jimmy could really handle himself. He’d been a college football player and everything, he was very athletic. He was a very tough guy to begin with.

Your work is on the Criterion Channel right now, to coincide with the 4K release of Thief on Criterion. Is there a film of yours you wish more people would see and discover and appreciate? 

 
For me, it’d be The Insider. For myself, that was very challenging. It’s a tense psychological drama that takes place in two hours and 45 minutes. The ambition of it is the challenge: Can I engage and deliver the intensity that Jeffrey Wigand and Lowell Bergman lived through? In Lowell Bergman’s case, your life’s work may be trashed, and you may be excluded. In Jeffrey Wigand’s case, with the assault upon you and your family, you’re reduced to the edge of suicide. So, it’s a psychological assault by your adversaries, and it’s a mortal threat. Both in the construction of the screenplay that Eric Roth and I wrote, but also directorially and cinematically, how was I going to bring the audience into the intensity of that experience? Naturally, it was a wonderful place to push myself into. Personally, I felt that I pushed myself onto a frontier, and I always feel that those are very healthy places to be.

 

 

 

It seems that over the past 15 or so years, there’s been a resurgence of interest in your films — even with some that weren’t seen as successes at the time of their release. Obviously, I think the movies are great, but why do you think people are connecting with your work now?

 
I don’t like to speculate. I think it may have to do with what’s in the work. I’m not a journeyman director; I’d like to be, because I love shooting. But I put a lot into a film, and so I think sometimes they have layers of relating. They’re not simple. They may be totally accessible — not all my films, but some of them may be accessible just as something that’s going to flow, just going to occupy you for two hours, or two hours and 45 minutes in the case of Heat and Insider — but there’s also a lot there, because my ambition was to put a lot of depth into it. I probably shouldn’t even be answering this question to tell you the truth.

 

 

Can I ask what’s going on with Heat 2? 

 
I just finished the screenplay and handed in the first draft.

In a case like this, who do you hand your screenplay in to?

 
In this case it was Warner Brothers. Any more than that, I can’t talk about. But it’s an exciting project.

 

‘I Probably Shouldn’t Even Be Answering This Question’ Michael Mann on why American critics dismissed Thief, and what’s going on with Heat 2. By Bilge Ebiri. Vulture, March 27, 2025.

 

 

 

There is a short scene in the 2023 movie Ferrari that I have not stopped thinking about since I saw it. It comes just moments after we meet the titular carmaker: a train pulls into a station and a man walks off. He has a leather duffel bag, tailored clothing, sunglasses. He glances in one direction, then the next, walking steadily, with precision, trailed by several attendants equally impressive in outfit, gait, and demeanor. None of these men looks at anyone else. They look instead at the horizon, walk patiently toward it, as if merely tolerating the compromises of mass transportation.

The man is the Maserati driver Jean Behra, an awed onlooker reports into a telephone. This piece of information travels through several nodes: we watch it run like lightning through the Italian countryside—this man is the Maserati driver Jean Behra. A car arrives to pick Behra up from the station—driven by men, more men—but still no one acknowledges one another. They drive away. Behra is introduced not as some supernatural visitation but as a mechanical force within this universe, noticed intensely by others but impassively by the camera—it doesn’t make a fuss of it. It responds as coolly as Behra’s colleagues and handlers do. Act like you’ve been here before. Act like you know how the Maserati driver Jean Behra lives, works, moves.

He is a man beheld by Michael Mann. He is a Mann man.

I held on to this image for weeks after watching Ferrari, thinking about the way Michael Mann presents men. Perhaps, I thought, I need a new duffel bag. The director became famous in the 1980s for a string of crime dramas across television and film. He helmed the early serial Crime Story (1986–88), pitched in scripts on Starsky & Hutch (1975–79), and then served as executive producer on the first two seasons of the stylish hit Miami Vice (1984–90). Of his three feature films from that decade, his first, 1981’s Thief, is the best, one of film history’s clearest debuts-as-thesis-statements, up there with Breathless, Eraserhead, Blood Simple. The first time you see the titular thief, he is hoisting a drill the size of a dishwasher against a vault. Synthesizers churn like ambient heat. Chicago is a neon latticework of fire escapes against which the thief, steadily, works. That is more or less all the thief in Thief does: work. The work is a means to an end—an exit—a better life, a family, a suburban estate. He visualizes this dream on a collage assembled in jail, manifesting what awaits on the other side of not just prison walls but also the years of labor to ensue upon his release.

 

 

That he would thieve again, outside the clink, was never in question. The thief perceives his skills as his identity, his identity as an economic actor. “I’m a thief!” he screams at the waitress he’s attempting to enlist as the wife for this vision. “[L]et’s cut the mini-moves and the bullshit and get on with this big romance.” It works. She stands in the glass frame of his dream house and they talk about children, adoption, retirement. It falls apart, mostly, by the end of the movie—not because the thief did anything wrong by dreaming but because he trusted a mid-level crime boss as the means to achieve it. When the thief finds this well-fed broker skimming money from him, “reinvesting” his earnings against his wishes, the thief seethes, “You’re making big profits from my work, my risk, my sweat. But that is okay, because I elected to make that deal. But now, the deal is over. I want my end, and I am out.”

“Why don’t you join a labor union?” the broker spits, mask slipping.

“I am wearing it,” the thief says, referring to his gun and standing up as if to use it. Various men assemble around him. “My money in 24 hours,” the thief retorts before leaving, “or you will wear your ass for a hat.”

The movie ends with the thief blowing the crime boss’s brains out in an otherwise soundless suburban living room. Then the thief walks off into the night, wounded but alive.

I haven’t had a boss for a couple of years, in part because of how much I sympathize with the thief in this regard. There’s a certain position you can get to where you can see the talent for what it is, the way owners and administrators siphon from it. Freelancing is hard—terrifying if you have a mortgage, a family, a middle-class upbringing. It helps to be a little pathological about things, to watch Michael Mann movies as if you yourself had something to learn from their protagonists.

The thief is the first great Mann man. But across five decades, a dozen features, and multiple TV shows, the writer-director would continue to refine, challenge, and build upon the definition. That the Mann man is a consummate professional goes without saying. It is assumed. The Mann man is an expert who travels only with other experts, working alongside handlers who understand his stark gifts. After the thief in Thief, few mess with bosses, working for themselves instead. Some men support the Mann man, stoically awaiting directives, while others—journalists, crooked cops, bosses, lesser cons—leach. Things do not end well for the parasites.

The Mann man attracts both types as he plies his trade, sometimes terrible, always profitable. When a man is this good at his job, money flows organically toward him not just as a function of the skill set but also as an almost causal response to the stimulus of his talent. Because it is not merely a job; it is a calling. It is a will to greatness. “Take pride in being good at what you do?” a high-powered lawyer asks a taxi driver as he skillfully navigates Downtown Los Angeles. “I am the greatest,” Muhammad Ali replies. The line between the two isn’t that far, in Mann’s estimation. We sometimes see Mann men working beneath their station—doing menial work, washing dishes—but it is presented as an error in the order of things, clocked and rectified by titular Mann men immediately. The vocation is the title of the movie is the Mann man. The thief in Thief, the manhunter in Manhunter (1986), the insider in The Insider (1999). The Mann man dresses immaculately, in tailored suits, wristwatch gleaming. He has a temper, a capacity for violence. Many live in icy minimalism aside an electric blue ocean that they gaze over in the predawn morning, a woman in bed nearby, warm, still sleeping. He will not say goodbye to her before he leaves for work. He will come home late. He will not respond to questions about where he’s been. He has been working.

He does almost nothing for fun. The only thing a Mann man ever does that seems like fun is go to a nightclub, and even then, it is absolutely for work—to make a phone call, to stage a handoff in a backroom, to kill a man. He drinks but never too much. We do not ever see him sleep, but we may see his dreams: icy and perfect visions of the future or the past, of work or what work might yield.

Most people agree that Heat (1995) is Mann’s best movie. It’s certainly a turning point for him, a culmination of years of work in which all his stylistic throughways—dreamlike soundscapes, ruthlessly logical plotting, roughneck philosophical reveries—coalesce into something operatic, epochal. It’s Mann’s second crack at the story of an L.A. detective tracking a crew of highly professional thieves as they prepare for a bank heist, and the first iteration, the 1989 TV movie L.A. Takedown, plays it as straight as that description sounds. Heat goes galactic. No less than three superstar actors get top billing; all play Mann men, Al Pacino in particular responding to the prompt with such over-the-top swagger that he risks rupturing the keening romanticism at the movie’s core.

 

 

But it’s right, it’s just right. The film is big enough. Robert De Niro, opposite him, is the first to play a Mann man small, simmering, constrained—a mode that ensuing leads would take cues from. Val Kilmer goes hot with it—tempestuous, young. Part of Heat’s legacy is its scale. Thief had one Mann man, Manhunter and Miami Vice a handful, but in Heat Mann assembles the greatest task force of noticeable Guys in film history, a semi full of Guys T-boning the armored truck of your action-movie cortex: there’s Sizemore, there’s Haysbert, there’s Studi, there’s Trejo (playing a man named Trejo). They all play Mann men, and they keep coming. You are still reeling from the mid-film introduction of Tom Noonan—you are still intoning “Tom Noonan” into an empty room because you saw him, you recognized Tom Noonan on the screen—when Jon Voight (!) places a phone call to William Fichtner (!!) and his bodyguard is Henry Rollins (!!!). This all happens in the same scene. These are devastating body blows to the action-movie viewer, from which recovery is impossible. The film itself is a redefinition of the form, its apex, but so singularly stylized as to be alien. Emotional turning points are set to surrealist trance music; De Niro and Pacino first lock eyes through a security system’s ghoulish night vision relay, dead silent. It has the largeness of myth, of shared hallucination.

And yet, all these men are mere chorus to the two Mann men at the center. The film’s famous diner scene, in which the two storied leads sit across from each other for the first time and discuss their careers as peers, is great talking to great, Mann to Mann, their eye movements and asides signaling things only the other can understand. What the work has meant. What it has cost them. That this climactic meeting doubles as a venue for the actors themselves meeting face-to-face (Mann filmed it, famously, in one long take, with minimal rehearsal) is just one way in which the director tells the viewer that the work transcends the frame. The actors are part of it, you are part of it. He is speaking to you as they speak to each other: mature, knowing, wry, respectful. Obsessive. To watch a Mann movie is to be swept into a seductive cosmos of pure tradecraft, of cops who respect robbers, of hackers nodding knowingly at lines of code. Of the oblivion men will seek to be the best at something, to succeed within a shadow ecosystem in which the craft and the skill are almost removed from the man, larger than him, drawing him necessarily and mechanically into conflict with the other players in his field.

The title of the movie is spoken by De Niro—“Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner”—but the heat the movie evokes is something larger than any one man or agency. All of Mann’s movies gesture toward some larger system, an economy of information and power, unknowable in its vastness. Even Manhunter suggests a psychic network accessible only to murderers and deviants. Mann men probe the borders, valuations, and trade-offs of their contextual systems. They meet to exchange information in empty vistas of logistical infrastructure. Bleating mechanical light, steam, night air. Under planes and overpasses. Heat begins on a train; it ends after a terse shoot-out amid shipping containers, planes taking off and landing overhead. The two Mann men finally grasp hands as one dies, consummating an understanding arrived at in the diner. Pacino looks off into the night sky. God moves over the face of the waters, but men only float for so long.

After Heat, Mann set about dismantling the conventions of the very genre he had perfected. His next film, The Insider, is my favorite of his, turning a tobacco exec’s attempts to expose the industry’s malevolence into a three-hour symphony of men in suits snarling at each other. I can credibly say it changed my life, presenting journalism as a vocation in which information can be secured, surfaced, and presented as a tool of opposition to power. I was in eighth or ninth grade at the time and knew immediately that I wanted to devote my life to the practice that would be systematically weakened and dismantled almost entirely by the time I graduated college. Ah! Well, nevertheless. Viewed today, it’s quaint to watch information flow through the physical world via shoe-leather journalism, appointment television viewing, the data dump of print newspapers on a street corner—not to mention the way this flow is facilitated as part of an institutional structure, a necessary component of society, toward an assumed and willing audience. My heart sings to watch this work done.

Mann, too, relishes the work of journalism, staging editorial meetings like heist sequences, Pacino (now in a less swaggy register) dictating intercuts to maximize the power of the titular insider’s testimony. Many of Mann’s films crackle with the energy of great journalism, whether through the rigorous research employed in safecracking techniques, the taut framing of real-life incident in 2001’s Ali, or the utilization of nonprofessional actors to heighten a given drama’s credibility. The film is most alive at its most procedural: depositions, production meetings, footage reviews. Mann is a relentless editor too. Composers who have worked with him bemoan his capacity to shred their work to ribbons in postproduction, particularly as the ambient scores of his early movies gave way to more florid and eccentric soundtracking. Part of what makes The Insider so unlikely—so singular—is the way the film’s focus on legal, corporate, and journalistic process is soundtracked by in-the-red, wailing opera singers. Mann works the story beats into something sweaty, insane, tragic. He will rework them like a bad habit. Heat and The Insider came out whole, but many of his other films exist in multiple forms, seldom as the result of studio intervention and more because he just can’t seem to stay out of the booth.

None of his “director’s editions” are Blade Runner–style reinventions. Each version cuts alternate paths through the footage, varying by minutes. You’ll want to watch the first version of the 2006 Miami Vice movie, which features a slightly less egregious use of a butt-rock cover of “In the Air Tonight.” You’ll want to watch the third version of Ali, which Mann recut in 2016 to include scenes illustrating the broader political machinations whirring around the boxer. The broader context transforms the film, which had always resisted expectations of what a biopic should look and feel like, into a Mann movie. And Ali becomes a Mann man, a figure of astonishing force and talent transforming the very structure of the systems that attempt, and fail, to contain him.

If all of this seems a little overcooked, well, sure. Mann movies can be overcooked. His most overcooked movie by a mile is the film version of Miami Vice, which features key character beats set to the music of Audioslave. It’s a bleak film about a job that never ends. It begins in the middle of an episode, practically in the middle of a song, and that song is a Linkin Park and Jay-Z mash-up, as if you have entered an Xbox 360 that cannot turn off. The cops have no vision of a life outside of the work. Their love for work turns literal, carnal. Maybe it happened a long time ago. Detective Tubbs makes tender, playful love with a colleague in the shower, then they head out to the kitchen to evaluate new intel with the rest of the team. Detective Crockett mixes business with pleasure even more dangerously, taking an undercover infiltration operation so literally that he fucks the target. She’s great at her job. He can’t help himself.

The city of Miami seems like some technological limbo, the vice cops themselves immortal. There is no problem with the unending gloom of their trade. Cool operators smoothly extend cell phone antennas, trade terse words with informants. They do not do anything lightly. They brood between meetings, chilly and removed. The first glimpse we get of humanity from Colin Farrell (as Crockett) is an unexpectedly melancholy reading of the line “I’m a fiend for mojitos.” As if a node in a network briefly misfires, then corrects. Miami Vice came out the same year as David Lynch’s last theatrical release, Inland Empire, which is similarly bleary and labyrinthine, as if the language of cinema had broken with the emergence of digital film. Filmmakers could just shoot forever now, finding the plot and the answers in the editing booth—or not. Leave the work raw, dense, inhospitable. Mutable, even. The grainy digital textures flatten everything, turning the stars garish in Lynch’s gaze, but Mann’s camera seems to glory in the transmutation of beautiful people and neon light into undifferentiated data.

For me, both films are comforting. Lynch’s final filmic transmission is an unsolvable puzzle, a series of interconnected hallways for my brain to get lost in anew upon each viewing. And Mann’s film lets me indulge in the fantasy of endless work—a cool blue ocean of meaningful labor to rocket across, the promise of a mojito on the other side.

Mann’s middle period was remarkably productive. He released six movies and a TV show between Heat (in 1995) and Public Enemies (in 2009). He was in his prime and he knew it. The movies feel propulsive, locked in, commanding big budgets and Christmas Day releases and conducting themselves more or less accordingly. Collateral (2004) was a smash—a popcorn movie with vast reserves of heart and artistry. He became a director top actors sought out, enabling his widest-screen visions, but also, I think, enabling the actors themselves to inhabit an archetype that Mann did not invent but by this point had entrenched as one of American cinema’s most beguiling. Many—Russell Crowe, Tom Cruise, Will Smith, Jamie Foxx—were never better than when given a Mann man to portray. As if they had an inherent desire to work like this, obsessively and astonishingly, and beheld by someone who understood and appreciated, at a cool remove. Maybe that is all anyone wants. The internet is awash in hustlers guiding the shiftless and underemployed toward better professional ROI. We are all one webinar away from our best selves. There is a guy on Instagram whose entire thing is showing you how to sit in chairs, open doors, handle a laptop as a high-net-worth individual. I sometimes worry that my own propensity to overwork puts me in league with this set. I have always worked too hard, basically until I can’t. I cannot not write like this; I cannot ungrind my teeth. I don’t ever plan to retire. Michael Mann is 82 years old, and he just co-wrote the novel Heat 2 (2022), a 500-page epic that sweeps back and forth across decades and continents, haunted by a new figure of pure evil that harrows all three of the film’s leads in turn. He says he is working on a film adaptation of it seven days per week.

Mann had wanted to make a movie about the automaker Enzo Ferrari for decades—one of countless in-the-hopper projects—but it didn’t escape development hell until 2023. Perhaps the money dried up after Blackhat (2015), a dense and uncompromising foray into cyberpunk, had one of the worst debuts in film history. That Ferrari would be Mann’s comeback always felt a little deflating: I’d watch him direct cops and hitmen and hackers forever if I could, but cars do nothing for me. Yet Ferrari is a quintessential Mann movie, perhaps the beginning of a late phase, and Adam Driver (in the title role) takes the Mann man to stately, reserved new territory. The Maserati driver Jean Behra ends up being a sort of boogeyman, a spectral heat demon that Ferrari uses to goad his drivers to go faster, no matter the cost. In a speech that belongs in the pantheon of all-time-great Mann monologues, Ferrari criticizes his drivers as “gentlemen sportsmen—very nice,” especially compared to drivers like Behra who, he says, have “a brutal determination to win, with a cruel emptiness in their stomachs.” Ferrari asks his drivers to imagine racing alongside Behra, hesitating as they approach a narrow turn, and then losing to him. “Because at that same moment,” Ferrari says, “Behra thought, ‘Fuck it, we both die.’” This is the philosophy of many Mann men: to live for the work—and to willingly die for it. “Brake later,” Ferrari concludes. As in other Mann films, this rhetoric is seductive, heroic.

An opportunity to practice the “brake later” dictate emerges in the ensuing Mille Miglia race, which spans 1,000 miles across Italy. Time slows down as a young driver we have followed barrels toward the horizon, seizing an opportunity—when, in slow motion, we see his wheel clip on a road stud, spinning his car into a crowd of onlookers. Dozens go down in an instant, the bodies of children we just saw eating breakfast spinning into the air. The camera is unsparing, salacious even, as it surveys the wreckage of their bodies, bisected across the asphalt.

There isn’t a scene like it in Mann’s decades of filmmaking. Like Pacino’s character in Heat, Mann sees every corpse as a human, with parents, kids, dreams. And yet never before has the collateral damage of a Mann man’s drive for greatness been relayed with such abject horror. Ferrari responds by turning to his family, bringing his illegitimate son to meet the half brother he never knew. The closing captions tell us it’s this son who would turn Ferrari into the company we know today. It feels less like a corrective to Mann’s preceding films than a clarification. That if all you heard in the key line of Heat was a willingness to leave your attachments in 30 seconds flat, you missed something. Because all Mann men need a philosophy about this central tension between an obsessive work life and a successful family life. As Ferrari tells his men, two objects cannot occupy the same point in space at the same moment in time. The ambition has a cost, and it can be great.

I had hoped there was some code latent in Mann’s movies to balance these things. But he’s not so prescriptive as that. The balance, too, will be work, perhaps grueling. We see Ali—maybe the man Mann holds in highest esteem—bouncing his kid on his knee after a bout, taking meetings at the same time. If your talent is the exploitation of a vast and unknowable system, then do not expect that system to let you rest. The clearest moral principle expressed across Mann’s decades of filmmaking is to do the best you can with all this. Pursue your talent against all else; be decent to your family, the people around you. If you want it to be easy, give up on one thing or the other. But why would you do a thing like that? This is what you grind for.

That Mann is pointing and shooting at his subjects who are pointing and shooting at their subjects is not lost on anyone—Mann, the subjects, or the viewer. In Collateral, there is a scene in which a hitman smoothly executes two minor crooks in an alleyway. Tom Cruise’s performance of this scene is marveled over by firearms experts as the apotheosis of the maneuver, shown in classes to teach proper form. Mann relishes the tools of the trade, the machines that men use to do their work: cell phones, notebooks, cameras. The thermal lance we watch constructed in Thief. The rattle of gunfire, mixed so loud the viewer can echolocate danger. It turns symphonic in the editing suite, an industrial barrage. The sound of men at work. Mann fell in love with digital cameras early, filming night scenes in Ali with a 1K camera, cramming a GoPro into his fighters’ faces to destabilizing effect. Collateral can be viewed as a feature-length death match between man and tool, the director wrestling with the capabilities of digital filmmaking across the streets of Los Angeles. It contains shots still marveled over by cinematographers. The hitman and the taxi driver stop dead in their tracks at one point to watch a coyote cross the street in low light. What does this mean to each of them? The quiet beauty of the city at night? The unlikelihood of a city at all? The will to survive? None of this, I think. I think they are looking at a coyote captured in low light on digital video, looking through the movie at the man who beholds them. I think they are both, briefly, viewers.

Then they get back to work.

Mann Men. By Clayton Purdom. Los Angeles Review of Books , March 25, 2025.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On The Brutalist, Talking With Brady Corbet And Mona Fastvold

 

 

“Architecture is a language. When you are very good, you can be a poet.” So wrote the spectacularly good Brutalist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. It’s a fair guess Brady Corbet and his longtime co-screenwriter Mona Fastvold have encountered this quote, and that they recognize the affinities between architecture and movies. Being good in either medium requires a sure knowledge of your materials, an ability to translate imagined designs into physical reality, to assemble and guide teams of inspired collaborators and to know or intuit more than a little about visual textures, space and light and how to move people through them. Another essential requirement: an aptitude for gathering immodest sums of money.

As if to prove how uncomfortably obvious this comparison can be, there aren’t all that many great or even good movies featuring architects as central protagonists, and they almost never leap, as Mies would have it, into poetry. (Notable exceptions include two feverish American movies starring Gary Cooper: Henry Hathaway’s Peter Ibbetson [1935] and King Vidor’s The Fountainhead [1949].) And so The Brutalist stands apart. A passionately inventive epic, bristling with ambition, historical references and allusions to cinematic predecessors, the film showcases larger-than-life performances within a story that both adheres to and challenges timeworn ideas about genius and suffering, art and commerce, personal and collective truth. Yes, Adrien Brody’s dispossessed visionary architect gets blindsided by the contradictions of capitalism after being uplifted and betrayed by a demonic patron (Guy Pearce), but Corbet and Fastvold also want us to track the tenderness and strength of their primary female characters (played by Felicity Jones and Raffey Cassidy), to bring forth a bitter and possibly ironic apprehension of the film’s thematic frame: the Holocaust’s long shadow experienced within the haze of the American Dream.

I made my way through the Brutalistic poured-concrete lobby walls of A24’s New York offices to interview Corbet and Fastvold on December 9^th, 2024. We could have talked about their film for a few hours, I felt, and they, on that day, certainly did, as our Q&A was wedged within a tightly crowded press junket. The following is distilled from my allotted twenty-five minutes; the conversation was rounded out later, briefly and over the phone, with Brady alone.

Almereyda: I’d like to start with a blunt, personal question: How did you meet? How did you start working together?

Fastvold: We were introduced by a mutual friend, Chris Abbott, when I first came to New York around 2003, 2004. We became friends right away. I was in the process of trying to make my first film, so Brady and I started working on the script together, then I convinced him to act in it, because he was still doing that at the time. Begrudgingly! You didn’t really want to, but I made you. Chris and Brady both acted in that. Brady and I were editing it together as well and worked on the film the way that we’ve continued working on our films. It’s a very clear director on each, but still we were very much involved with each film from beginning to end. Later on we became a couple, but we made that film first.

Corbet: I think part of the reason we’re still able to work together is because that’s how we met. I think it might have been more difficult if we were a couple and then tried to work together. But it’s sort of the only way that we know how to relate to each other. We’ve always done it that way.

Almereyda: The first time I saw The Brutalist, I was so dazzled by the shot of László (Adrien Brody) emerging into the open light and seeing the Statue of Liberty that I wasn’t really conscious of the voiceover, and I didn’t remember how the movie is framed by shots of the intensely distressed niece: two shots—one dissolves into the next—and then she comes back at the end. Can you talk about why that became important? I assume it was in the script.

Corbet: It was. The screenplay always opened that way, with this brief moment with Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy). I think it’s because we were concerned about contributing to the canon of films about male genius and legacy. These characters were very much written to their circumstances: the character is a middle-aged man because, in the 1950s, of course he would have been a middle-aged man. The characters are Jewish, because it was predominantly Jewish Architects that were at the Bauhaus before it was eventually shut down by the National Socialists. We felt that it was extremely important that the film seems to be about his legacy as it relates to his body of work, when in fact it is about his legacy in the path that he’s forged for his niece having inadvertently given a voice to the voiceless. We wanted to draw everyone’s attention to this character that otherwise would have seemed quite peripheral.

Fastvold: Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) enters into the film right at the beginning through the letters, so we wanted her presence to be strong from the very beginning. She is a female character that we’re not so used to seeing in these types of films about brilliant men. It was important to us to show this relationship that we recognize so much more—other artists that we know, couples with two intellectuals who respect one another—instead of this cliche of the sad housewife at home who’s angry that he’s fulfilling his dreams and she’s not. That’s not Erzsébet at all; she says, “You should go and make whatever the hell you want to make and I’m going to support you. I understand what you’re making and why you’re making it, but stop being such an asshole about it.” What she’s saying is, “Don’t lose yourself in it.” She has perspective that he doesn’t. We can both play that role with one another, to say, “Don’t lose perspective. Come back down to earth. Ground yourself. See this from a pragmatic point of view.” And I thought that her character being portrayed that way versus this other cliche—

 

 

 

Corbet: This doting housewife—

Fastvold: Yeah, or frustrated, where she’s like “I don’t understand why you’re not thinking about money and food on the table.” She says, “I’ll take care of it. I’ll figure out that. Just don’t lose yourself in this toxic relationship.” Because she’s not fooled by him at all. She sees who Van Buren is from the get-go.

Corbet: It’s something that’s usually celebrated after the fact, but as you well know, making something requires a level of obsession that always borders on the unhealthy. You are, in fact, putting all of your relationships second. It’s the only way that these things tend to get off the ground. I mean, now more than ever, when there’s not a real appetite for very transgressive or radical or ambitious movies anymore, or films that have a poetic logic.

Almereyda: That’s a great way to put it.

Corbet: That is just something that’s not widely embraced at the moment. You have to just kick the tires over and over again. Films tend to get made as long as you don’t stop making them. It took seven years, but it could have easily been another 10 to 15. Look at what Jon [Jonathan Glazer] went through bringing Under the Skin to life. How many iterations were there? Or Coppola this year with Megalopolis. It can be an even longer journey. So, I can’t really complain too much about the fact that it took as long as it did, especially given that COVID was smack dab in the middle of all of it.

Almereyda: You landed in exactly the right spot. I read about your initial cast, and it seems like you’ve transcended it. You wound up with exactly the right people.

Corbet: Yeah, these projects are pretty self-selecting. The people that you should be working with are usually the people that you do end up working with, because [the parts are] very difficult. On the page, I think that most actors know right away whether or not they can pull it off, and they’re really big asks. The Hungarian accent alone can easily drift into Bela Lugosi territory if you’re not really careful. Everyone that worked on the movie had a really strong sense of what to do with it. I don’t feel that we teased these performances out of the cast. Everyone came really prepared. We’re fortunate that as we’ve gotten older and have a body of work that gives context to who we are and what we do, normally now the people that show up to work with us know what they’re making. Which is really helpful, because when we first started out, it was different. People didn’t know what to make of it. They thought “OK, I like it enough maybe to be involved,” but they didn’t know exactly what they were making. But with this film, everybody was excited to be making this movie with us, and I feel like that was the first time we’d ever really experienced that.

Almereyda: I know Ethan Hawke is a big fan of the movie, and we made a biopic about a tormented genius that was also made for very little money—much less than yours—and one of my regrets, especially in relation to your film, is that I didn’t allow the character to stop sulking in disappointment, fuming about being thwarted and cheated. Adrien Brody’s performance has so many wild mood swings. So many displays of joy—exaltation and triumph countering every episode of disappointment. The pendulum swings are part of the great energy of the movie. How much were you conscious of giving him these highs and lows?

Corbet: On the page, the character was a lot colder, and there is a natural warmth that Adrien imbued the role with. Even in the sequence that establishes his impotence at the brothel in the beginning of the movie, there’s still something sweet about him. That’s something that’s hard to plan for. One of my good friends saw the film, who also read the screenplay, and was like “I was really surprised by the fact that there’s so much warmth and joy in the movie.” I think that as a filmmaker it’s so important that if somebody has a better idea, don’t shut it down. I’ve really learned that the sort of myopia of conceiving of a project—that’s one thing and that’s one part of the process. But if you don’t share it with everyone—if that warmth was something that I had tried to stifle in Adrien’s performance, I just don’t think it would be the same film. If there’s a new texture or a new color, I always try to remind myself that just because it’s a surprise doesn’t mean that it’s wrong.

Fastvold: And Alessandro Nivola and Adrien had just immediate chemistry. They played off each other so well. There’s that playfulness that Alessandro brought out of Adrien’s character. That was a history that he chose for the characters that’s just hinted at in the script, but they really played into it.

Almereyda: That makes the betrayal more hurtful.

Fastvold: Yes! And I think it was a great choice of Alessandro’s to bring that into the relationship. There’s this little moment when they finished the library and they’re doing this little tap dance moment that they just improvised. Or did you tell them to?

Corbet: No, they totally improvised it. What I loved about it too is that those guys are both so clever—it feels very of the period. Normally, as you know, when you’re making a period piece, you don’t invite a lot of improv because people start saying things like “like,” “um,” “awesome.” But their point of reference for all of this was so strong. Alessandro’s grandfather, for example, is Constantino Nivola, a sculptor that had sculptures in many of Breuer’s lobbies, so he really understood what the film was about. Everyone was really connected to it. And Felicity, who doesn’t have a family history in common with the character, it was just subject matter that she was really passionate about and interested in. 85% of the people that might have been right for the roles physically, they just didn’t get it. That’s what I mean when I say the project was self-selecting, because it ruled a lot of folks out.

Fastvold: Felicity also infuses her with so much warmth and strength, which I thought was crucial for the character. Same with Adrien. It could have been played much darker. Obviously, the successes and failures of the character, they’re scripted. But the specificity of his enjoyment of it all is something that I really love in good performers.

Almereyda: It gives you a full human being.

Corbet: Yeah, Adrien, like, eating an apple! He just keeps on doing it. As I cut, he’s like “I’m not quite done yet.”

Almereyda: I want to get back to what you’ve called the poetic logic of the film. It’s a film of great oppositions, thematically, that get translated into images and dramatic conflicts. But one of the things that’s amazing to me is how history is active within the film. This is shared with The Childhood of a Leader, the feeling that history is like an underlayer, like canvas showing through a painting, but it’s also a shadow pressing down on the characters. One of the ways that you key the audience into this is with archival footage and music, rooted in history. How much of that is done in advance? How thorough and deep does the research go before you start?

Corbet: Some of the archival sequences, for example, were scripted, and some were found along the way while we were pulling stuff for those sequences. That extraordinary footage we found on the history of the Christian tradition and industrialization in Pennsylvania, when we found that we were like, “Oh, well, we’ve got to open the movie this way. I mean, this is so fantastic.” I often speak about W.G. Sebald, Robert Musil, Ingeborg Bachman, V.S. Naipaul and Paul Celan—a handful of writers who have this feeling for history that is in the text that transcends the linear nature of the way that we’ve been taught history, where it’s just basically dates and events, cause and effect.

 

 

Fastvold: “This is a fact. This is what happened.”

Corbet: It’s not fungible!

Fastvold: Who knows? I mean there’s of course facts, but when you start writing history, it all becomes slightly fiction as well. There are always details and parts of it that are—

Corbet: —invented by the storyteller. I just feel a more honest relationship with history from Sebald than I do from even great historical writers like David McCullough, because they found a way to this concussed feeling of the trauma and burden of history. And the fact that this is something that we carry with us all the time—

Fastvold: —connecting events that are not obviously connected. I think it’s what Sebald does a lot. He speaks about something that happens in one part of the globe, and then another, completely unaware of each other, but somehow these events speak to him.

Corbet: A butterfly flaps its wings. But it’s one thing to say it, it’s another thing to feel it. And I think it’s the reason that I’m constantly doing these historical projects. I’m using the same actor to play a character and then that character’s child or family member. It’s because it’s one thing to say that history repeats itself, it’s another thing to feel it as a viewer. There’s something about it that’s quite disturbing. It really challenges the system of belief that you have built over the course of the entire film.

Fastvold: It’s a little Brechtian in that way where you’re saying like “Wake up and let’s talk. Let’s look at the ideas and the things that we’re talking, not just be lulled and seduced.”

Corbet: It’s an architecture which reveals its nuts and bolts.

Fastvold: Similar to Brutalism.

Almereyda: Absolutely. There’s a quote from Goethe read in voiceover early on, in Erzsébet’s letter: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”  That’s obviously important to you. Did you have that going into the film?

Fastvold: I don’t know when it came to me in writing that letter. I just don’t remember when I stumbled upon it or how. But it somehow felt right. I wanted us to know that the person writing was a person who had knowledge of history and literature. The way she’s writing to László has almost a sense of humor, albeit a very very dark one, but still saying, “It’s as bad as you thought it would be, not worse.” And all these things establish the way that the two of them spoke to one another. It’s important.

Corbet: I also think that there’s never been a period of my life where I wasn’t reading Goethe.

Fastvold: That’s true. (Laughs)

Corbet: There’s only a handful of writers that are just always there. It’s so rich and it just feels like the foundation for almost all great literature. It’s sort of like, okay, well you had Homer, then you had Goethe.

Almereyda: 300 years later, he’s still going strong. But that opposition between freedom and imprisonment is one of the many polarities in the film. It’s very dramatic and very clear. Two words that get thrown around, or woven into the film, are “beautiful” and “ugly.” How conscious or careful were you in how those words come up? Because they felt very intentional and strong.

Fastvold: They are, but they are also funny. I mean, “beautiful” and “ugly” is completely subjective, right? So, it’s funny László is using it as an insult—twice! Most of all “ugly,” to me, is childish, almost because it’s so subjective to say.

Corbet: But artists are sort of juvenile. One has to hold on themselves across so many decades; there is a part of every artist I’ve ever met that has just never changed. I remember working with Michael Haneke many years ago and Michael had quite a juvenile sense of humor—in the loveliest way, because it was very disarming, especially when you’re expecting the maestro. I always found him surprisingly delightful. In my experience, serious work is not necessarily made by serious people, so there is something in this portrait of an artist that we wanted to explore. We didn’t want to rehash the tortured genius in a way that that one might fall victim to.

Fastvold: It’s not about “This is so brilliant, this construct of all my brilliant ideas creates this marvelous thing.” He’s like, “This is beautiful and interesting, and what you’re doing is ugly and stupid.”

Corbet: At least he’s in pursuit of a progressive idea. Whether the building is beautiful or not, I don’t even really know.

Almereyda: One of the other elements of humor comes from Guy Pearce’s performance—nailing Van Buren’s pretension and self-deception. In any case, I think the film carries a lot of traditions on its back, a legacy of references and ambitions, but the way sex works in the story is unusual, unexpectedly bold. How much did you calibrate the explicitness of it?

 

 

Fastvold: I love writing sex scenes and love scenes in films, because I think it’s so important. It’s such a wonderful tool to show a relationship, to understand a relationship, without spelling it out, without talking about it. It’s a wordless way that we can communicate through images the subtleties of that dynamic. Of course, there were parts of the story that explore sexual violence, but that is not about sex, that is about power. The love scenes to me were really a way of showing how Erzsébet is stronger in many ways than László, and how she can hold their trauma—not just hers but his as well. They’re reclaiming their bodies, which have been taken from them.

Corbet: That’s exactly why, in the first five minutes, it was so important to be confronted with his impotence—here he is, completely unable to perform after what he’s been through—and then to see the journey of becoming a human being again. Finally, there’s also something kind of funny about the upside of drug abuse, which allows these two characters that couldn’t really connect prior to that night. There’s one last thing, which is a technical thing, but it’s something that I feel like you might really appreciate. The sex scenes were all shot by putting a 435 into service mode. So essentially what it does, because the aperture never closes, is it streams the highlights and gives the images this extraordinary quality where it’s like an Aura-cam. You can see both of them and the glow of their skin. [An “aura cam” is a toylike camera employed by psychics to track a person’s aura, naturally, as displayed in a range of soft gassy colors.]

Almereyda: I was wondering about that. And how did you discover it?

Corbet: Lol Crawley and I love this film, Love is the Devil, about Francis Bacon from the early 90s. John Mathieson shot it and there was something very interesting, which was that they couldn’t access Bacon’s paintings. And because of that effect, without the cardinals and stuff, of the streaming highlights that come from all of the Bacon paintings, they figured out how to evoke those paintings. Lol and I had never seen it before and we don’t think we’ve seen it since, so it was really this insane process of trial and error. Because the first time that we shot with it, nothing ended up on the negative. It was an extremely expensive process because it’s like ceramics; you’re not paying for the bowl, you’re paying for the bowls that broke. It was a bit like that. And you know, the third time was the charm. And Mona shot the sex scene while we were busy shooting something else. Mona shot a lot of the most beautiful stuff in the movie. We kept stumbling when we were trying to do it, because you have to put tape on the camera, so you can’t see anything. Once you put it in service mode, you can’t look through the eyepiece anymore.

Almereyda: The tension between aesthetics and politics is underlined when the story shifts to Italy and a captivating new character shows up, Orazio the stonecutter, who has left the mountains just once, “to beat the corpse of Mussolini with my bare hands.” He says he’s an anarchist, having fought in the Resistance, trapping fascists in caves and dropping stones on them. Is Orazio’s backstory as important as I think it is? How did you decide to present this rhapsodic interlude just ahead of a scene where Van Buren reveals himself to be an absolute villain?

Corbet: The film is sort of a 1950s melodrama. Everything is taken to operatic extremes, and Guy’s character is very much like an antagonist you would have in a film from mid-century a la James Mason. And I felt that this transgression in Carrera had to happen there—it wouldn’t mean the same thing elsewhere. The marble quarries felt like the appropriate visual allegory because the film is very much about this agent who wants to possess that which cannot or should not be possessed. The quarry is a very beautiful place, but a very violent place. We take a bite out of Mother Nature and she gets pretty pissed off about it. There are constant rock slides, it’s quite dangerous, and ultimately it’s one thing for it to be the source of Michelangelo’s Pietà, but now it’s primarily a material that’s used to surface people’s bathrooms and kitchens.

We had this rule that every single character in the film has a backstory and a different relationship with the Second World War. Isaach De Bankolé’s character as well as Guy’s character as well as Joe Alwyn’s character—there are no absolutely peripheral characters. Everyone has a link to the central theme of the movie, which is about this post-traumatic generation processing what happened with the Second World War—with both World Wars really, back to back. I looked at a lot of different guys for Orazio. Salvatore Sansone is predominantly a painter and a writer, and he looks so incredibly iconic, and has this beautiful voice, so I asked if he would do it. He gives it this kind of mystical quality, like the old man in the mountain.

Almereyda: He has a timelessness. It’s rare in a movie for a character to drop in and drop out and have so much impact.

Corbet: He’s a poet. I knew that he would bring this heft to it that other folks wouldn’t, given the short amount of screen time.

Almereyda: It seems that Orazio’s political virtue is fused with his belief in beauty, and then Harrison sort of challenges that idea, with his preening admiration for beauty. Can you talk a little about this moral imbalance?

Corbet: You have two characters, László and Orazio, interfacing with their oppressor. The oppressor has a new face, a new nationality. László and Orazio have a mutual respect, and a respect for the place, whereas for Guy’s character, he’s almost aroused by the impossibility of this two- or three-ton stone that’s been channeled from the earth being pillaged. It really turns him on. When I sent it to Guy, I said “It’s really fetishistic, when he puts his face against the stone.” What’s funny is I watched buyers doing exactly that, putting their cheeks against the marble, when we went to scout. There’s something mystical about it, but it’s also inherently absurd, because it is just a big piece of stone.

Almereyda: Was Orazio’s disembodied dialogue planned to play this way, before you shot the scene, or did you arrive at it in the editing?

Corbet: It absolutely wasn’t conceived that way. The reason we decided to basically lose sync, and trail off in these overlapping voiceovers, was because the fog was impossible for us to control, so we had major continuity issues. I was like, “We’ve already established this language earlier in the film, with the night where Alessandro, Emma and Adrien are dancing to Dinah Shore, when the reality becomes a little like liquid, with flash-forwards and flashbacks to earlier in the evening.” The whole idea was to represent how one might recall that evening, so that when he gets kicked out and Atilla accuses him of making this pass at her, there’s at least a part of you that wonders “Well, I don’t know. Did he? Did I miss that?” So the language had been established that allowed us to do that with Orazio.

Almereyda: When Orazio pours the water over the marble, is that a conventional thing to do?

Corbet: It is a conventional thing to do. It’s essentially the same ingredient that’s in toothpaste, I forget what it’s called, but they cover the stones in it to preserve the stone. Basically whenever a buyer arrives, they pour water on the stone so that you can see veining and assess the quality of the veining.

Almereyda: The whole scene shimmers.

Taking Everything to Extremes: A Conversation Between Michael Almereyda, Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold on The Brutalist. By Michale Almereyda. Filmmaker Magazine, February 20,2025.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the wake of its success at the Golden Globes and its current frontrunner status at the Academy Awards, Brady Corbet’s film The Brutalist has been one of the most acclaimed and discussed films of the year. Not something that its premise as a three-and-a-half-hour film about a fictional architect would suggest.

Andy Hazel from the Curb caught up with Corbet to talk expectations, exhaustion and excellence.

Since it arrived at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, where you won the Best Director prize, The Brutalist has been collecting prizes and getting rave reviews. Are you surprised by this response?

Brady Corbet: I am surprised. It’s hard to have expectations while making a film. After working on post-production for 20 months, you start hoping for the best but expecting the worst—that’s just life. We knew the film’s length, gargantuan as it is, would be a challenge, especially from a relatively unknown filmmaker. But I couldn’t find a way to make it shorter. Every cut felt like it hurt the film holistically. We always knew the movie would be long, but we didn’t think it would be this long.

But also, time is a very important ingredient in the recipe, and when you’re making a movie about a character’s entire life, things could suddenly feel very rushed. The final version of the movie is the screenplay. There’s not a single scene in the movie which is missing. My wife [co-screenwriter Mona Fastvold] and I try to remind ourselves to trust the material.

Executing a movie, there are practicalities that you’re facing because every single day that you’re not delivering a movie it’s very expensive, you start accruing interest on the loans and there’s a lot of pressure to get it done. We talked about the screenplay for a long time before we executed the draft and we executed the draft very quickly, but because we did it early, we didn’t have a gun to our head. I think that you tend to make better creative decisions in that part of the process rather than later.

Is this what success and acceptance looks like for you?

BC: I don’t know. I haven’t had enough time to process the response to the movie. I’ve been on the road since we premiered the film in September and prior to that I was shooting another movie with my wife that she directed, a musical that we wrote together, so it’s been a sort of marathon after marathon the last couple of years.

I hope making the next one is a little bit more peaceful and it comes together a little bit faster. Ideally, I wouldn’t like almost a decade to pass between films every time. But, with success also comes expectations and that’s a reality that I haven’t even really thought about yet. Because post-production on The Brutalist was so long, I’ve already been planning for my next project, and it’s a radical movie in a very different way. I think it’s very important to never repeat yourself.

Can you give examples of how you’ve done this?

BC: After I’d made Childhood of a Leader, I was like, what’s the most dangerous thing I could possibly do? I’d just made a film that was set in the early twentieth century with a lot of heavy drapery and a very specific period style and tone. I thought the most dangerous thing I can do next is to make a movie about right now. I was tired of the lace and linens, and I really needed to do a movie that was all pleather.

Vox Lux was conceived in this bifurcated way, it’s missing a second act, which was the film’s experiment. To omit the passage which an audience anticipates. There’s a sort of brutality to that experience where it’s very difficult to let go of part one, and in part two, it’s a different group of actors, it’s a different tone and style entirely. There was something about that which was quite dangerous and quite interesting to me. But after I made a film without a second act, I was like, maybe for the next one it’s the second, third, fourth and fifth act.

So, I think you’re always in this sort of dialogue with yourself. And with Mona, we’re able to have these conversations where we explore the form and see how much we can bend it before it breaks.

In 2016 you said that you gave up making Childhood of a Leader because the film was too ambitious. Later, you met Mona, and she encouraged you to see it through. Could you talk a little bit about how you work together?

BC: We have different complementary strengths, and we recognised that in one another early on. It’s very helpful to have someone who, when you’re running out of steam, encourages you to keep going. I made Childhood when I was 25, but I had been working on it since I was 20, 21 years old, trying to get this period piece starring a seven-year-old off the ground. I shot the film in 25 days or 24 days, but because we were working with a child, it was only about 8 to 9 hours a day on set. Vox Lux was shot in 22 days, but at least I was working with Raffey [Cassidy] at the time, who had teenage hours that were slightly more forgiving. The Brutalist was shot in 33 days, which felt like a luxury compared to the previous two movies, just to have a little bit more real estate to work with in terms of planning a schedule. But of course, because this was also longer, the screenplay was about 170 pages, so we had to shoot about seven pages or so a day.

That seems remarkable. Your films seem to take a long time to come together, and you have a very clear idea of what you want. What is it that keeps you from compromising?

BC: [long pause] It’s an unhealthy way of living. It requires a level of obsessiveness and stubbornness that’s probably not so pleasant to be around all the time.

Have you always worked this way?

BC: I’m an only child who grew up with a single mother and my mother was extremely supportive. She really treated me with a lot of respect from a very early age, and I try to treat my own daughter with that same level of respect because I remember how much I appreciated it when I was her age. I’m the first generation in my family to work in movies, and I really kind of fell into it.

Pre-Windows 95, the way that national casting calls worked for young actors is that there were about 10 or 12 hubs across the US where all children were cast. So, whenever you were working with another child actor on a project, they always came from one of a handful of the same places. When I was seven years old, I happened to move to a small town, around 10,000 people, that happened to have this very legitimate casting that was happening locally. Because I was such a cinephile, my family encouraged me to audition for films at a young age. Then it kind of took on a life of its own.

As an actor, you’ve worked with directors like Lars von Trier, Ruben Östlund, Olivier Assayas, Catherine Hardwicke and Gregg Araki. How much did you learn from them, and how much did you learn from your own experiences as an actor?

BC: I’m a hundred percent sure that my experience of growing up on film sets gave me a real sensitivity to recognising the insecurities that folks have. Making a movie is exhausting. You’re generally sleeping two or three hours a night because whenever you’re not shooting, you’re scouting or planning for the next day. There’re simply not enough hours in a day when you’re making a movie. So, I think it probably did give me an understanding and an empathy for everyone involved. In terms of performance and anxiety, I really do everything in my power to create a space where people feel really supported. These are serious movies, but it’s important to us that no one feels like they’re being made by serious people. We want it to be a joy to come to work and we always encourage people to bring their kids and make it a familial experience.

In my experience that’s when some people do their best work. Obviously, there are different philosophies about that, but I think it’s important that there are monitors everywhere and that everyone can see what we’re working on. Gatekeeping can occasionally happen on set, when some people really don’t like having actors reviewing takes or anything like that, but I encourage everyone to participate in the process because it helps to orient them. It’s so hard when you’re acting for the camera if you have no sense that we’re on a wide lens or a tight lens.

Most of my favourite actors and a lot of the folks on this film are very technical. They’re very precise about blocking, they’re very precise about the text. There is a lot of dialogue in this film and there would be times when somebody would be struggling to spit out a word, and I’d say, ‘that’s okay, just make the words fit in your mouth. It’s no problem.’ And, and all of them, Guy [Pearce] and Adrien [Brody], would always say, ‘No. It’s written this way for a reason. Just give me a second, I’ll get it’. That was so wonderful.

Can you talk a little bit about casting and working with Adrien Brody? Did you audition him? Did you always have him in mind?

BC: I don’t do auditions. The only time that we ever hold casting sessions on any movie is for when you’re working locally, like we were when we were shooting in Hungary, and you just need to hear that someone can do an American accent or something like that. Some people do auditions that are 10, 13 pages long. That just ruins a performer’s week because they spent so much time memorising the text and I don’t like putting people through that.

But with Adrien, I knew a little bit about his background and his mother was a Hungarian refugee who emigrated during the revolution in the mid-50s. I knew that because he had grown up with Hungarian, it was a great place to start. He is a really fine actor. I didn’t have to coax anything out of him. He just, he read it, he understood it, and that goes for everybody in this movie, and it’s not always like that.

 

 

How much of Adrien Brody is in László Tóth?

BC: It’s hard to say. I mean, I always encourage a performer to bring as much of themselves to a role as possible, unless there is a very specific reason not to. Like what I wanted to achieve with Natalie Portman on Vox Lux was something transcendentally maximalist, something like performance art. And so that’s a different sort of very theatrical approach. But with this, the only theatricality that I was trying to keep in mind for not just myself but to remind all the performers was the films I was referencing, Rope and a lot of mid-century melodramas. Michael Powell movies and Doug Sirk movies, so we were sure to sort of evoke their style, especially because we were shooting on VistaVision, which is a camera engineered in the 50s. I wanted all of these things to be in lockstep, but because of the nature of the subject matter of this film, it was also important that there was a level of humanity and that the theatricality not overpower the humanity.

Someone who was very good at balancing those things was the musician Scott Walker, who died in 2019 and to whom The Brutalist is dedicated. He scored your first two films; did you also intend for him to work on this one?

BC: I don’t remember. He passed away just after Vox Lux, so it was early days. I expected to make all my movies with Scott because I didn’t know any other way. When I was finished with a movie, it was like, ‘okay, well, let’s hand it off to Scott’. One thing that was really nice about this project is that Daniel Blumberg, who scored The Brutalist, works with the same co-producer as Scott did, Peter Walsh, so a lot of things about this process were very familiar to me even though Scott and Daniel have a very, very different approach. For this movie, Daniel wanted to construct the tracks. It was part of the philosophy of making a film on brutalism that there were these particular kinds of sounds and processes he wanted to use. With Scott, we did big orchestral sessions and everything was recorded live. The Brutalist score comprises many individual sessions with artists like the saxophonist Evan Parker, pianist John Tilbury or, even Vince Clark from Erasure and Depeche Mode, who worked on 80s Moog synth version of the soundtrack at the end of the movie.

You’ve said that The Brutalist is not a political film, but you’ve also said that Donald Trump is on a mission to have all the brutalist buildings in Washington torn down. How do you feel about the film taking on political overtones on its release?

BC: Of course, all movies are viewed very much through the prism of the time that they come out in. But for me, it’s a funny thing, because my films are not made with a political intent. If you make a film with a political intent, it can segue into propaganda pretty quickly, even if its propaganda in service of a more or less righteous or moral cause.

I really resist interpreting the movies in a political way because I feel that we need a space that is outside of politics.

And I think that it’s important for us to reflect on historical events without viewing them through a political lens. But that said, even though they’re not made with a political intent, a viewer projects onto the vessel and inherently they become political. There’s nothing I can really do about that. If I could go and adjust absolutely everyone’s televisions and to make sure that they don’t have frame blending on and make sure that the movie doesn’t sound or look like shit when they see it [laughs]… at a certain point you give it away. People tend to imbue those projects with meaning from their own perspective and I encourage that.

I want to activate an audience. I want them to wrestle with the material. I don’t want to do all the work for them. I want to ensure there’s enough space for them to really engage.

Finally, how important are awards to you? You won two awards at the Venice Film Festival for Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux was nominated for the Golden Lion. Usually, festival recognition and awards make funding the next project easier but, so far at least, that doesn’t seem to be the case for you.

BC: The jury in Venice this year was full of a lot of filmmakers and film workers that I really have a lot of respect for, so that was fantastic and very touching. But, you know, to be honest, I don’t even remember who won the Oscar or the Palme or whatever, three or four years ago. I’d have to really sit down and think about it.

I think that it’s very important for the commercial prospects for a movie and that’s really what they’re there for because it allows movies like the fantastic Zone of Interest to make $50 million worldwide. Zone of Interest. That it sold $50 million worth of movie tickets is extraordinary and I think it being recognised by the Academy, the Globes etc. contributed to that. That’s great, but beyond that, to me, it’s not… It’s a lot of pageantry, and sometimes that can be really fun.

But, when you’re done making a movie, you’re just so carved out and exhausted that the last thing you feel like doing is going to a party every night. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. So, it won’t be until after award season that I’ll have time to reflect on the past few years and hopefully just focus on spending as much time with my daughter as humanly possible because she’s at an age now where I can’t take her out of school as often as I used to. Now, I’m just counting the days until I can be at home for longer than seven to ten days at a time.

“I want to Activate an Audience”: A Q&A with Brady Corbet, Director of The Brutalist. By Andy Hazel. The Curb, January 13, 2025.