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| Alessandro Nivola shows a photo of Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock with his grandfather Costantino Nivola to Anne-Katrin Titze: “He was part of that whole scene. And so I grew up with all that around me.” |
Alessandro Nivola is in two movies that had their world premières this week at the Venice International Film Festival. Pedro Almodóvar’s adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s The Room Next Door (the Centerpiece Gala selection of the New York Film Festival), starring Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton with John Turturro, Alex Hogh Andersen and Esther McGregor, plus Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist (co-written with Mona Fastvold and in the NYFF Main Slate) starring Adrien Brody with Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Stacy Martin, Joe Alwyn, Raffey Cassidy, Emma Laird, and Isaach De Bankolé.
Alessandro is also teaming up again with JC Chandor (after A Most Violent Year with Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain) to play Aleksei Sytsevich (aka The Rhino) in Kraven The Hunter. The Rhino, a character portrayed by Paul Giamatti in Marc Webb’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is only one connection to Giamatti, who is also his co-star in the Downton Abbey 3, directed by Simon Curtis.
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| Alessandro Nivola on Le Corbusier making Nivola house murals: “He was staying one weekend, and just said, I think these walls need a mural.” Photo: courtesy of Alessandro Nivola |
In the first instalment of our end of summer conversation, Alessandro discussed his grandfather Costantino Nivola’s relationship with Le Corbusier, the Nivola family life on Long Island and Italy, the Coco Chanel connection for him with his wife Emily Mortimer (soon to be seen in Dougal Wilson’s Paddington in Peru), and Paul Giamatti and Yale.
From Long Island, New York, Alessandro Nivola joined me on Zoom for an in-depth end of summer conversation.
Anne-Katrin Titze: Hi.
Alessandro Nivola: Hey! How are you?
AKT: I'm really well. How are you?
AN: Long time.
AKT: Yeah. Good to see you. Where are you?
AN: I'm out in Amagansett right now. We'll be here until we go to Venice.
AKT: Enjoying the end of summer.
AN: Yeah, it's been beautiful, actually, really, really nice.
AKT: How long has it been since you've been to Venice?
AN: I guess a few years, I mean, I go to Italy so much and even this year I've been already three times because I have all this family in Sardinia, so I go visit them. I was filming the third Downton Abbey movie in London in June, and I flew down and visited my next door neighbours in New York, Tim Van Patten, the director. He and his family were down outside Naples, and so I just flew down and met up with them for a few days, and then we were in Tuscany in the beginning of August. So I've already had three trips. It's been a little while since I've been to Venice. I have actually never had a film at the festival there. It's the only major film festival that I've never had a film at, which is absurd, especially since I speak Italian.
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| Alessandro Nivola on Le Corbusier and Costantino Nivola: “They developed a technique of sand casting for bas-relief, which involved bringing ocean sand from the beaches here in Long Island to his backyard …” Photo: courtesy of Alessandro Nivola |
AKT: Besides Venice, the two films have been selected for the New York Film Festival. The Brutalist and The Room Next Door, which I'm also very excited to see. Sigrid Nunez has two films in the New York Film Festival that are based on her books. I've only read The Friend. I've never read The Room Next Door.
AN: Who's directed The Friend?
AKT: Scott McGehee and David Siegel.
AN: Okay, cool. Yeah. I'd like to see that, too. That's amazing. Two adaptations, that's great. Well, yeah, I haven't seen Pedro's movie yet. I mean, I really just have a cameo. It's a sort of big, important scene at the end of the movie. The Brutalist was immediately a fascinating story. The script is brilliant and epic and it was undeniable when I read it, but in particular, because my grandfather [Costantino Nivola] was a sculptor in the Fifties and Sixties and Seventies, and he was best friends with Le Corbusier.
AKT: Wow!
AN: In fact, they developed a technique of sand casting for bas-relief, which involved bringing ocean sand from the beaches here in Long Island to his backyard in Springs, where he lived since 1949, and they would wet the sand down together and then carve negatively into the sand, and then pour cement in and then pull it up.
And it created these incredible bas-reliefs, which ended up initially being used for this huge showroom for the Olivetti Company on Fifth Avenue back in the 1950s. And if you go online and just type in Nivola bas-relief Olivetti showroom, you'll see these massive walls of these reliefs that he made from the sand. And this was this technique he designed with Le Corbusier. In fact, that particular relief is now up at Harvard in the Science Building.
AKT: Was it the connection to your grandfather why Brady thought of you for the film?
AN: No, he didn't know anything about this. I'd grown up in the house. We have our own little house in Amagansett, but at my father's house in Springs, there are two center walls. I show you the pictures. The two center walls of the house are painted by Le Corbusier. They're these huge, stunning murals here [he shows them to me]. There he is painting in the house, in our house.
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| Le Corbusier murals in the Nivola house Photo: courtesy of Alessandro Nivola |
AKT: That looks fantastic!
AN: Anyway, he was just incredible, you know, he would come and stay there all the time, and I think the reason that he ended up painting those murals was that he was staying one weekend, and just said, I think these walls need a mural and he ended up spending the weekend painting those. And obviously they've been carefully preserved over the years. Here I'm going to show you another!
AKT: This is great. I just did a feature on a documentary called Modernism, Inc.: The Eliot Noyes Design Story.
AN: Oh, really, wow! How amazing!
AKT: The children of Eliot Noyes are interviewed, talking about how a Calder Stabile was their jungle gym! Growing up with these artworks is fantastic.
AN: Yeah. That's my grandfather with Pollock and Lee Krasner out here. He was part of that whole scene. And so I grew up with all that around me. It was just such a part of my childhood and my experience growing up.
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| Alessandro Nivola on Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, co-written with Mona Fastvold: “I had an amazing first encounter talking about the film.” Photo: Anne Katrin Titze |
AKT: Did you ever think about making a film about that?
AN: Well, I've thought about making a film about my grandparents, because, in addition to this whole sort of connection with Brutalist architecture, my grandmother was, as you know, a German Jew who was born in Munich, grew up in Frankfurt till she was about 12, and then fled the government there in the early 1930s and was living, grew up in her adolescent years in Turin. She ended up going to an art school in Milan, in Monza, which is where meanwhile my grandfather, who was Sardinian from a very poor Sardinian family in a little village up in the mountains, had miraculously gotten a scholarship.
He was one of nine children who were starving during the First World War, and somehow, you know, he had this incredible talent with drawing and painting, and had apprenticed with a church fresco painter who'd gone through Sardinia and had him helping him. And somehow this led to him going to the same art school as she did. They ended up falling in love there, getting married back in Sardinia as the war started, and then were woken up in the middle of the night by one of their very close friends who wept and told them that he'd been informing on them to the police for months, and that they were going to arrest them in the morning.
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| Attila (Alessandro Nivola) with László Tóth (Adrien Brody) in The Brutalist |
They packed their bags in the middle of the night and fled through France, and then came to New York. So on top of the architecture thing, it's this Holocaust refugee story as well in my family. So basically, there wasn't one element of the story of The Brutalist that wasn't covered in my personal history. And so obviously, Brady and I had an amazing first encounter talking about the film.
AKT: Emily [Mortimer] I last saw in The New Look. There is a Nivola family Coco Chanel connection!
AN: That's right, that's right. You know, now we both have had a brush with Coco [Alessandro played Boy Capel in Anne Fontaine’s Coco Before Chanel and Emily was the invented composite friend of Coco’s, Elsa Lombardi in The New Look].
AKT: A brush with Coco! You, I think, I saw the last time in neighbour Ethan's [Hawke] Wildcat.
AN: Oh, yeah, yeah, I did a little cameo in that, as a favourite to a friend.
AKT: Is he doing well? He's also still in the neighbourhood?
AN: Yeah, we see each other several times a week in our regular “office space” [a lovely neighbourhood café].
AKT: That's where we used to meet.
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| Alessandro Nivola on Paul Giamatti at Yale: “We ended up being in a bunch of plays together.” Photo: courtesy of Alessandro Nivola |
AN: I know. I know we'll have to meet up there again. Yeah, no, he's doing great. He's just come back from filming Rick Linklater's new movie in Ireland, and in fact, he's coming to Venice. So he's going to come to my Brutalist première. And he's coming to Pedro's movie. So I'm going to see lots of him in a few days.
AKT: That's great. Tonight I'm going to see ESG, the band. Do you know them?
AN: I've heard of them. Yeah.
AKT: I'm going with their producer [music legend and 99 Records founder Ed Bahlman] who discovered ESG and recorded them for his label [99-04EP; 99-10EP; 99-003LP]. It feels like fall is coming. And autumn in New York is always special.
AN: Yeah, you can feel it in the air, although I think Venice is like 90 degrees. So I think summer is about to be extended for a few more days. I'm going the 29th and then The Brutalist screens on the first and The Room Next Door screens the second. Then I'm flying home on the third
AKT: It sounds all very exciting. I'm very much looking forward to seeing them all.
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| The dynamic Midnight Magic was thrilled to open for the revered ESG at Elsewhere on August 23, 2024 Photo: Anne Katrin Titze |
AN: Yeah, let’s reconnect soon. I'll start all kind of promotion in October, November, because all three of these films, I think, are going to open within weeks of each other, which will be an interesting trifecta of characters to have on screen all at once. I think The Room Next Door is December 20th. Kraven is December 13, and The Brutalist date hasn't been set yet, but I believe it's going to be November, December.
AKT: And Emily has more Paddington coming! I love Paddington! That's also opening this winter, no?
AN: Yeah, she's in the third Paddington movie, which is coming out in January, I think. And then Downton Abbey. I got to reunite with Paul Giamatti, whom I had done a play with, you know.
AKT: I did not know that you did a play together!
AN: He went to Yale as an undergrad, and so did I. But then he's a few years older than me. But when he had graduated he came back to the drama school, to the graduate school, and I was still an undergrad there, and we ended up being in a bunch of plays together. In fact, I’ll show you a picture of us together in the Lope de Vega play Fuenteovejuna. This was when I was about 18.
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| Boy Capel (Alessandro Nivola) with Coco Chanel (Audrey Tautou) in Anne Fontaine’s Coco Before Chanel |
AKT: Great picture!
AN: And so anyway, we were partners in crime in this Downton movie just now. And interestingly, he played the Rhino [Alessandro’s role in Kraven the Hunter] in a previous incarnation of the character in one of the Spider-Man movies [The Amazing Spider-Man 2, directed by Marc Webb]!
AKT: It all goes round and round. I have never really met him, but I've been in touch for a long time with Alexander Payne. He and Paul Giamatti were in Munich earlier this year [to promote The Holdovers] and Alexander was asking me for tips where to eat and where to go, and the best pretzels, for Paul Giamatti, because he seems to like pretzels very much. And bookstores.
AN: Well, he's just an absolutely wonderful guy. He's hilarious and totally brilliant. I always remember when we shared a dressing room together at the Yale Rep Theater and, you know, in the dressing room they have those speakers where you can hear the play going on. So you know when your cue is coming up, and then you go. You leave the dressing room, and you go stand in the wings, and then you make your entrance and he used to just sit next to me in this little dressing room reading the Dickens he had.
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| Coco Chanel (Juliette Binoche) with Elsa Lombardi (Emily Mortimer) in the series The New Look |
I think it was Hard Times, or Our Mutual Friend, I can't remember which one, just this 1,000-page Dickens tome, and he would just like blast through this Dickens the whole time. I don't know how he could hear the cues coming or anything, but somehow he had both things going on at the same time, and as soon as it came time for his entrance he would close up the book, put it down, and on he went.
AKT: Very admirable!
AN: He's a reader.
AKT: Great. We’ll keep in touch! Enjoy Venice!
AN: Yeah, let's stay in touch. When we get closer to the end of the year we can reconvene.
AKT: Enjoy the last days of summer!
AN: You too, take care and look forward to seeing you this fall!
Coming up - Alessandro Nivola on The Room Next Door, Kraven The Hunter, and more on The Brutalist.
