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| Attila (Alessandro Nivola) with László Tóth (Adrien Brody) in The Brutalist |
Alessandro Nivola was at the Venice International Film Festival this past week for the world premières of two movies he is featured in and he turned out to be the lucky charm. Pedro Almodóvar’s adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s The Room Next Door won the Golden Lion (also in the London Film Festival and 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.
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| Alessandro Nivola with Anne-Katrin Titze: “This has been a very long-time passion project for Brady.” |
Plus, Brady Corbet won the Silver Lion Best Director for The Brutalist (co-written with Mona Fastvold and in the Toronto International Film Festival and the NYFF Main Slate), starring Adrien Brody with Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Stacy Martin, Joe Alwyn, Raffey Cassidy, Emma Laird, and Isaach De Bankolé.
In the third instalment of our end of summer conversation, Alessandro discussed his working relationship with Brady Corbet on filming The Brutalist.
From Long Island, New York, Alessandro Nivola joined me on Zoom.
Anne-Katrin Titze: I'm very curious about The Brutalist. I've met Brady and Mona over ten years ago. At First Time Fest, where I was on the jury, and we gave them an award for The Sleepwalker. Later I met them when their daughter was a tiny baby. So tell me about The Brutalist!
Alessandro Nivola: Well, as you may know, this has been a very long-time passion project for Brady. It's something he wrote with Mona, and he wrote it eight years ago, or something. The movie really is about a genius artist getting f***ed by his patron. It's really how I describe it. Of course, it's also like an epic story, an American immigrant story.
It's a Holocaust story. It's a story about the sort of will to power of an artistic mind. And it has just an extraordinary scale. At its heart, it's about this sort of abuse of a patron to an artist. And, I think the story of Brady's getting this movie made probably reflects the content of the movie over many years.
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| László Tóth (Adrien Brody) with his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) |
I was one of the very first people to sign on to the movie. And and I think Stacy Martin, who had been in both of his previous two movies, The Childhood Of A Leader and Vox Lux had been attached, and I think Raffey Cassidy also, who was in Vox Lux, had been attached, and I was the third person, and then the rest of the cast changed about ten different times since I first met Brady about it.
He first got in touch with me, I think, like a month into Covid, this was 2020 and he was planning to shoot in September, October, November of 2020 as one of the first films back. And obviously that didn't work out. And it was, I think, three years later that we were finally on set with a completely different group of actors than he was talking about when we first met.
AKT: What is your character like in the film?
AN: Adrien Brody plays this Hungarian Jewish Holocaust survivor named Laszlo Tóth, who's loosely based on various different real people, but is a fictional character. And he comes at the beginning of the movie out of the camps, and his cousin, whom I play, has been living in Philadelphia since the First World War.
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| Alessandro Nivola on Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold on making the most of it: “He and Mona are just extraordinary that way.” Photo: Anne Katrin Titze |
He emigrated during the First World War, and he has totally assimilated, or tried to, into American culture, and he's married a shiksa and has converted to Catholicism, and he fancies himself a hip American dude and he has his cousin Laszlo, who is Adrien, come and move into his apartment in Philadelphia with him and his beautiful young Catholic wife.
The first kind of hour and a half of the movie is the story of Laszlo and his cousin, and Laszlo's first arrival in America and attempt to establish himself as an architect there, and it's really about this complex dynamic that he has with this cousin, who's in awe of his genius.
Growing up, they were intensely close and part of the same family, and he also feels some kind of sense of shame for not having suffered through the Holocaust in Europe, and having gotten out before and having changed his religious affiliation and all that. At the same time he's also resentful of the sort of genius of his cousin, and there's some kind of history of sexual jealousy in their relationship from their adolescence. So it's a fascinating dynamic between them.
And it's a fascinating exploration of the immigrant experience and what you have to do, what you have to sacrifice from your own moral integrity and your own cultural authenticity in order to succeed in America. So that is the sort of setup of the story that then in the second half of the film becomes about this relationship between Laszlo and this patron that I introduce him to. Who's a rich Philadelphian, sort of captain of industry, who commissions his first major work.
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| Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce) with László Tóth (Adrien Brody) and Gordon (Isaach De Bankolé) |
AKT: So it's all your fault?
AN: Yeah, I suppose! It's full of nuance and power, and it's visually just one of the most beautiful films that's recently been made. It was shot on VistaVision and will be screened in 70mm and I mean the scale of it is just massive, even though Brady in typical form, made the movie for a song, you know, relative to what it looks like. He and Mona are just extraordinary that way.
I mean, it's real old school indie filmmaking. He's just lived on pennies for years and years and years to get this epic work of art made. And so it's pretty exciting that it's finally going to be seen. And Venice is the perfect setting for it to have its debut, and he won, I think, Childhood of a Leader won best first film there. So this is kind of him coming to full maturity as a filmmaker, an I think he's really one of the greats.
Read what Alessandro Nivola had to say on Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door.
Read more on what Alessandro Nivola had to say on Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, 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.
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| Alessandro Nivola on The Brutalist: “It's visually just one of the most beautiful films that's recently been made.” |
Coming up - Alessandro Nivola on JC Chandor’s Kraven The Hunter.
The Room Next Door will have its US première at the New York Film Festival on Friday, October 4 with Pedro Almodóvar, Julianne Moore, and Tilda Swinton in person at Alice Tully Hall.
The Brutalist will have its US première at the New York Film Festival on Saturday, September 28 with Brady Corbet in person (joined by Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, and Stacy Martin).
The Room Next Door will have its UK première at the London Film Festival on Saturday, October 19.
The Room Next Door opens in the UK on Friday, October 25 and in the US on Friday, December 20.
