The work that followed ranged from voiceovers for Japanese anime series to TV shows including 24. First taken to a casting call aged seven, he got his debut role at 11 in the sitcom The King of Queens. It’s easy to see how folks start to come undone.”īorn in Arizona, raised in Colorado, Corbet is the only son of a single mother who worked in the mortgage industry. If I was doing it 200 days a year, I’d probably have a heart attack or liver failure. I would never want anyone to think I was making fun of them, because I’m not.” Being a pop star is “an inherently absurd line of work”, Corbet says, but he’s also fascinated by the burnout factor faced by performers on tour: “If you’re shooting a movie for 30 days, you usually come home and polish off a bottle of wine. “It’s not just Madonna, it’s not just Britney Spears, it’s not just Lindsay Lohan – the character is such a dragon, and embellished to such operatic extremes. Vox Lux has struck some as facile, or cartoonish: the Guardian’s deputy music editor, Laura Snapes, tweeted, “It’s like what my nana thinks pop music is like.” But the broad strokes are intentional, Corbet insists – not least in Portman’s flamboyantly spiky performance as Celeste, a manic conflation of multiple female stars, Gaga and Judy Garland included. Even if that’s who I support, why should she have an opinion about it?” But there’s a strange expectation of Taylor Swift to take a political stance and support the female Democratic nominees. It’s totally fair to come down on a politician for misrepresenting you. to be remembered at any cost is something that seems to be unique to this generation.” What bewilders him, he says, is that “we expect celebrities to be our representatives. The movie is about the desire to be iconic. “The only thing that mass shootings and mass distribution of manufactured hits have in common is spectacle. He states that he is not making direct connections between pop and terrorism. “A lot of people needed to be convinced to carry on making the film,” Corbet says. Indeed, the project nearly came to a standstill after the bombing at Ariana Grande’s Manchester Arena concert in May 2017. But there’s something deeply unsettling about its juxtaposition of showbiz glitz and the horror of mass slaughter. This audacious film – mixing exuberant razzle-dazzle with moments of desolate severity – has been hotly praised since its premiere at last autumn’s Venice film festival (“a deeply satisfying, narratively ambitious jolt of a movie,” said the New York Times). But Vox Lux is no routine backstage melodrama: not so much A Star Is Torn as A Star Is Shredded, Piece By Painful Piece, it features Natalie Portman as Celeste, whose celebrity is forged in the crucible of a school shooting, and who later becomes implicated in a terrorist attack. to be remembered at any cost is something that seems to be unique to this generationĪll this might not make him the likeliest candidate to direct a film about a messed-up Gaga-esque pop star. His passions include writer WG Sebald, artist Anselm Kiefer, and the Finnish modernist composer Kaija Saariaho his track record as an actor includes work with such blue-chip auteurs as Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier and he thinks of himself as making “movies where the form is the content”. ![]() Articulate and thoughtfully confident, Corbet is a hardcore, highbrow Europhile. However, we’re absolutely not dealing with another Sundance brat. ![]() In London to promote his second feature, Vox Lux, Corbet – pronounced “Cor-bay” – initially resembles your average indie bro: the regulation backwards baseball cap and fuzzy beard, coupled with a comfortable bulk, suggest a laid-back bar-band drummer. Corbet, now 30, expects strong responses because, as he puts it, his films go for “operatic heights… When people totally hate a movie that I’ve made, I totally understand, and if they love it I also understand.” “Those are things you steel yourself for,” he says. Having made his first, brazenly ambitious feature at the age of 27, and finding himself compared to the young Orson Welles, American writer-director Brady Corbet is used to being on the receiving end of the brutal P-words – “precocious” and “pretentious”.
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