Vox Lux director Brady Corbet: ‘The movie is about the desire to be iconic’
The US film-maker on creative burnout, working with Scott Walker and his new film starring Natalie Portman as a messed-up pop star
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”. “Those are things you steel yourself for,” he says. 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.”
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. However, we’re absolutely not dealing with another Sundance brat. Articulate and thoughtfully confident, Corbet is a hardcore, highbrow Europhile. 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”.