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Brady Corbet: It was supposed to be a series of three short films on the theme of protection. Each film was concerned with an adult male character being faced with a hostile or aggressive situation and tracked his reaction to it. The films all had a moment where the character would get caught in a "loop of aggression" in an effort to demonstrate the absurdity of violence and the male ego. I was 18 years old when I made the film, so it's all a bit weighed down by it's concept, but I still find the film fascinating when I look back on it. The following two films were meant to be shot in France, the following year with an excellent DP named Yves Cape. But we lost the financing and they were never completed.I had always intended to direct. I was an early cinephile, so in a way, it had been a long time coming. When I was working as an actor on Funny Games in2007, I asked our cinematographer Darius Khondji to shoot the film, as well as that film's producer, Chris Coen, if he would be interested in supporting the project. They both said yes.How did you conceive of the climax? It's pretty fucking disconcerting and intense and I don't know if I've ever seen anything like it.
I have a lot of theories about redundancy and repetition in regards to both the visual language of a film and its narrative content. I've often felt that that redundancy can aggressively reinforce certain narrative themes while also allowing an audience to reassess their relationship to what's happening at that particular moment in the story. It is the same way that by the third time you have heard the chorus of a pop song your relationship to it has changed from the first time you heard it. You've only really processed the melody by the end of the song.
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I guess the antagonist was irrelevant because it never really mattered to me why he was bothering these two people—I was only focused on the paranoid reaction to the scenario by Daniel's character.What are you working on now?
I am in Paris now doing very early prep work on a feature I am directing called The Childhood of a Leader. The film is, in part, about events leading up to the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.@PRISMindexPreviously - I'm Short, Not Stupid Presents: 'How to Live with Bedbugs'
