Brady Corbet On 'Simon Killer,' Antonio Campos

Well, [director] Antonio [Campos] and I had kind of developed the whole thing together. He came to me with an idea about this sort of psychological portrait of a young man that kind of unravels while he’s abroad. He’s kind of loosely based on these kind of noir stuff from the '40s, replacing what were usually middle aged characters with a young man to tell a coming of age story of a young man who comes of age in a very bad way. Yeah, he had this idea and I was very interested. Everything that I write for myself are related to portraits of male identity and male anxiety, which is something that having grown up with a single mother all my life was an interesting thing to process and deal with those things within myself as I got older. Then we just sort of fleshed out this story together.

The film was made primarily with an outline. We worked on that outline together, and then basically the meat on the premises of that structure came from just going to France and going to do the improv rehearsals where Antonio would transcribe whatever was working from those improv rehearsals for the next day’s material. We would always have dialogue to work with and memorize. On the other hand, we were definitely flying by the seat of our pants. We wanted to make something very loose. We wanted to make a movie in the same way that they were making movies in the 70s with our friends. And see what happens. For the most part it was pretty successful. In some cases we were very successful because we dragged ourselves. We just got lucky with some widely talented and intelligent people we worked with.

I haven’t and I don’t think I would have done it with anyone other than Antonio. And that’s not like hyperbole. I’ve thought about it and I don’t know who could ask me to do a movie that was this radical, that I would have felt close enough to, someone that I know well enough that we can share this certain amount of control. I think that if I was just taking orders it could’ve gone very badly. I did trust Antonio’s sensibility. He’s such a brilliant, wonderful, sensitive, compassionate human being. He’s been one of my best friends. You know, we both just have a lot of respect for each other and we had a lot of patience with each other and we needed a lot of patience in order to get it done.

Well, we both lived in Paris and we didn’t know each other then but we’ve both sort of been in that position and we had a lot of stories that was a kind of compare and contrast and a lot of those things ended up in the movie, particularly in the first 35-40 minutes. Like being attacked on the street. Antonio would have this situation where he was walking with two girls and a guy insisted that he shake his hand on the street so he did and then he started asking Antonio, ‘Why is it that you get two girls and I get none.’ We included those little details in the movie.

I’ve actually never chosen a job before because of a role, I only thought about making a movie. I’ve been like, ‘I’m sorry, that’s not my area,’ ‘I don’t know how to do that,’ ‘I don’t think I’d be good at that,’ or ‘You’d be better off with someone else,’ or ‘I suck.’ But I usually get into thinking about who I want to work with. I’m into cinema history and actually making things for history; these things are important to me and I want to contribute to this medium, which I find at times transcendental and holy. I want to transcend this barrier as frequently as I can. Sometimes that’s possible and sometimes it’s not. There are a lot of other factors. I have to support myself too. You just do as much as you can and right now as I don’t have a child and a wife that I’m supporting, then I can continue to be this poor for a while.

Fortunately, no. I couldn’t hurt a fly! I’ve been attacked very few times in my life and honestly, I’ve never fought back. I’m a pacifist. I was raised by a single mother. I’m a feminist really and so you know, I kind of hate those words. I mean, I hate the word 'feminism.' It’s just an annoying word. But yeah, I believe in female equality. While I don’t give a fuck about political correctness, I do think that it is something that we need to examine ourselves a little bit.