'Emilia Pérez', 'The Substance' Surprise on Golden Globes Noms Day
Meanwhile, 'Gladiator II' wobbles. Plus: 'The Brutalist' director Brady Corbet and composer Daniel Blumberg on how they made that memorable score
If you had your formal wear on at 5:30 am PT, then congratulations: You, like me, are probably taking today’s Golden Globes nominations far too seriously.
As my colleague Richard Rushfield has extensively reported, the Golden Globes — despite its highly publicized overhaul a few years ago — is an organization with some major challenges, and quite possibly an unclear future as the Attorney General takes another look. Yet it retains its position as the Oscars precursor that everyone agrees to pay attention to, even if this particular group of 300-or-so journalists voting on awards is no more influential on the Oscars than any of the others.
Is it fair? Of course not. But it can be fun, which is an advantage the Globes continue to have over nearly everyone else. How can you not revel in a crop of best actress nominees that makes room for both Zendaya in Challengers and Fernanda Torres in the brilliant Brazilian drama I’m Still Here? How can you not rejoice that we finally have the best supporting actress lineup that pop fans have been dreaming of: Emilia Pérez’s Selena Gomez and Wicked’s Ariana Grande, up for the same award?
Rejoicing is exactly what Esther Zuckerman and I were doing this morning, launching The Ankler’s first-ever Substack Live to discuss the Golden Globes nominations moments after they were announced. If you missed it, it will be part of this week’s Prestige Junkie podcast — stay tuned.
In summary, it was a major morning for Emilia Pérez, which had been left out of many of last week’s critics’ and independent film awards but scored an immense 10 nominations from the Globes. It was a puzzling morning for otherwise major contenders like Sing Sing, which missed out in the best drama category, and Gladiator II, which was only acknowledged for Denzel Washington’s supporting performance.
The Globes provided a huge boost for such on-the-bubble contenders as Challengers and The Substance, which had surprisingly strong showings. The Substance director Coralie Fargeat making it in the best director category was a particularly intriguing clue at what might happen when the Oscar nominations are announced next month.
One major factor in Emilia Pérez’s huge nominations tally was the original song category, where it received two nominations but will also face some formidable competition. Last week The Ankler launched a new music interview series, Notable, from Rob LeDonne, kicking off with newly-minted Golden Globe nominee Maren Morris talking about her emotional song from The Wild Robot, “Kiss the Sky.” Now would be an excellent time to check it out!
Finally, today’s been another big one for The Brutalist. Just yesterday, the A24 movie about a fictional midcentury architect was a runner-up with the Los Angeles Film Critics after being named best film by the New York Film Critics Circle. But now the Brady Corbet film also has seven Globes nominations, the second-most after Emilia Perez, including a nod for its indelible score by composer Daniel Blumberg.
When I was in Los Angeles a few weeks ago, I caught up with Corbet and Blumberg to talk about that score, its four-note main theme I haven’t been able to get out of my head — and some of the wild musical experiments that made the film possible on a remarkably small budget.
Music Men
Corbet and Blumberg make a fascinating pair. The longtime friends clearly have a shared language and history, reminiscing about going to a noise show together soon after they met about a decade ago. “We were pretty sloshed, it was the birth of a beautiful thing,” says Corbet.
They even lived together as they were preparing to make The Brutalist. The 36-year-old Corbet started his Hollywood career as a teen actor (his first credit is an episode of The King of Queens in 2000), and he’s gregarious and wide-open, taking every opportunity to joke with an audience, often at his own expense. Blumberg, a 34-year-old Londoner, is quieter but just as thoughtful, sometimes turning his body physically inward as he tries to explain the process behind his work.
Speaking to the duo, both in front of an audience following a screening of The Brutalist for the Society of Composers and Lyricists and in a side room immediately after, I came away even more dazzled by Blumberg’s score for The Brutalist, an essential element of one of the year’s most beautifully crafted films. You can hear its insistent percussion and stirring four-note main title in the film’s trailer, truly just a small sample of what’s in store.
The Brutalist is already famous for its remarkably small budget, made for $10 million even when filming in 35mm VistaVision and spanning decades in the life of fictional architect Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody). But Blumberg had even less to work with to create a score that’s both sweeping and haunting — just $50,000 according to Corbet.
To do it he gathered musicians from across Europe, some recording from their home studios or garden sheds, to make music that sounds like the film’s midcentury American setting, but also like nothing else that’s come before.
Ahead, read selections from my conversations with Corbet and Blumberg, about the ways the score was built into the film from the very beginning and why Corbet embraces some of the complaints you might hear about the film’s second half: “Movies have to be confrontational, too,” he tells me. “You need something to wrestle with.”
I. On Filming With Blumberg’s Music on Set
To capture certain sequences in the film, including the bravura early scene on an immigrant ship that makes up much of the trailer, Blumberg composed a temp track that Corbet could play on set and time out the scene precisely. Because VistaVision cameras are so loud — “like a sewing machine,” Corbet says — they had to recreate the sounds afterward anyway, so the temp score could be played loud.
Brady Corbet: So we shot that opening sequence in the boat to the music, and we hired dancers to play all the people in the background so that everything would sort of be more or less in sync. It gave such energy to the cast and to Adrien, blasting that piece of music in the belly of the ship. Even Lol [Crawley, the cinematographer] operating the camera, it became really a dance for everybody.
II. On That Four-Note Main Theme
BC: Daniel played something, I think specifically that piece. I was in the other room, and I came in and I was like, that’s it.
Daniel Blumberg: Brady heard me literally trying to work those things out, and that sound of someone stopping and starting again was immediately a good direction for Laszlo's character. We were happy with that theme for three and a half hours. It has to be the right kind of theme to develop and to travel that length.
BC: I think when something takes four to seven minutes to pay off — when it does, it’s electrifying. The anticipation is kind of part of the fun. I mean, it’s the same with eroticism. It's the anticipation that is such a turn on. With a three-minute song, it’s almost not enough time. It doesn’t usually work on me. I haven’t been seduced.
III. On Parts of the Score You Can’t Quite Put Your Finger On
Blumberg’s background is in improvisational music, and he not only leaned on musicians who were used to making things up as they went, but also had them using instruments in ways virtually no Hollywood scores ever would — to capture everything from siren sounds to a very unique kind of percussion.
DB: The opening 10 minutes is constant music, and that whole section is also interesting in terms of a collaboration between the different departments. The sirens at the start came from the rough sound mix that Steve Single did. I was working with a trumpet player called Axel Dörner, who's based in Berlin, who has a lot of strange techniques and unique sounds. I just started asking these musicians to make siren sounds. So it’s that kind of disorientation of the score and the diegetic sounds mixing together, which was something that we talked about for the whole film.
Brady was talking about the score having more of John Tilbury’s melancholic, intimate piano, but then also we worked with prepared piano, where you’re literally putting screws in the strings of the grand piano. That tick, tick . . . tick, tick . . . that’s prepared piano.
Then there was an amazing player who's based in Paris called Sophie Agnel; she improvises on the strings. So she has a bag of objects, and one of my favorite sounds she did was using just a bouncy ball on the strings.
IV. On How to Do All This With Just $50,000
BC: It’s 110 minutes of music, and I don’t know very many folks that wouldn’t have griped more. Daniel was so patient throughout this process and so flexible. It was every department on the movie; my production designer as well really had to embrace minimalism. In a way that was the only way to get the movie made, but of course it was sort of apropos considering what the movie’s about.
I struggle with all scores that are asleep at the synths. I just fucking hate it. I’m like, what’s it doing there? I like choices. The most iconic film scores, they’re a major character in the film. If I think about the way Kubrick worked with music, or Tarkovsky worked with music, I can’t imagine the films without them.
The reason that this score feels so simpatico with the movie is because it is really telling us something about this character's internal life. Because Adrien’s character is not able to express himself in any other way, except really through his work, I thought that it felt like it really always needed to be there, and it was written into the screenplay. It’s always been an integral part of the film’s architecture.
DB: In your scripts, when you talk about score, I always feel like you are talking to me when I read certain words. I’m like, Oh, I know what he’s talking about. Sometimes when you read ‘the orchestra swells,’ I’m like, Oh fuck. Why can't he say ‘the solo flute repeats this phrase?’
BC: If I was to do a film that had absolutely no score, I’d still probably just have Daniel work on its sound.
V. On That Controversial Second Half
If you hear someone criticizing The Brutalist, odds are they are zeroing in on the film’s second half, in which Laszlo’s exhilaration at being given a massive commission from a millionaire, played by Guy Pearce, curdles into a much more cynical vision of the American Dream.
Corbet, whose previous features Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux received much more mixed responses, seems to welcome the criticism. When I asked him how he was getting used to all the praise for The Brutalist, he cheerfully replied, “They’ll hate the next one!” Pushing the audience’s buttons, it seems, is very much the point.
BC: I’m constantly just thinking of even very small ways that we can really change our relationship to the narrative and how far can we bend it before it breaks. I mean, the first half of the movie makes people feel really good in a way. It’s American optimism, and the second half of the movie is pessimism. But movies have to be confrontational, too. You need something to wrestle with.
DB: Yeah, I would be worried if someone said, “I feel like this is going really well, actually.”
BC: If we take what Hitchcock did with Janet Leigh and Psycho — I think that it’s amazing how radical the choices used to be 75 years ago. That’s why I really believe that the past is the future. I think large format, which has existed for almost as long as the medium has existed — I think that is what’s going to make people start coming back to the movies. Universal is releasing the film internationally, and they were like, look, 70 millimeter for us is not only good creatively, but it’s actually good business.
Hopefully this film is going to help other filmmakers as well. What I find strange is for a city that is so politically liberal to be so creatively conservative. I’m like, these things are linked. We have to help nourish the culture. People will follow you. It can’t always just be about the bottom line.
There are actually more examples than not of the films that really stand out and make really bold choices being the films that are really working, and the ones that really play it safe are not. And I'm like, well, yeah, I’m not going to order a car and get a babysitter and all this shit either if I saw the trailer and I already know what it is.
