Summary

Collider’s Steve Weintraub talks with The Brutalist’s Alessandro Nivola ahead of the film’s release.

In this interview, Nivola discusses finding his character through prep work, the backstory of his relationship with Adrien Brody’s László Toth, the whirlwind production, and the recent critical acclaim.

Nivola also talks about projects like Kraven the Hunter, Downton Abbey 3, and Face/Off, revealing insights into the industry and his career.

This has been a banner year for actor Alessandro Nivola, who’s currently celebrating the release of a number of projects he’s been involved with over the past four or so years. In particular, he recently spoke with Collider’s Steve Weintraub about Brady Corbet’s independent epic, The Brutalist, which has been enjoying quite a bit of Oscar buzz since its World Premiere at the Venice International Film Festival.
Starring Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, and Guy Pearce, The Brutalist is a frontrunner for a Best Picture nomination. In the movie, Nivola plays Attila, the cousin of Hungarian immigrant László Toth (Brody), who relocated to America a decade prior. When László finds himself in a strange country, Atilla offers his home to the architect, who “can see through all of this facade of the American success story” that Atilla so desperately tries to put up.
In addition to working with Brody and writer-director Corbet on The Brutalist, Nivola talks with Collider about the lasting success of past projects like Face/Off, his son Sam Nivola’s role in Season 3 of Mike White’s hit Max series The White Lotus, and the number of films he has releasing presently. “I’ve gotten so used to movies in these in recent years getting tripped up by world events,” he tells us, referring to Sony’s latest, Kraven the Hunter, in which he plays Aleksei Sytsevich, or Rhino, in the Marvel universe. He discusses its rocky production and what it was like on set, as well as his slate of future projects like Downton Abbey 3. You can read the full conversation in the transcript below.
Alessandro Nivola Had No Idea the Impact ‘Face/Off’ Would Have

“That’s the only hit movie I’ve ever been in.”

COLLIDER: Is it every day that someone brings up Face/Off, or is it every other day?
ALESSANDRO NIVOLA: Well, it’s funny, there seems to be, just in the last year or something, a big resurgence of interest in that movie. I don’t know if that’s because it had a streaming run on Netflix or something. I have no idea, but it’s somewhere. It’s suddenly been playing again. And then there was all this talk about there being a sequel or something, so it’s just in the last year or so, I’ve had a lot more people asking me about it and talking about it and being curious about my experience on it. But it was a hit from the start, to be honest. I think, basically, that’s the only hit movie I’ve ever been in.
I’m trying to think about your resume. That can’t be true. But you mean a mega-hit, something that a ton of people saw.
NIVOLA: Yeah, but even beyond that. The movies that I think of and people think of as being my biggest triumphs really weren’t entirely successful, apart from my performances in them. [Laughs] I mean, if you look at Disobedience, it kind of did all I was decently reviewed. I won a couple of awards for it, but the movie wasn’t a smash. You can go through all of them like that — The Wizard of Lies, Laurel Canyon… I guess American Hustle was a pretty big one. But most of the bigger movies I’ve been in have kind of not worked.
Being an actor is like winning a lottery but then managing to have a career as an actor over such a prolonged period of time, it’s really, really hard to do. You’ve got to get lucky and you’ve got to have talent, and you’ve managed to do it, which is a testament to your ability.
NIVOLA: No, I have a great career, and it’s taking on a new dimension now. In fact, it’s probably got the most head of steam now than it’s ever had, but that’s definitely despite the fact that most of the movies that I’ve been recognized for haven’t really been movies that made a big impact.
I see what you’re saying.
NIVOLA: But the funny thing about it was the one that really did was Face/Off, and I had no idea how unusual it is for a movie to have that amount of appreciation and to be both the box office hit and to become a kind of cult thing and all that. I just had no idea. I didn’t even go to the premiere. I was filming a Michael Winterbottom movie with Rachel Weisz called I Want You in Hastings on the south coast of England, and I didn’t bother to fly back for it. I remember my agents calling me at the afterparty, and I think Etta James was singing at the party, and I remember them calling me up on the phone and saying, “Hey, wish you were here!” I just didn’t understand the significance of it at all. I thought it was kind of a dime-a-dozen, and this was the first of many of those kinds of big smash hits, so I was like, “Yeah, whatever.”

Related

‘Face/Off 2’ Is Still in the Works From ‘Godzilla x Kong’s Adam Wingard

The faces may be off, but the scripts are in.

Yeah, you never know. You think the movie’s good, but you never know if something’s going to stand the test of time and be something that people like me want to talk about almost 30 years later.
NIVOLA: It had such an individual style that belonged to John Woo, and so even among those Hollywood kind of blockbuster action movies and stuff, it stood apart even at the time, and still now.
What do you think might surprise people to learn about being an actor in Hollywood and also being an actor on stage?
NIVOLA: I guess people think everybody’s deciding between 10 different movies to do every quarter of the year, and it’s really deciding between doing a movie or not working. That’s for most people, most movie stars.
There are very few people on this planet as actors, maybe Leonardo DiCaprio or Tom Cruise…
NIVOLA: There are five guys who have their years planned ahead, sort of three years in advance, and they’re developing stuff with Martin Scorsese and everything. But apart from them, the idea of curating your career doesn’t really exist in the way that people imagine. There are always these conversations about your choices and everything. It’s just a whole bunch of B.S.
I completely understand. You’ve done a lot of roles in your career. If you could go back in time and do one more day on the set of a previous project or one of the things you did on the stage, what would you love to be able to do for one more day?
NIVOLA: My first lead role in a professional play was an Athol Fugard play called Master Harold and the Boys, which they made a film of at some point with Matthew Broderick in it, but it’s a perfect play. I think I was 17 or 18, and it was one of the most complete performances and perfectly rounded characters that I’ve ever played. It was just such joy because it was the first time I’d ever been on the road. I was living alone in a hotel in Seattle, and my dreams were coming true. I could live in that moment of my life, definitely, for another 24 hours.
I don’t do personal questions, and this is as personal as I get: how do you feel about your son, [Sam Nivola], booking The White Lotus before you?
NIVOLA: [Laughs] Amazingly, he’s the only actor who could ever have any kind of success, and I wouldn’t feel jealous. No one else is exempt. But it’s a strange feeling because I’m so not used to it, just being able to really delight in someone else’s success. [Laughs] The main thing is he seems so happy right now, and that’s every parent’s fantasy.

Image via HBO

I’m really looking forward to the new season. I’m sure you are more excited than me.
NIVOLA: Well, except that I gather he does some kind of unspeakable things, and so I’ll probably be covering my eyes for most of it.
‘The Brutalist’ Was the “Most Thrilling Little Twist” at the Venice International Film Festival

“It was like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

Jumping into The Brutalist. You’ve heard the buzz. You know how good it is. At what point when you got involved did you realize, “Oh, this might be a really special movie?”
NIVOLA: I thought Brady [Corbet] was a special guy when I met him. The director is the first priority. By the way, when we were talking about curating careers and choices as actors and everything, don’t get me wrong, I’ve chosen not to work instead of doing a lot of things that were offered to me. It’s not that I never turn down work. I turn down a shitload of work and spend time not working. The main criterion for me, especially in the past 10 years, has been the director. Brady, if you talk to him, the way his brain works is particular to him. There was always going to be something original about this movie, and it was always going to have the imprint of a director on it, as his other two films had. I knew that was going to be the case.
Did I know that it was going to end up being a frontrunner for Best Picture? No. I didn’t know that until it was, really. It was looking like they weren’t even going to fly us out to the Venice International Film Festival. Brady had booked an Airbnb on his own. That’s how low the expectations were for the movie having any kind of chance of getting the attention of the kind that it’s getting. That all changed within 24 hours of its screening at Venice.
I wanted to ask you about that because I will never know what it’s like to screen a movie the way you’re describing it, where you’re hoping for the best, and all of a sudden, there are rave reviews coming out, and everything about a movie completely changes.
NIVOLA: I had a front-row seat to this extraordinary about-face. It was like nothing I’ve ever seen before, and I’ve been through all that sales process on a million different films over the years at film festivals. This was by far the most thrilling and hilarious little twist. Every single one of these distributors passed on the movie after having had it screened before the festival, and then most of them were bidding on it within hours of the reviews.
The night before the actual premiere, there was a dinner party for the cast and Brady, and we were sitting at the dinner. The press screening was happening the night before, and he started getting these texts saying that at the intermission, there had been a standing ovation from the critics to the film at the halfway point, and his eyebrows kind of went up. That was the first little indication that something was brewing. Then, the following day after the premiere, that was when the phone started ringing.
The thing that I can’t believe is that he shot the whole thing in 34 days, which is, when you think about it, pretty crazy. But then, when you examine the film, there are only so many locations, and there’s a lot of people talking. There’s not a lot of special effects. You can see how he managed to do it. But what was it actually like on set? Because this was being done on a very finite budget, and there was a lot of stuff you had to get done in not a lot of time.
NIVOLA: The main thing that made it all possible was Brady and Lol Crawley’s shot selection. I think even if Brady had all the money in the world, he wouldn’t be covering scenes with unnecessary hidden camera setups. His shot selection is so deliberate and carefully chosen and planned that it didn’t surprise me, really, that he was able to make those days and to get the scenes finished in the time that he had. Unlike a lot of big Hollywood movies that shoot a scene from 100 different angles and then either dump most of it on the cutting room floor or over-edit scenes in that frantic way that is popular now to hold people’s short attention spans, Brady doesn’t do that. He shoots scenes, sometimes in one with camera moves and choreography worked out, or he’ll shoot a whole scene in a two-shot, or there’ll be a whole scene that plays mainly on one person’s face, and then you might cut it at the end. Every scene’s different, but the unifying theme is that there was no waste of film.
How ‘The Warrior’s Cinematographer Helped Inform This Character

“Everything kind of flowed from that.”

Image via A24

I’m always fascinated by how actors prepare for a role. With something like this, how early on were you starting to think about the character and the way you wanted to play it?
NIVOLA: He offered me this role three years before we shot it, during COVID. So, in the time between the first conversation that we had about it and the day that I set foot on set, the world changed, the cast changed. There was basically nobody left in the cast who had been in it when I first agreed to do it with him. So, it had been on my mind over those years, but then, when we really got down to it, it was a fascinating preparation. I started with voice stuff, with the accent, because it was important to convey that this was a guy who was trying to sound American in a very hip, casual, colloquial way and was getting it just slightly wrong. That was a total insight into his character in general, that he was trying to project a kind of ease and confidence in his new, adopted country that he didn’t really have. Both the audience and Adrien [Brody]’s character had to be able to see through that and recognize the insecurity underneath. There’s something tragic about him, really. There’s something pathetic and sad about his desperate attempt at assimilation.
So, a lot of it started with trying to find a model for that. I discovered these interviews with a Hungarian cinematographer named Andrew Laszlo, who had shot the original Shogun, as well as that cult movie, The Warriors. Very talented guy. I started listening to these interviews with him, and he had a kind of urban East Coast, New York sound to his voice that had a little bit of a New York accent and New York attitude to it. But then, in crucial syllables of words or crucial words and sentences, he would stress the wrong thing, and it would give him away. I don’t mean to say that he shared the same kind of insecurity or low self-esteem that my character does in The Brutalist, but the voice seemed right. I really started working on it off of him, and that was the beginning of it. Then, everything kind of flowed from that.
It was all a work of my imagination and creating this relationship between him and László that has so many crosscurrents in it, where I imagine that they grew up together, almost like brothers in Budapest. I think their families were probably very close. He probably, from a young age and all through his adolescence, both admired and looked up to László’s talent and genius and confidence, and then also felt overshadowed by it and resentful of it, and there was sexual jealousy between them because László had stolen one of his girlfriends when they were teenagers or slept with one of his girlfriends — it’s not totally clear, but it’s hinted at in the script. On the other hand, he was family. There’s this incredible shame and guilt that I think Attila feels from having avoided the camps and the Holocaust because he had come 10 years earlier, so he’s desperate to provide some kind of safe haven for László.
But, as soon as László is there in the bosom of his family, László can see through all of this facade of the American success story, and that’s really painful for Attila. All these things were things that I had just created in my imagination. I think Adrien had his own sort of understanding of that relationship. We never really discussed it, and I never really discussed it much with Brady. It was just all instinctive stuff that came from the emotional reality that was in my head.
I could see everything that you were talking about in the film in terms of the relationship between the two of them. It’s in your performance and in the way Brady shot it.
NIVOLA: I think all three of us really were on the same page in an unspoken way. We didn’t intellectualize it or try and explain it, overtly, but I think we all basically had some version of what I just described to you in our heads.
How Does Filming in VistaVision Affect a Scene?

“It created this heightened feeling.”

Image via A24

Brady shot this using the VistaVision film stock. What was that like? You’ve obviously worked your career from cinema, I’m sure you’ve done a lot of digital filmmaking. What is it like when the filmmaker is shooting on VistaVision? Does that change anything with your performance? Does it change the energy on set?
NIVOLA: Not all the scenes were shot on it, but the ones that were, it is a very different experience because the camera mag is turned to the side, which creates the wider format. It is something about the way that the camera works in that wider format creates this incredibly loud noise, almost like an industrial fan, so it sounds almost like a projector is right by your ear.
I remember the scene that’s the first scene between me and Adrien when he gets off the bus, and I’m there to pick him up, which was a very emotionally charged scene to begin with. He’s just come out of the concentration camps and has made this difficult trip across to America and managed to come and find me, and I have this information that his wife is still alive, that he didn’t know, and then also the things that I just described with the complications of my having not been there. Already, there was a pitch to the moment, and then the camera was only about four feet away, and it was making that racket, and it created this heightened feeling to the scene because there was just so much going on. We could barely even hear each other talk over the sound of the camera. It definitely is different than filming on regular 35.

Photo via CAA

I know people who have worked with the IMAX cameras. I would imagine it’s very similar for IMAX film, where it’s very obvious you’re filming because it’s loud.
NIVOLA: Yeah, it’s similar to the sound of an over-cranked camera, which means when you shoot things in slow motion on film, you run the film through twice the speed so that when the film is then being run through a projector at regular speed, it looks slow. That sound of an over-cranked camera is very similar to the sound of the VistaVision.
Before Adrien Brody, Joel Edgerton Was Set to Star in ‘The Brutalist’

Image via Netflix

Originally, The Brutalist was going to have Joel Edgerton in the role that Adrien plays. I’m a fan of Joel, but it all worked out for the best, is what I’m saying. I’m not trying to disparage Joel, it’s just two completely different performances.
NIVOLA: Especially with independent films, they take so many different twists and turns along the way to coming to fruition. Sometimes you get lucky with certain things, and sometimes you don’t. In this case, I think it was Joel who felt like it was a role that was more suited to someone else. I think everybody feels like it was just so obvious that Adrien’s personal history aligned so well with the character. That’s just one of those things that, as a film comes together and falls apart and comes together and falls apart, sometimes the right man for the job ends up revealing himself at the last minute. Also, at different times different actors have different value, and all this nonsense, so there was an earlier moment when the film was being put together where maybe it couldn’t have been made with this cast, and then suddenly, it could.
I don’t think people understand how international financing and how one name can change everything, and it’s good for six months, and then the person isn’t on that same list.
NIVOLA: It’s generally just total nonsense. This movie is not being sold on any of the actors’ names in it. The movie is being sold on the brilliance of the filmmaking and the brilliance of the performances. People aren’t going to see the movie because there’s an actor in it that they will see in anything. That’s not the reason that this movie is, to whatever extent it is, already a success. That’s usually the case with independent films. So, that whole number value assigned different actors’ names at different times, it’s all just complete nonsense. But financiers need to feel some kind of comfort that their investment has some kind of backstop or something, but it never really is.
‘Downton Abbey 3’ Reunites Alessandro Nivola and Paul Giamatti In a “Double Act”

“It just seemed like a no-brainer.”

Image by Zanda Rice 

I saw that you’re in the upcoming Downton Abbey, so I definitely have to ask you, because we have a lot of fans of Downton Abbey on at Collider. I know they haven’t revealed anything about the plot and I don’t want to get you in trouble, but what can you tease about your role in the film? What was it about the material that said, “I want to do this?”
NIVOLA: All I can tell you is that Paul Giamatti and I are a kind of a double act in it. He is somebody who I’ve known most of my life. When I was about 18 and an undergrad at Yale, he was at the Yale School of Drama, and we ended up in a couple of plays together. I even have photographs of us when I was 18, and he was 23 or something, on stage together. We shared a dressing room a couple of times, as well. I remember him sitting next to me, and they have these monitors on the wall where you can hear what’s going on on stage so you know when your cue is coming up, and then you can leave your dressing room and go down to the wings and get ready to make your entrance. He would just sit there reading Dickens novels all through the play until his entrance would come in — I don’t understand how he could even hear his cue. He would make his way through these huge tomes over the course of the run. Somehow, he would just be reading along, and then just as the cue approached, he closed the book, and then we’d go and walk onstage to his performance. Then our kids went to the same school here in Brooklyn Heights.
So, over the years, we’ve known each other, so this opportunity came up to do something together in a movie, and it just seemed like a no-brainer. Then we discovered while we were on set that we’d both played the Rhino in two different Marvel movies. Anyway, I’m hearing great things about it. I can’t reveal too much, but apparently, they did a test screening recently that scored very, very well, so maybe this will be my biggest hit since Face/Off.

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Downton Abbey is very popular. I am curious what it’s like on set on one of those versus other things, because it does seem like there’s not too much veering from a script on one of those movies. But perhaps I’m wrong.
NIVOLA: It’s not heavily improvised or anything like that. It’s a group of people who’ve known each other and worked together for so many years. That would have seemed like a tricky situation for me to enter into because they’re like a family, and I would have been the outsider, but I guess because of my relationship with Paul and then I had worked with Hugh Bonneville in Mansfield Park, 20-odd years ago, and Dominic West has a daughter, Martha West, with one of my wife, [Emily Mortimer]’s, oldest friends, and he had starred in the three-part series that she wrote and directed called The Pursuit of Love, so I have a long history with him. There were all these kinds of crossovers, so I felt part of that group. I slipped into it pretty seamlessly, but there’s a shorthand that they all have from having done the show so long.
It felt kind of charged, the atmosphere on set, because everybody knew that this was the last go-round. I think people were feeling nostalgic and sentimental about it. I’d known Simon Curtis for years, as well, the director, and so we had a great, easy on-set rapport. So while, yes, there is a kind of reverence for the script, I guess, that that isn’t necessarily true on every movie, it didn’t feel like you were straight-jacketed by that.
Before you step on set for something like that, are you watching all the seasons and the previous movies, or are you like, “I know what I’m doing. I’m good. I don’t I don’t need to watch six seasons and two movies?”
NIVOLA: No, I watched a lot of it. I really had a good sense of who all the different characters were in everything. Although, my character in the movie is entering into this world from New York, and so he would only have limited familiarity with all the different people in the family. But no, I had already seen a lot of it, but I definitely did a refresher course. I got the flow chart for the different family members.
What Was the Hold-Up on ‘Kraven the Hunter’?

Image via Sony Pictures Releasing

I definitely have to touch on Kraven the Hunter for a second. That movie took forever to come out, and I’m always curious about how things change along the way. From when you signed on to what people ended up seeing, is it pretty much the same script? Did you end up doing a lot of reshoots? Was it a lot of changes?
NIVOLA: I don’t remember that much changing in the script. There were a few reshoots, but they were mainly action things, if I remember, and not a lot of them involved me because I had so little action to do in the movie. There was just that one fight at the end, which was pretty much all my stunt double or a computer animator. But the process for me, I had a blast. It was a great character. I based it all on a Russian friend of mine and Emily’s, who’s a poet named Philipp Nicolai. He had a particular voice and look, and I basically did an impersonation of him in the context of this fantasy world. I had a great time. I’d worked with J.C. [Chandor] before on A Most Violent Year, which was the main draw for wanting to be in this movie to begin with. Also, Chris Abbott had been in that, and so the three of us knew each other really well. J.C. really let me run wild with the role, and so it was a joy to film.

Image Via Sony

Then once the shoot was over, there seemed to be just a million different kinds of obstacles in the way of it coming out, with the strike and all that kind of thing. So, yeah, it took an interminable amount of time, which resulted in it coming out the same week as these other two movies, one of which I shot only a few months ago. The [Pedro] Almodóvar movie, [The Room Next Door], I’d just walked off set seemingly and onto the red carpet at Venice. So, one of them was just quicker than anything I’ve ever been part of, and one was probably the longest role, although The Many Saints of Newark was stalled for two or three years by COVID. So, I’ve gotten so used to movies in these in recent years getting tripped up by world events.
You’re not alone. Do you already know what you might be doing next year, or is it still too early?
NIVOLA: There are a few things. There’s a movie that hasn’t been announced yet, but it’s something that I’m going to do with Ben Whishaw, and that will be in the late winter in Geneva, so that’ll be interesting. Then there’s a little movie that I shot during the strike that had a SAG waiver that was a little comedy that I did with Amanda Peet, Bob Balaban, and Judd Hirsch. That’s gonna play South by Southwest in March, and so we’ll see if that gets picked up. Then, Emily and I have a production company, King Bee, it’s called, and we have a deal at Sony, so we’re developing a whole slew of things, which is basically our day job. There’s one project that is being developed for me as an actor, which is hopefully going to be shooting next fall.
The Brutalist is in theaters now.

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When visionary architect László Toth and his wife Erzsébet flee post-war Europe in 1947 to rebuild their legacy and witness the birth of modern America, their lives are changed forever by a mysterious, wealthy client.

Director

Brady Corbet

Cast

Adrien Brody
, Guy Pearce
, Felicity Jones
, Joe Alwyn
, Raffey Cassidy
, Stacy Martin
, Emma Laird
, Isaach De Bankole
, Alessandro Nivola
, Michael Epp
, Jonathan Hyde
, Peter Polycarpou
, Salvatore Sansone
, Ariane Labed
, Jeremy Wheeler
, Jaymes Butler
, Matt Devere
, Natalie Shinnick
, Stephen Saracco
, Peter Linka
, Robert Jackson

Writers

Brady Corbet
, Mona Fastvold

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