Alessandro Nivola on the improvisation and family history that shaped his role inThe Brutalist.
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What has your awards season been like?
I dont think anybody gives a shit about any of it at the moment.
Its exciting because even good movies dont always have this kind of spotlight on them.
In those first conversations, what did you and Brady discuss about the film and about who Attila was?
Had you read the script?I had read it.
I mainly was interested to get his thoughts about the relationship between Laszlo and Attila.
If Im really honest, I dont remember us getting into too much detail about the character and relationships.
My grandmother was a bourgeois German Jew, and my grandfather was the son of a stonemason in Sardinia.
Theres a lot of internal agony to that moment.
Tell me about it.I dont think that pause in particular was planned.
That moment is informed by all these different things that are playing subtextually between them.
Laszlo has this aura around him and the confidence of a genius and the arrogance of a genius.
I think that was always annoying to Attila and it was also something Attila wished he had.
Hes come 10 years before and avoided the whole horror.
Attila feels humbled and sort of humiliated by that imbalance.
And Laszlo, of course, sees through all of it.
Hes just being completely exposed at every moment of their interaction for being full of shit.
The result is cruelty passed on, almost in cycles of abuse.
Hes tried to fuck my wife, as far as I know.
Hes shit on my generosity, and I cant live with that.
This moment is so laced with so much stuff.
But Ive compromised myself, and I know it, and Laszlo knows it.
How did you decide how Attila would dance?
Theres a lot of that self-aware comic dancing.
That all came out of the moment.
I also want to ask you about the final good-bye between Attila and Laszlo.
The dancing scene was all handheld.
There were no boundaries or formal restrictions in the scene.
And Adrien was like, Im getting gold here, and hes not even shooting it!
But truth be told, I didnt know anything about the lighting setup.
Some actors do that a lot, and I cant stand it.
It makes me self-conscious, and I dont even want to think about it.
We did a bunch of different takes.
I feel the weight of the whole Holocaust in that moment, as I tell him to leave.
More and more, that came to define the performance of that scene.
The framing of that scene creates such menace in how Attila is treating Laszlo.
Are you aware that your tennis outfit fromA Most Violent Yearhas a thirsty following online?Yeah.
I figured somebody had posted it.
I didnt know that this was reaching a wider audience.
But I couldnt be more thrilled.
Im glad you know about it.
In those kinds of movies, the villains are always the fun parts.
She has a friend from that time, a poet named Philip Nikolayev.
I didnt want to be this typical Russian gangster guy.
That was the genesis of it all.
I had Philip record my entire script into my iPhone, and I basically did an imitation of him.
I showed it to J.C. and he loved the idea.
I needed to create a character who was believably somebody who had problems with his health and fitting in.
Once we got into shooting it, there were just opportunities for comedy.
I wanted as much as I could to have humorous moments followed by menacing moments, without any transition.
The relationship with the dog, for me, was a metaphor for my interaction with everyone.
J.C. really let me go with that, and I was improvising some of that.
Not all of it made it in there, but some of it did.
Theres some confusion about this very memorable moment in the film where you scream for a second.
I heard the scream was added in post.
Maybe there was the tiniest bit of some sound, but it was pretty much silent.
The idea was the henchman doesnt know what Im doing.
That was the design of it from my point of view.
It wasnt something I really planned.
In ADR, J.C. had me vocalize the scream a little bit.
Its still not fully vocalized, but its a caught-in-my-throat kind of scream.
I think it could have worked either way.
Some people think that its a birdcall.
Youre also inThe Room Next Door, Pedro Almodovars first film fully in English.
He sought you out for this role.
That feels like a unique responsibility in Almodovars filmography.
Id been hearing that voice all through my life.
To me, its the first little doorway into a whole world of detailed personal history for any character.
The language of the film was not kitchen-sink American vernacular; it was like a heightened language.
Its just a way in.
The most important thing is feeling spontaneous.
I was trying to bring a conversational, everyday feeling to a scene that was written as heavily confrontational.
When I arrived to shoot the scene, hed had the exact same thing mocked up for me.
They all had been working with him for three or four movies straight.
But he wasnt precious at all.
He was a self-contained person.
