‘I’m really proud of him,” Robert Pattinson says of 27-year-old actor Brady Corbet—a close friend—and his astonishing directorial debut film, The Childhood of a Leader. Pattinson signed on for a cameo role as reporter Charlie—a “deliberate red-herring character. I’d read the script a long time ago and thought it was amazing,” Pattinson says. “I really trusted Brady. He is so singular in his vision—I’ve never met someone in the film industry so pure in his intentions.”
Set in post-World War I France, leading up to the signing of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, this psychological family drama serves as a small-frame window into the rise of Fascism. The father, played by Liam Cunningham, has been sent by President Wilson from America to help negotiate the treaty. He, his wife, played by Bérénice Bejo, and their young son, Prescott, played by British child actor Tom Sweet, engage in a power struggle that reveals both the boy’s manipulation of his elders and the knee-jerk cruelty that his parents exercise in trying to obstruct their son’s indomitable will.
A thundering, ominous score by Scott Walker is almost another character, and grainy 35-mm. film reinforces the interplay of light and dark. Cunningham, like Pattinson, is awed by Corbet’s assuredness and authority: “He’s the most knowledgeable cinephile I’ve ever met in my life. He directs like it’s his 20th movie, and he loves the European tradition.” Pattinson agrees: “I think he’s going to be one of the most important people in films.”
The idea behind The Childhood of a Leader struck Corbet 11 years ago, and he started writing it when he was 17, only to abandon the project when he decided it was too ambitious to be made. “I couldn’t go any further,” he says. “Everything about its structure, its arch, was genre-defying.” He picked it up again in 2013 when his partner, the Norwegian director Mona Fastvold, suggested they finish it together. “It has been a constant fight,” Corbet says, “but these things work out as long as you’re as relentless as the problems are.”
