Netflix Brazil has added The Childhood of a Leader to their movies screening this week.

 

Thanks Pattinson Daily for the heads up.

 

Photo Credit © A.Nitecka

We have this great new still of Robert Pattinson as Charles Marker thanks to a brilliant interview for Kodak done by Tomris Laffly with Brady Corbet and Lol Crawley.  I loved reading about the thought process and reasoning on why Brady used film.  Personally I love the texture – I’m not a huge fan of digital – sometimes I find it too crisp especially when filmed in a studio, but that’s my personal opinion.  Here’s an extract from the interview, but do yourselves a favour and head on over to read it (click on link above). Wonderful insights:

Working closely together, Corbet and Crawley found the look of the film, which has a glorious, painterly quality to it. “On the set, we were talking about Anselm Keifer for texture. We decided very early on in the design that we do this post-modern Victorian thing,” says Corbet. “We were talking about painterly textures. I think when you’re shooting celluloid, especially [with this film] which was quite underexposed; you’re drawing a lot of the grain out. I think that as soon as you are working with those textures, you get that oil vibe.” Crawley says in addition to Anselm Keifer, which thematically inspired the child’s dream sequences, the paintings of Vilhelm Hammershoi were a strong reference point. He and the film’s production designer John-Vincent Puzos draw from Hammershoi in terms of the color and lighting of family home interiors during daytime. The paintings of Rembrandt were also looked at for inspiration, especially for creating shadow areas. “Harris Savides’ work in Birth exemplifies this approach and his bold use of underexposure inspired me underexpose the day exteriors by 1 1/2 – 2 stops,” Crawley concludes.

…

Corbet adds that a shot of Bérénice Bejo cutting flowers is his favorite shot in the movie, and talks about the lensing of it specifically. “We shot a handful of things with these very special portrait lenses that have an incredible swirl. We kept looking for a lens that had this feel like a portal, something that lets you access a task in a way. I was trying to think about ways of evoking a notion of memory without being extremely literal about it. I didn’t want the film to be from this boy’s perspective. I wanted it to dip in and out of it.

 

It is that time of year where people are compelled to publish their  “Best of” lists for 2016.  I posted in our Week in Review on Sunday that Barfly gave the soundtrack an honourable mention and Citizen Film included it in his list for “striking score and breakaway finale knocked me out.”  Today though, quite a few others came about so I thought I might do a compilation of the lists.  I will add to them as we close off 2016:

The Film Stage – Best Directorial Debut

The Childhood of a Leader – Brady Corbet

Scale — in terms of both narrative scope and ambition — can be forgivably small in a directors first feature. When ambitions and ideas get too big, the result can often times become unwieldy. Yet Brady Corbet, in his directorial debut The Childhood of a Leader, manages to take both grand thematic ideas and cold aesthetic choices and balance them perfectly. The result is a European influenced character piece that is both engrossing and horrifying, evoking Haneke without adopting his voice. Not an easy movie, and not a perfect film, it nonetheless announces Corbet as an aesthetic and cerebral storyteller to keep an eye on. – Brian R.

Indiewire (David Ehrlich) – The 10 Best Movie Scores

4.  The Childhood of a Leader

“The Childhood of a Leader” might be set in 1918, but it sure sounds a lot like 2016. Written by art pop god Scott Walker (as opposed to embattled Wisconsin governor Scott Walker), the score for Brady Corbet’s directorial debut begins with 17 seconds of an orchestra tuning up, as if warning you to brace for what’s to come. And when the first strains of Scott Walker’s panicky accompaniment slice into the soundtrack like Penderecki having a heart attack, the strings cutting into archival footage of World War I troops marching in deadly formation, you’ll be glad for the warning.

The year’s most unnerving coming-of-age film, Corbet’s first feature is a troubled look inside the formative experiences of a young boy with a dark future. But rather than paint a reductive portrait in which every adult psychosis can be clearly traced back to a childhood trauma, the director relies on Walker’s score to articulate the rage that foments inside his pint-sized protagonist. The music charges around with authoritarian confidence: In one piece, a violent insurgency of strings crashes into a war balustrade of trumpets. In another, the ratatat of a printing press assumes a militaristic beat you can dance to. Every brief respite that Walker writes into this sonic nightmare is meant to lull us listeners into a false sense of safety, meant to make us relax so that we can feel when the hairs on the back of our neck go stiff again.

Highlight Track: “Opening”

Indiewire also included The Childhood of a Leader theatrical poster in their “Best of 2016” list, which we posted about here.

Preorder Robert Pattinson “The Childhood of a Leader” on iTunes UK

We had originally posted that iTunes (UK) would be releasing The Childhood of a Leader on 21 December 2016, but I was checking today and noticed it’s been updated to the new release date.  You can still preorder though here.  I like the little picture of Charles in the right hand top corner.  Smart people at iTunes.

Watch Robert Pattinson in The Childhood of a Leader – 19 February 2017 at The Town Hall Theatre

The Galway Film Society is presenting “The Childhood of a Leader” at The Town Hall Theatre on Sunday 19 February 2017 at 8.00pm.  You can purchase your tickets here

Indiewire included this theatrical poster for The Childhood of a Leader in their “The Best Movie Posters of 2016” (they’ve only selected 21).  I think that one and the Japanese poster are my favourites to be honest.  I like that they considered this poster in the 21 best posters for 2016 and what they have to say.