Directors Roundtable: 6 filmmakers on doubt, compromise and Timothée Chalamet

LOS ANGELES — About 10 years ago, Malcolm Washington was working as an assistant, pulling cable as part of the camera team on a commercial being directed by James Mangold.

Now Washington has completed his debut feature as a director, an adaptation of August Wilson’s play “The Piano Lesson,” starring his brother John David Washington along with Samuel L. Jackson and Danielle Deadwyler. And he found himself on a mid-November morning participating in last year’s Envelope Directors Roundtable seated next to Mangold, who brought to life the early years of Bob Dylan’s career with “A Complete Unknown,” starring Timothée Chalamet.

“I didn’t know what a director did,” recalls Washington of what he learned working on film sets. “But being close to the camera, I was like, ‘OK, let me see what this job is. Let me see what they do practically.’ [To Mangold] So you were one of the people that I got to study for that time. So it’s an honor being back here with you at the table.”

That same combination of commitment and curiosity courses through all the participants in this year’s roundtable.

Washington and Mangold were joined by French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat, who made “The Substance,” a body-horror parable on women and aging starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley; German filmmaker Edward Berger, director of “Conclave,” a sly drama on the behind-the-scenes politics of selecting a new pope starring Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci and John Lithgow; Denis Villeneuve with “Dune: Part Two,” a continuation of the blockbuster sci-fi franchise; and Brady Corbet with “The Brutalist,” a story of wealth and power in post-World War II America starring Adrien Brody as an immigrant architect.

“I watch these roundtables,” Washington says. “I grew up a DVD kid, so I was listening to the DVD commentary and trying to learn how to direct like that. You didn’t get a lot of opportunities to be on set. You don’t see how other people work or think through the thing. So this is so amazing, both as an audience member and being here.”

(These excerpts from that conversation have been edited for length and clarity.)

Q: Are there nonnegotiables in making your films, things you can’t budge on?

Denis Villeneuve: Everything? I think there’s an equilibrium. There’s a balance with the limits of the budget that is healthy, but in that space, no compromise.

Coralie Fargeat: Making a film is doing no compromises, especially when your movie wants to really play with excess and doing things that are out of the regular reality. Everybody sometimes wants to try and change it and make a difference; it’s my job to keep it the way I had invented in my head.

Q: All of your films just have this sense of scale and ambition. Brady, your film even takes ambition as one of its themes. What gave you the ambition to explore that idea?

Brady Corbet: There is something about the role of an architect and a filmmaker. They’re very similar jobs in a way, because it’s not painting a painting or writing and recording a song in a private space. It requires 250 people or 300 people. It’s a lot of personnel, and it’s a lot of management. And I grew up with my uncle who was an architect, and he’s one of the people that I can call and speak to that has very, very similar experiences to myself and my wife [Mona Fastvold], who’s also a filmmaker and wrote the movie with me.

Q: Part of the story of “Conclave” has to do with Ralph Fiennes’ character having doubts. Edward, I’ve heard you say that you’ve come to sort of embrace doubt in your filmmaking?

Edward Berger: Not so much on set but beforehand, when there’s a ton of decisions, and you wonder is that location better or that one? And I put a lot of thought into these decisions because they have to be right. A location is like casting. If you get the right location, the movie’s going to go much quicker, and it’s going to look better. And the architecture determines where the camera goes, where the actors walk and everything. And so there’s many decisions. And to go through that process in prep, to really know what you need and what you want, is really important to me. But [it’s OK] to open up the discussion to be able to say, “You know what? I don’t know, why don’t we just think about this for a couple of days?” On set, you’re not going to have the time. You just need to go. Sometimes little things, when Ralph asks the question, “Should I do it this way?” I say, “Well, I don’t know until I see it. Why don’t we do both?”

James Mangold: We all make plans before we start. But then the secret, at least in my experience, the work I’m most proud of is where I adapt. It’s not about compromise, but it’s that the world, the actor in that moment, the weather, the location, the schedule, something within the very real confines that Denis was talking about comes up against your vision. You need a reasonable amount of time to make the movie, a reasonable amount of money to make the movie, in whatever style you’re choosing to make it. But you have to somehow also be open. Part of the creative act of directing a movie isn’t just the kind of Alfred Hitchcock myth of “I knew it all in advance, and now it’s a bore, and I just execute it with all these puppets.” Because even he didn’t do that; that was his press. The reality is how we adapt to the s— that happens, good and bad, which isn’t about compromise, but it’s about being alive.

Villeneuve: There’s a pleasure there.

Mangold: Yes, that’s the most beautiful part of making a movie I’ve experienced.

Berger: That’s what you said earlier, you told me you love the vaping cardinal [in “Conclave”]. That wasn’t my idea. It wasn’t in the script. [The actor] showed up to set and suddenly sits in the Sistine Chapel and goes [inhales deeply], and Ralph goes, “What the hell is he doing? It’s the Sistine Chapel.” But it’s great. And now everyone loves it.

Mangold: And in the moment that the cardinal’s vaping in his movie, Edward has to go through several things: “I didn’t plan on that. Ralph doesn’t like it. Are we keeping it? It’s not in the script.” All of them are a challenge to your ego, your sense of plan. But those are the decisions you have to make based on the real vision, which isn’t just this set of exactitudes. It’s about a compass point, about a larger compass about what it is you’re making.

Q: Malcolm, especially with this powerful group of actors that you have in “The Piano Lesson,” was it a challenge to remain open to what they’re doing in front of you?

Malcolm Washington: There was a day in the first week of shooting where I went home, I was like, “I became a filmmaker today. This was the day.” Because I was shooting a plan, and still I came in being like, “I want to be present.” And then you’re there and you’re kind of like, “OK, look, I just need to push this forward a little bit to get it going.” And we come in, and we change the whole plan that day. I’m watching, we rehearse, I block the whole thing. I’m like, “No, let’s do this other thing.” We do a complicated camera move and blow the shot-list up. And I didn’t know how to get out of it. I did this oner that I was like, “I don’t know how to break this. I don’t know how to get out of it. I don’t want to fall into coverage. I’m stuck. What do I do?”

And I’m obviously a first-time filmmaker. I have Samuel L. Jackson here. I have all these great talents around me and the cast and the crew, and they’re all looking at me like, “What now?” And I sat there and I pushed everybody out. I cleared the set, me and my [director of photography] sat there sweating, and it was that space that you were talking about. And I felt myself grow in that moment. It was that exact moment. I’m like, “This is a moment of growth.” We boxed ourselves into a corner. I actually stole a shot I did in film school to get myself out of it. It was knowing that the answer that comes from my own intuition is the actual movie that I should be making, and everything else that I was doing before that is not the movie.

Villeneuve: You’re fast, man. Because it took me years to figure that out.

Berger: I’m still not there. Also, that’s what I mean with doubt, because there’s no recipe for making a movie. In the end, you hope that it’s good. You never know until it comes out into the theaters or you guys review it or it’s in a festival and people applaud in the end. Every decision you make, it’s kind of you’re 51% sure, because it could be the other way too.

Q: Coralie, you’ve said that you wanted “The Substance” to be unsubtle, because the world is unsubtle in its treatment of women. What made you want to explore that idea in the movie?

Fargeat: Oh, my very own life, I guess. I really discovered that I was a feminist when I did [the 2017 thriller] “Revenge.” “Revenge” was a kind of unconscious gesture when I wrote what I needed to express — in the way you can be seen when you’re a woman and when you please or don’t please, or do what’s expected from you, then people can rip you off and make you disappear. But it was really when the movie was released, and it was happening just after the [Harvey] Weinstein story happened. So it was kind of an unexpected meeting between reality and my film. And the critics and everyone else spoke about feminist film, and I wasn’t aware of it. It’s stuff that I have had within me since I’m a kid.

And then I started to read more and be more aware in a rational way of the way to see the world and to look at a system and spot the inequalities. And once your eyes are open, unfortunately, you see that it’s everywhere, and then it brings the next step, which was doing it in a very conscious way and in a very active way, which was I needed to have a huge scream about what I feel we should really be over with, and that we’re absolutely nuts. So to me, being unsubtle, as you said, was really trying to show the world that our society is still so unsubtle about this. And what makes me really mad, I’m upset when I hear, “Oh, but don’t you think it’s going too far now?” And with this I want to scream even more.

Q: Brady, very early in “The Brutalist,” there’s an image of the Statue of Liberty that’s upside-down. There’s something about it that’s incredibly evocative. What does that mean for you?

Corbet: It’s intuitive. Every film has a poetic logic. And something that I think is really interesting about the collection of movies this year is that the films are incredibly radical. Coralie’s film is so radical. James’ film is an incredibly radical biopic. And that, for me, is really exciting, that people are showing up for these films, because they’re very unconventional. And even a film that could easily be quite formulaic is not at all.

When I went out to shoot the Statue of Liberty, it just looked best upside down. It’s really the truth. It’s like the extraordinary shot in “The Shining” where you’re looking up at Jack Nicholson banging on the door, and it’s such an unusual and kind of graphic angle. And of course, the first 10 minutes, it was very, very important for me to relay for the audience that this was not a conventional American myth story. And so it just was a way to kind of set the table for the next four hours.

Q: James, there were recently some photos from the set of a Bruce Springsteen biopic showing Springsteen on set with actor Jeremy Allen White, who’s playing him in the movie. I’m going to assume that did not happen with Timothée Chalamet and Bob Dylan in making “A Complete Unknown”?

Mangold: That did not happen. I think Bob has been incredibly helpful. To me, he was really helpful in getting it launched, but also I couldn’t operate with the subject, the actual real-life person, hanging out on set every day. That would be really challenging. To me, it’s a burden for the job because what I’m actually doing is what Brady did, you’re making a fable. You’re making fiction from reality, which is what we all do, whether the names are real or not. It’s kind of the same act every time. You’re not drawing from some whole imagination. You’re drawing from your uncle, and you’re drawing from all these things.

Corbet: It’s representation versus presentation.

Mangold: And that is not to say you’re doing something untrue but that we’re always making story. There is no way you can do a pageant with actors pretending they’re people, and somehow at what point is it truth? If Bob didn’t really pick up that guitar at that moment in that apartment, then I’m breaking that truth. If he didn’t play that song at that club, but we are, then I’m breaking that truth, and I’m like, for those people, go read a book, man. That’s not what these movies are about. They’re about taking the ideas of these lives, the energies of these lives, the feelings of these times, and presenting that to the audience.

Q: Denis, you have been working with Timothée Chalamet on the “Dune” pictures; he stars in James’ movie as well. What makes him special as an actor?

Villeneuve: I would say his intelligence. Timothée is a very thoughtful artist, and he has a deep understanding of a character’s arc and where to adjust himself according to the arc.

Mangold: I’ve heard him talk about you, and I think this is true for him, that he has a deep connection to his director. He wants to stay connected. There’s actors who arrive on a movie and see the director as a potential obstacle, and they can deliver great performances, and it might just be the way they need to feel to get what they have out. But there are also actors who really want to work with you. And I found with Timmy, he’s checking in with you all the time about what you need and how he can serve it. And that’s really special.

Villeneuve: When we worked together on the first “Dune,” he was very vulnerable. He was young, was not used to a set of that size. I was feeling that as an actor he was very strong, but [I needed] to protect his creative bubble, his focus on set, and I felt that he was still consolidating his identity in some ways. He was trying to figure out, “What kind of guy am I?” when he’s beside Javier Bardem, or Oscar Isaac, or Josh Brolin. And I felt very protective. And it was beautiful to see him growing up between both movies. That was a privilege. It was embracing the character’s full arc that comes from someone having the burden of not having any power, being a victim of the events, and then finally taking lead on his own faith. And it was beautiful to see him growing up.

Q: Coralie, you have such a specific challenge with “The Substance” in casting Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley. You need two performers who believably could be the same person.

Fargeat: I think the most important was, of course, that there is some kind of resemblance in their appearance, but more important was the shared energy they have. They both have this very instinctive, raw energy. They also know how to work with their bodies in very different ways. Margaret was a ballet dancer, and she asked me, “So how do you want Sue to be? What is the image that you have for this fantasy?” I grew up with all the supermodels, the Jessica Rabbit thing, the Barbies, everything was curvy but thin. And I told her, “This is what I have in mind for this ideal.” And basically she created that. She doesn’t look like that at all in real life.

In a very different way for Demi, which I think is a more vulnerable confrontation with her body. And which goes into even more personal spaces, because I think she lived, in one way or another, everything that’s in the script. When we first met, the only thing we almost didn’t need to discuss was what the movie was about, because it was so clear that we had lived the same story. We had the same issues. What we needed to discuss a lot was the intensity of the film, how far it was going to go.

Q: Before we go, Malcolm, there’s so much to be discouraged about right now with the future of movies, the business of movies. As someone that’s still fairly new in your career, what keeps you inspired about moviemaking?

Washington: I think that it’s a really exciting time, actually. I can’t speak to the business because I’m navigating that for the first time. But just as a fan of art, of the kind of contemporary films that are coming out right now, like you were speaking to earlier, everybody taking these really big swings and looking internally and pouring out these gigantic ideas. What inspires me is just that: How do we keep excavating our own stories and excavating our own identities and portraying that in a new and exciting way. Everybody’s trying to do something interesting again; film feels alive again in a way that’s really exciting to me. People want to be in the theaters again. People are outside talking about movies.

Q: Brady, you’ve always been so open about what a struggle it is to get your movies made. What keeps you inspired?

Corbet: It’s a compulsion. I’d love to do something else, but as soon as I have finished the ascent, then the peak is the plateau. So then I feel like I have to start again. And also, there’s always something left to improve, with every film. It’s like a high school yearbook. You look back on decisions you made a decade ago or 15 years ago and go, “Oh, I was a little chubby then,” or “I had bad skin.” But you forgive. As you get older, you forgive yourself. It’s a snapshot, a moment, a time and place of what was on your mind. Making a movie, it’s a marriage. It’s not a one-night stand.

Villeneuve: It’s a tattoo on your face for the rest of your life.