Director Brady Corbet says he made ‘zero’ money from Oscar-nominated movie ‘The Brutalist’

(CNN) — Director Brady Corbet has said he made “zero dollars” from his Oscar-nominated movie “The Brutalist” during an interview in which he also highlighted the financial precarity facing many filmmakers.

“I just directed three advertisements in Portugal… it’s the first time that I had made any money really in years,“ Corbet said on the podcast “WTF with Marc Maron.”

“Both my partner and I made $0 on the last two films that we made… So we had to just sort of live off of a pay check from three years ago,” he said in an episode released Monday.

For his work directing “The Brutalist,” Corbet has won almost every major award this season so far. His film, a sweeping three-and-a-half-hour-long epic that depicts fictional architect László Tóth, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor starting over in the United States, has been nominated for 10 Academy Awards.

Corbet said he isn’t the only filmmaker struggling with the financial state of the industry, adding that he’s spoken to many others who “have films that are nominated this year that can’t pay their rent.”

After their movies have premiered, directors embark on promotional tours and awards campaigns, which are often months-long, take up all their time and are unpaid.

“Our film premiered in September, so I’ve been doing this for six months and had zero income because I don’t have any time to work. I can’t even take a writing job at the moment,” Corbet said, detailing the “crazy” travel involved in promoting a film internationally and in the US.

For all its scope and ambition, “The Brutalist” was made relatively cheaply by Hollywood standards, on a budget of about $10 million. Still, it took Corbet seven years to make, and several attempts to piece together the financing required to fund it.

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