Brady Corbet Looks Back on ‘Mysterious Skin,’ Which He Knew Was Destined to Be an ‘Important Movie’
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- Brady Corbet co-starred in Gregg Araki's 2004 'Mysterious Skin' at age 14 alongside Joseph Gordon-Levitt, playing a boy who blocks out sexual abuse by convincing himself he was abducted by aliens.
- 'Mysterious Skin' returns to select theaters via Strand Releasing on August 14 in a new 4K restoration by the Academy Film Archive, UCLA Film & Television Archive, and Sundance Institute.
- Internet sleuths have traced a Froot Loops match cut and childhood bedroom scene in Steven Spielberg's recent 'Disclosure Day' back to Araki's film; Corbet, who hasn't seen it, says he'll ask Spielberg if he runs into him.
- Corbet credited Araki with creating a safe set and called it 'one of the happier film sets that I'd ever worked on,' confirming he was not molested during production — a question he's fielded for 20 years — and said he now deliberately keeps his own sets safe for young actors in films like 'The Childhood of a Leader' and 'Vox Lux.'
- Money pressures from the 2008 financial crisis, which hit his mother's mortgage-industry career, pushed Corbet to officially quit acting; he calls directing 'much more validating' than performing.
- His rumored next film, 'The Origin of the World,' stars Michael Fassbender, Cate Blanchett, and Selena Gomez, is '100 percent independent,' and is being made through his production company Precode — named because he considers the MPAA 'a dinosaur of an institution.'
Why it matters: The 4K re-release reintroduces a once-banned film to viewers who only know it through online theories linking it to Spielberg, while Corbet uses the platform to position his upcoming Fassbender-Blanchett-Gomez film as truly independent — a distinction that frames him as an auteur operating outside the boutique-studio system.
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