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    Deepwater Horizon Examined

    Documenting the Invisible: Filmmaker tries to make sense out of Deepwater Horizon disaster

    Tarra Gaines
    Dec 13, 2014 | 6:29 pm

    On April 20, 2010 what began with an explosion on the offshore oil rig Deepwater Horizon that killed 11 members of the crew became one of the largest environmental disasters in U.S history. The oil continued to flow into the Gulf of Mexico for months after the initial explosion, yet the story continues today, with just last week the Supreme Court refusing to review the BP settlement.

    The Great Invisible, a new documentary film by Peabody Award-winning director Margaret Brown, attempts to chronicle the events and Gulf Coast lives forever altered by the disaster. This weekend Brown brings the film, which won the SXSW Grand Jury Prize for Documentary, to town for its Houston debut. I recently had a chance to speak with her about the project and how Houston fits into this ongoing saga.

    CultureMap: How soon after the Deepwater Horizon explosion did you decide you wanted to document what was happening?

    Margaret Brown: It was about three weeks afterwards. I grew up in Alabama, and my father, who has a house on the water, kept sending me pictures of the clean up. They were shocking photographs. I am used to seeing the house as a pretty pristine place in Alabama and it was over run with workers and boom. It was very upsetting. I started talking to people and kept hearing the hopelessness in their voices. At the time, I was making a whole different movie, but I decided to drop that film and make this one.

    CM: When did you complete the film?

    MB: I finished right before SXSW this year, March of 2014.

    CM: So at what point in the project did you realize it was going to take years to fully chronicle this story?

    MB: It’s funny that you ask that because I didn’t realize right away the emotional toll that it would be making a project for so long.

    What I thought the project was changed as I was making it. I thought I was just going to make it about where I grew up in Alabama, and I would go back every few months and document what was going on. But about a year and a half in, I got interested in how globally we’re all connected to oil. I wanted to make the film bigger and have it also relate to the oil industry and people who were on the rig that day, not just be about the people in Alabama. It became something I was making all the time.

    CM: So with your Gulf Coast roots, this started as a personal story for you, but it became much more?

    MB: I feel like it stayed personal, but it got to be where I wasn’t interested in just that story. I wanted it to be character driven, but I realized it was a bigger story about how we’re all connected to oil and what happens when you fill up your car and that risk that we’re connected to.

    CM: I would imagine for a story this vast, with all these lives affected, and then getting into the nature of oil in all our lives, that one of the biggest challenges would be to find some coherent narrative for a film audience.

    MB: Yes, absolutely.

    CM: Were there ways that you decided to do that so it would be comprehensible to the viewer.

    MB: The film is one connection that leads to another connection. It’s a web of a film. It’s an ensemble piece, and it does have a three act structure, but it doesn’t follow one character on a journey. It’s a web of how we’re all connected to oil.

    There are three or four mains characters that take us through the story. There’s a narrative progression, but it’s not one character’s story.

    CM: Tell me about a few of those voices that help to carry the audience through the film.

    MB: We meet Doug Brown who is the head engineer on the Deepwater Horizon. He was there when it was being built in Korea and he was there when it sunk. He also gave me never-before-seen footage on Deepwater Horizon that he made for his family about two years before the explosion. Through the footage you get the feel of what life on a rig is like. He leads us through that world. It’s pretty powerful stuff because you can feel the danger.

    There’s another character named Roosevelt Harris from Bayou La Batre, Alabama, who volunteers for a soup kitchen. He brings food to all these oyster workers who are out of work. He leads us through the world of seafood workers along the Alabama Coast and how they’re being impacted and coming together as a community, or not as the case may be.

    Then there’s Bob Cavnar, who’s going to be at one of the Q&As. He’s worked in the oil industry for about 30 years. He owns different oil companies and wrote a book on the Deepwater Horizon.

    CM: How does Houston fit into the overall story and the film?

    MB: We follow three cities in the movie, Houston, Bayou La Batre, and Morgan City, Louisiana. We are in Houston because that’s where the oil industry is headquartered for the world. Houston plays a huge part, about a third of film.

    CM: The impact of Deepwater is still being felt, so was there a moment when you just had to tell yourself: This is it. I have to stop filming, I’ve got to end it at some point.

    MB: Actually, it was a Houston thing that ended it. There’s an oil executive named Steve Wyatt, who I filmed in the beginning of the movie and I’ve stayed friends with him and we’ve talked over the years.

    Less than a year ago, I had a rough screening in New York, where I talked to one of my producer about what might be missing from the film. We realized what was missing was another scene with these oil executives.

    I called up Steve and I said “Americans don’t really understand what oil is and what you guys understand about it.” He knew my film was also about the United States relationship to energy. And I asked, “Can we do a scene where you guys talk about that from your perspective?” We filmed this scene with Steve and his friends and it was an amazing scene. Then I knew I was done, that all the pieces of the film were there.

    ----------------------

    Margaret Brown will discuss the movie after the 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. screenings on Sunday (Dec. 14) at the River Oaks Theatre and conduct a question and answer with several subjects from the film, including oil executives Bob Cavnar and Steve Wyatt; Keith Jones, whose father died on the rig; and Stephen Stone, a roustabout on the rig and his wife, Sara.

    Latham Smith, a tugboat captain who works for the oil industry, in a scene from The Great Invisible.

    The Great Invisible Latham Smith, a tugboat captain who works for the oil industry
      
    Photo courtesy of Participant Media
    Latham Smith, a tugboat captain who works for the oil industry, in a scene from The Great Invisible.
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    Movie Review

    Adrien Brody portrays the immigrant experience in new film The Brutalist

    Alex Bentley
    Jan 16, 2025 | 4:45 pm
    Adrien Brody in The Brutalist
    Photo courtesy of A24
    Adrien Brody in The Brutalist.

    Many filmmakers have taken their stab at making a great American epic, although few have truly succeeded. One of the best in recent memory came just last year with Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which wrestled with the world-changing consequences of one man’s unique vision. Writer/director Brady Corbet attempts something similar, albeit with less of a broad impact, in the new film The Brutalist.

    Adrien Brody plays the fictional László Tóth, a Hungarian architect who immigrates to the United States in the late 1940s to seek a better life for himself and his family. Working initially with his friend Attila (Alessandro Nivola) at a furniture business, a job redoing the library of the wealthy Harrison Lee Van Buren, Sr. (Guy Pearce) turns into his big break. Impressed with Tóth’s modern style — aka brutalism — Van Buren hires him to design a huge multi-purpose building to honor Van Buren’s late wife.

    Tóth’s vision, however, is soon confronted with the reality of financial limitations, interference from Van Buren and others, and, for good measure, good old fashioned bigotry. The long-awaited arrival of his wife, Erzsebet (Felicity Jones), brings added stress, as years of suffering back in Hungary have left her in a wheelchair. As months and years roll by, Tóth’s dream becomes his nightmare.

    Corbet, along with co-writer Mona Fastvold, signals his intentions to have the film be a throwback at multiple turns. The film was shot using VistaVision, a format created in 1954 but not used in America since 1961. It also clocks in at a whopping three-and-a-half hours and includes an intermission, a break in the middle of a movie that’s rarely been seen in the past 50 years. With the story spanning decades and the mid-century focus on a very particular style of architecture, much about the film is designed to take the viewer back in time.

    In the first half of the film, Corbet intrigues with Tóth’s immigrant experience, which shows that even a man with his talents could only get so far without the help of others. The building of the narrative befits the grand scale that Corbet seems to be going for, the occasional odd detour notwithstanding. The production design, the score by Daniel Blumberg, and the acting all combine to set up what seems destined for an epic second act.

    Instead, Corbet almost completely wastes the momentum he had built up. Even as he impresses with the looming building on a hilltop, he includes weird sojourns into Tóth’s drug use, throws in the occasional explicit sex scene for no good reason, and creates conflict out of thin air. The title gradually becomes less literal and more metaphorical, although arguments could be made as to which character it is actually referring.

    Brody hasn’t had many notable starring film roles in the past 10 years, but he makes the most of this opportunity. Using a highly credible accent, he takes Tóth through big emotional swings while still remaining relatively subtle in his performance. Pearce is given the bombastic role, and he works extremely well while still giving the role a lot of nuance. Jones seems miscast in her role, though, while supporting actors like Joe Alwyn, Raffey Cassidy, and Stacy Martin are hit-and-miss in their parts.

    Corbet, making only his third feature film, has an ambition with The Brutalist that is unmistakable. While there are elements of it that match his lofty goals, he too often veers off into territory that makes little storytelling sense. It may look like the latest “great American film,” but he’s mostly just using older techniques to make it feel more impressive than it actually is.


    ---

    The Brutalist opens wide in theaters on January 17.

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