The forthcoming American version of Funny Games, disturbing in its apparent sadism, follows the harrowing ordeal of a vacationing family taken hostage and subsequently tortured by two preppy young men who, at first, claim to be friends of neighbors. In its original incarnation, the film takes place in Austria, though Haneke has said that he had always considered it an “American” film in both its portrayal of a prototypical nuclear family and the way it calls attention to the audience’s fascination with violence. Even the title of the original Austrian film is in English.
     When Corbet got the call about the project, his first reaction was simply “why?” A remake of any film inevitably prompts scrutiny, but one by the original director begs more complex questions. Is the director dissatisfied with the original? Is he in it for the money? Is he trying to break into an American market? The answer to all of these questions, Corbet would find out, was “no”, but that came much later. For the time being, he didn’t care why Haneke was remaking Funny Games. All he knew was that he had to get the part.
     No stranger to Haneke’s work, Corbet first met the director years ago at a screening of 2000’s Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages, known to English-speaking audiences as Code Unknown. From an early age, he’d routinely fly from his home in Colorado out to L.A. for auditions set up by an agent who’d been introduced to him through his acting coach. After a few years of trekking back and forth he and his mother decided that he was serious enough about acting to make the move out to the West Coast. It was around this time that a very excited 13-year-old Corbet found himself at the post-screening Q&A session for Code Unkown inside the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood, brazenly asking the director how he pulled off those impressive, long tracking shots. Haneke listened politely and then laughed.
     By the time he auditioned for the role of Peter, one of the two tormentors in Funny Games, Corbet had grown from a preteen cinephile and actor into an adult cinephile and actor with a modest but promising list of credentials behind him, most notably a part in Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen, a lead role alongside Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Greg Araki’s critically praised Mysterious Skin, and a recurring part on 24 — respectable television by most standards. His admiration for Haneke had also grown immeasurably since that first viewing of Code Unknown, and it was with a sense of both eagerness and extreme anxiety that he donned a white polo shirt, a pair of shorts, and boating shoes to convince Haneke and whomever else was in the casting room that day that he could play a killer.
     “If this one job hadn’t worked out and I’d come that close, I would’ve been so devastated. I would’ve been more devastated about that than probably anything in my life, which is precisely the reason I thought that it wouldn’t happen,” Corbet says. “I don’t know if I was thinking that I was passionate about the character or these characters. I wasn’t thinking about that at all. I was just thinking about this man. I was like, I’ll do anything for [Haneke]. I’ll bleed for that guy.