Photography by João Canziani

Leaning over his laptop, Brady Corbet is busy downloading a movie. It’s not what you think. The film is a self-written-and-directed 11-minute short called Protect You and Me — one edit of it anyway. He’s “screening” it for me in a living room on a 17-inch screen and laptop speakers. The first of a series of short films he’s planning to make, themed around protection, this one takes place at a New York restaurant, where a man meeting his mother for dinner grows increasingly uneasy about a stranger lurking in the window. From there, the story takes a surreal, manic turn and then ends abruptly. It’s not done yet, he explains, and illustrates this at one point by making L’s with his fingers to indicate where the camera needs to push closer into the frame. Another scene needs to be re-cut, and so on…
     A feature film director? Someday, Corbet supposes. As for now, the young actor has managed to land one of the lead roles in acclaimed Austrian director Michael Haneke’s first (and possibly only) American film — a close remake of his own 1997 drama, Funny Games — opposite Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, and Michael Pitt. Haneke’s last film, Caché, won him Best Director honors at Cannes in 2005, along with a formidable array of other awards.