Fresh Air - Jeremy Strong / Sebastian Stan / Adrien Brody

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

The Academy Awards are this Sunday. We hear from the two stars of the film The Apprentice, Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong. It's about how a young Donald Trump was influenced by the infamous, unscrupulous lawyer Roy Cohn. Also, we hear from Adrien Brody, who is nominated for his starring role in the film The Brutalist, in which he plays a Hungarian-Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor who seeks a fresh start in post-WWII America.John Powers reviews the animated film Flow, which has been nominated for both best animated feature and best international film.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

There's been a lot of attention on loneliness lately. 16% of Americans report feeling lonely all or most of the time. The former Surgeon General even declared a loneliness epidemic. On It's Been a Minute, we're launching a new series called All the Lonely People, diving deep into how loneliness shows up in our lives and how our culture shapes it. That's on the It's Been a Minute podcast on NPR. This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bianculli. The Academy Awards are Sunday. Today, we feature interviews with three nominees.

First, actor Jeremy Strong. He's probably best known for his role in the HBO series Succession, playing the troubled character of Kendall Roy. In the film The Apprentice, Strong is nominated for his role as the unscrupulous lawyer Roy Cohn, who mentored a young Donald Trump as he was establishing himself in his father's real estate business. In the 1950s, Cohn was infamous for being the chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy's Senate investigation into suspected communists. Cohn and McCarthy also were leaders in the anti-gay movement that led to an executive order banning gay people

from serving in government. But Cohn was a closeted gay man who died of AIDS. He never came out and insisted that his disease wasn't AIDS, but was liver cancer. Strong's performance personifies what was written about Cohn on his patch on the AIDS memorial quilt, Bully, Coward, Victim. Terry spoke with Jeremy Strong last October. Let's begin with a scene from early in the film when Trump and Cohn first meet.

Trump has just gotten accepted to a private dining club in Manhattan. Cohn is seated at a table with several mobsters, including Fat Tony Salerno, the boss of the Genovese crime family. When Cohn notices Trump, whom he's never seen before, he asks his friend to bring Trump to the table. Cohn is interested in finding out who Trump is. Trump is played by Sebastian Stan. Jeremy Strong, as Cohn, speaks first. What is your business, Donald? Real estate. I'm Vice President of a Trump organization.

Oh, you're Fred Trump's kid? That's right. He's Fred Trump's kid. It sounds like your father's a little tangled up. It looks like he could use a good mornin'. Oh. Right, tell us about it. Right now the government and the NAACP are suing us.

They're saying our apartments are segregated. This is America, you can rent to whoever the hell you damn want. But our lawyer wants us to pay a huge fine to settle and we can't. It's going to bankrupt us and ruin the company. You tell the feds to f*** themselves. File a lawsuit. Always, file a lawsuit, fight them in court. Make them prove you're discriminating.

Wow. I guess, uh, might have to get us a new lawyer. Of course it helps if Nixon and the Attorney General are your pals. Jeremy Strong, welcome to Fresh Air. I love the film and that scene has so much energy to it. You have such swagger in it. Thank you, Terry. I'm honored to be talking to you. Thanks for having me. Oh, it is totally my pleasure. You know, a biopic is different from a film based on an original story.

So you had a character who is a known person who you had to portray. What did you do to know, to watch, to listen to him before playing him? Yeah, you know, I'll just say I haven't watched the film in a while and hearing that scene back it's really so charged, isn't it? And Roy in that scene encapsulates the playbook, which the film examines the idea that, you know, what Roy Cohn stood for, these principles that he passed on to Donald Trump, always attack, deny everything, and never admit defeat.

They're all kind of the DNA of that scene. Contains all of them. It's a great introduction of a character. But your question about playing historical figures, you know, I've done a fair amount of work playing people who, you know, were either alive or were historical figures. John Nicolet in Lincoln, James Reeb, in Selma, Jerry Rubin in the Charlie Chicago 7, Lee Harvey Oswald. I feel always an enormous sense of responsibility to a kind of historical veracity and accuracy to try and capture and render the essence of these people.

And ultimately, it's not an intellectual, you're not writing an essay on someone. So the information is sort of emotional, intuitive, visceral information. But did you ever fact check any of it? Like, do you feel a responsibility to not only be have acting truth, but have, you know, like, fact truth? Absolutely. Yes, I absolutely feel a sort of fidelity to truth with a capital T, which is funny in this case because Roy Cohn, if he's anything, to me, he's like the progenitor of alternative facts.

Mm-hmm. He's like not someone who really espoused truth with a capital T. He thought truth was a play thing that you could do as you wish with it. And I should mention here that the film was written by Gabriel Sherman, who is a journalist who wrote a book about Murdoch and Fox News.

Yeah, a book about Roger Ailes. Yeah, I should have said Ailes, right? Well, no, I mean, it's also about Murdoch, but of course I read that book when I was working on Succession because during that time. Right, well that's the thing, I feel like your recent career is so connected to Trump. There's intersectionality there.

Yeah, what I wanna know is do you feel very adjacent to Trump, like that you know Trump, because your characters have been so related to Trump in one way or another, and very directly related in The Apprentice? You know, I don't. I don't. If I'm honest, I feel that my job is to almost be a sort of vessel, which involves kind of clearing myself out. I went on a silent meditation retreat last week, Terri, and the

teacher who's an incredible man named John Kabat-Zinn, who's written a lot of great books. Oh, yeah, yeah. I know. John talked about a term called anatta, which means no self or not self. And it really resonated with me because I find that that is the place where I tend to be when I'm working, I think creatively. But your question about whether I felt adjacent to Trump, I guess I don't. I guess I feel like my job is to be a musician, a first-chair musician, to play whatever instrument it is that I'm given, to play whatever piece it is that I'm given to play whatever piece of music that I'm given.

Yes, I want to stop you there because I was going to ask you if you notate your scripts as if they were music because like in the scene that we just heard, there's real music in your voice. You've got a rhythm. Thank you. You know, I used to, when I was in college, I sort of have held on to old scripts and plays. I sort of have held on to old scripts and plays and when I did, you know, American Buffalo or something, Look Back in Anger in college, I have a million notes and it's sort of notated

and annotated to death. And then at a certain point, I'd stopped writing anything down. I guess at a certain point, you develop a trust in your unconscious, intuitive self that if it's properly absorbed something, then it will be there somehow. Now, I think voice is very important to me for any character. And Roy had a very, very particular way of speaking and a very specific pentameter.

And the music of that is something that becomes your job to both master and then throw away. He writes in Hamlet, Shakespeare says, that use can almost change the stamp of nature. And I feel that actors, especially when you're attempting to do some kind of transformational work, which is the kind of work that I love the most and have been inspired by in my life the most, your job is to kind of change the stamp of your nature and voice is a really

key part of that because there's something about a person's voice that is like their eyes. It's such a way in to that person. Well, why don't we listen to the real Roy Cohn's voice? This is from an interview with Tom Snyder on his late night show, Tomorrow. I probably watched this a thousand times. Really, as broadcast in 1977. So here we go. Now here's Roy Cohn, who appeared recently

on the cover of Esquire magazine. And the title of that article, as I recall, sir, was The Legal Executioner. It went on to say that you are really a tough man and that at times you can... Tough, mean, vicious, so on. What does that kind of publicity do for your business in New York?

That's fantastic. The worse the adjectives, the better it is for business. What are they looking for? What are they buying? Scare value. Going back over a period of years when I call somebody or write a letter or something like that this is supposed to make them tremble and think unless they

act promptly and reasonably that all sorts of terrible consequences are gonna flow. So what was it like playing somebody who you find like is despicable to too strong a word? I mean I don't think it's too strong a word, but you know, you have to really check that at the door as an actor when you approach a role. You have to leave your judgment at the door and try to, in an almost diagnostic way, identify their wounds and their struggle, and then fight

their fight the way they did. I'm simply trying to inhabit him in a fully dimensional way, as you do for any character. Jeremy Strong speaking with Terry Gross last October. He's nominated for an Oscar for his supporting role as Roy Cohn in the film, The Apprentice. We'll hear from his co-star in the film, Sebastian Stan, after a break. This is Fresh Air.

There is a lot happening right now in the world of economics. You may have heard about the president's desire for a sovereign wealth fund. If your country's small, well-governed, and has a surplus, it is probably a good idea. We are not any of those. We're here to cover federal buyouts, the cost of deportation, and so much more.

Tune in to MPR's The Indicator from Planet Money. On the Throughline Podcast, the myth linking autism and vaccines was decades in the making and was a major moment for vaccine hesitancy in America, tapping into fears involving the pharmaceutical industry and the federal government. No matter how many studies you do showing that this is not a problem, it's very hard to unring the bell. Listen to Throughline from NPR, wherever you get your podcast. If you're a super fan of Fresh Air with Terry Gross, we have exciting news. WHYY has launched a Fresh Air Society,

a leadership group dedicated to ensuring Fresh Air's legacy. For over 50 years, this program has brought you fascinating interviews with favorite authors, artists, actors, and more. As a member of the Fresh Air Society, you'll receive special benefits and more. As a member of the Fresh Air Society, you'll receive special benefits and recognition. Learn more at whyy.org slash Fresh Air Society. Today we're featuring our interviews with Oscar contenders. Sebastian Stan, whose credits include playing Tommy Lee in the TV series Pam and Tommy, and Bucky Barnes in Marvel's

Captain America and Avengers movies, is nominated for an Academy Award for his starring role as Donald Trump in the film The Apprentice. The movie begins in 1973 when Trump is 27, still working for his father's real estate development company and trying to make a name for himself. The company is being sued for discriminating against black people in its rental units. Trump convinces his father to hire Roy Cohn as their attorney. Cohn becomes Trump's mentor, teaching him how to admit nothing and deny everything, go on the attack, and intimidate through the threat of lawsuits. Terry Gross recently spoke with Sebastian Stan. Let's start with a scene from The Apprentice.

Trump is planning to build Trump Tower and is trying to persuade the mayor of New York City, Ed Koch, that the building will be so extraordinary, Koch should give him tax breaks. Roy Cohn, played by Jeremy Strong, also is in the room. You'll hear him jump into the conversation. I really think this is going to be one of the most exceptional buildings anywhere in the world and frankly there's never been anything like it. 68 stories tall, 28 sides, a million square feet,

every unit will have amenities like you wouldn't believe and the high floors have exceptional views over Central Park. The lobby, the floors will all be marble, pink Paradiso marble from Italy. We'll have the largest atrium in the world, a 60 foot waterfall spanned by shops and retail and restaurants, and I think it's gonna be something very special. Frankly, there's never been anything like it. Am, what are you gonna call it?

Trump Tower. Trump Tower? Oh, that's interesting. Look, he has a great track record, so we think this is a very reasonable ask. Well, as I frequently say about his buildings, the merit to find the thing is we're just not going to give you the tax breaks. Why would we? I mean, I can't let you get rich on the backs of the people of New York

and they're treasuring. Well, Mr. Mayor, I mean, first of all... Look, Mr. Mayor, my client is... Well, you're not, you're not, Mr. Mayor, because I'm building a 68-story building that's going to employ 5,000 construction workers. And we have heard stories about the construction workers working on your projects. They don't get paid.

They have liens against you, Donald. I'm trying to employ people in New York and turn us back around towards the future. And you're being a very unfair guy. Because, frankly, what do you know about me? What do you know about the amount of money that I made on my own? You don't know anything, to be perfectly honest, Mr. Mayor. You don't know me at all. But you will. You'll never forget me after this because I won't

forget what you just did. Trump Tower will be built with or without you. Okay. You're about to be sued Mr. Mayor. Sebastian Stan, welcome to Fresh Air. It's a pleasure to have you on the show. I think you're great. Thank you. Thank you for having me. So, after choosing that clip, first of all, I should say, some listeners were probably thinking, he doesn't sound like Trump. What would you say to that? Well, I mean, I would say that Trump did not sound like Trump when he was in his mid to late 30s,

which is when that was sort of happening. And I think that I did make some conscious choices very carefully with the voice, not only just to honor the age and what he sounded like at the time, which to me sounded very different than today, but also to not lean into it as much as it's become popular to do. Because a big challenge with this role was obviously to avoid falling into caricature and into sort of the version of a cartoon that he's somewhat become, one would argue even willingly on his own part, whether he's aware of that or not. Because the voice along with mannerisms and other physical characteristics that he has that we've become so accustomed to and we've been so over saturated with really had to be

kind of very I had to very carefully select and maneuver them and kind of earn them over the period of time with the movie very much like he did as he grew into what we see today but in part because I needed to bring audience in on this journey as opposed to alienating them from the beginning with what they've already Sort of know and expect After choosing that clip I read that you improvised some of that scene that whole clip actually was improvised. Yes The scene in the script as it was written it started out with you know, it just said Donald finishes as it was written, it started out with, you know, it just said Donald finishes introducing Trump Tower,

and he sits down and he goes, well, what do you think, Mr. Mayor? And he goes, oh, very fascinating, what do you call it? So, but in the matter that we had been shooting, by the time we got to the scene, I was already prepared to sort of have something ready because our director was always encouraging. And really, the script was asking for this, you know, it was always asking for the beginning and the end of the scenes which weren't there.

You know, we had a lot of the middle of the bulk of what we needed, right, that was written. But there were many times where we needed to kind of like find out about what surrounded it. And, you know, that was part of what I did to prepare many times the night before with this scene and other scenes where I would very kind of surgically construct an improvisation in his way of speaking that I would get from various interviews that I'd collected over time and things that he had said to Barbara Walters and Larry King and many things that he had said to Ed Koch and all kinds of footage that I'd placed together. You made the film while Biden was president in between Trump's two terms.

What's it like watching his second term after having played him? Well, that's a really great question and it's one where there's no real clear answer that I can give you. It's a mixed bag, it's a mixed bag. I mean, in a lot of ways, a lot of things look very predictable to me, especially having studied him for this film.

The victimhood, blaming, the revenge tactics, all that we go in depth in the film that he had absorbed from Roy Cohn. You really do see, I think even if you look at the inauguration, and even at the debate with Kamala Harris, you really see what we talk about in the movie of these sort of ways he's learned to flip it around on the other person and

kind of just always just be denying reality and reshaping the truth as long as it fits his narrative and the complete utter lack of And the complete utter lack of acceptance for any criticism or any wrongdoing or anything whatsoever. So it's eerily familiar. It's predictable. It's also, I may say, tragic because I guess for me, you know, I also feel like I saw a version of this overweight kid that was paranoid and insecure and desperate for attention that was made to pay a big price at daddy's big betrayal, sending him off to

military school where he had to kind of, you know, whatever happened there that dehumanized him further and the revenge that he's been enacting out, you know. And at the same time, it's hard not to sort of find some of it upsetting as well because I do feel so much of it is rage and anger that's been suppressed and undealt with that we're all having to kind of just, you know, deal with and pay a price for. But playing him, I'm sure you had to be him and see things from his point of view which requires you, the actor, to have empathy for Trump,

the character that you're portraying. Well, I think as an actor, you have to kind of go through a process where you look at what are the things here that I feel that are useful for me to do this in the right way that it's asking of me? And what are the things that I feel that are going to work against me? And then you have to sort of become an investigator. And you have to, in a way, be a bodyguard to the character you're playing. And, um... I've wrestled with a degree of powerlessness as a child

that I felt growing up as a result of... a lot of change that happened very quickly in formative years, um... where I didn't feel safe and changing countries and changing schools and changing homes and caretakers coming and going and so on. And that's affected my life in a certain way. But I would argue nowhere near the degree of powerlessness that I feel he must have gone through in order to create such an ulterior ego to the extent that he has,

because that's what I really see it's about with him. It's always power and mistrust and paranoia and everything is transactional. That's how he operates. Sebastian Stan speaking to Terry Gross. He's nominated for an Academy Award for his starring role as Donald Trump in The Apprentice. After a break, we'll hear from another of this year's Best Actor Oscar nominees, Adrian Brody, nominated for his starring role in The Brutalist. And John Powers reviews Flow, an animated film from Latvia that has earned Oscar nominations

for both Best Animated Feature and Best International Film. I'm David Bianculli, and this is Fresh Air. The Academy Awards are being televised on Sunday, and among the Best Actor nominees is Adrian Brody, up for his starring role in The Brutalist. He plays a Hungarian refugee who escapes post-war Europe and arrives in the US with dreams of rebuilding his life. The film is up for 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Directing, Cinematography, Supporting Actor and Actress, and Screenplay. Directed by Brady Corbett, The Brutalist explores the harsh realities of the American dream. Brody

portrays a fictional character named Laszlo Toth who settles in Pennsylvania in 1947. He soon meets a wealthy industrialist played by Guy Pearce who's also nominated for an Academy Award who recognizes Laszlo's talent and hires him to create a community center in honor of his mother. However, the relationship between the two comes at a cost. The sweeping nature of the Brutalist is reminiscent of Brody's work in The Pianist, in which he won an Oscar for his stirring performance as a Jewish pianist from Warsaw who survived the Holocaust by hiding from the Nazis. Adrienne Brody spoke with Tanya Mosley last month.

I want to play a clip so folks can hear a little bit from the movie, but first I want to just set up. Your character, Laszlo, arrives in the U.S. in 47, and he goes to stay with his cousin in Philly, who's been in the U.S. for a couple of years now, and he owns a furniture shop named Miller and Sons. And I'm saying that because that is not your cousin's name. He does not have sons but he notes that Americans love a simple name and they also love a family business. So your character works for his cousin designing furniture for the store and then one day the son of a wealthy businessman asks you to redesign

his father's library as a surprise. And when the father, Harrison Lee Van Buren, who's played by Guy Pearce, returns home and sees this library, he's furious, he refuses to pay, this sends your character into a spiral until a little while later, Lee Van Buren searches and finds your character shoveling coal. He apologizes. He asks him to be a part of this new project to create a community center in honor of his deceased mother. And in this scene I'm about to play, Van Buren asks your character why he chose architecture as a profession when he lived in Hungary. Van Buren, played by Piers, speaks first. Nothing is of its own explanation.

Is there a better description of a cube than that of its construction. There was a war on, and yet, it is my understanding that many of the sites of my projects had survived. They remain there, still in the city. When the terrible recollections of what happened in Europe cease to humiliate us, I expect for them to serve instead as a political stimulus, sparking the upheavals that so frequently occur in the cycles of people-hotel. That's my guest today, Adrian Brody, in the new film, The Brutalist.

He's in that scene with Guy Pearce. And you're known, you're pretty well known for going the extra mile to embody your characters, in particular with The Pianist. You did all sorts of stuff. You gave up your apartment, you put your stuff in storage with The Pianist, you did all sorts of stuff. You gave up your apartment, you put your stuff in storage, you moved to Europe, you learned to play the piano. I think that all the headlines talked about how you starved yourself.

I think you lost like 30 pounds. And you do this with all of, a lot of your films. For the movie Dummy, you literally slept with a dummy to play a ventriloquist. It depends what you mean by that. But yes, he slept in the same bed together. But I worked with it very, I had to learn how to, yeah, be very close to it. Were there any things in particular for this role that you kind of refashioned your life for to really embody Laszlo?

You know, I only do what I feel is necessary to find a closeness and a sense of truth so that I can, you know, quote, act less, you know, and feel honest in an interpretation. I can't portray a man who's starving if I don't understand hunger. I can't portray the physical shift of a man who's starved by not losing that weight. I can't understand classical music without knowing to play it, you name it.

And fortunately, a lot of that work that I had done in an effort to honor Spielman and the pianist and really to honor one man's journey that represented the loss of six million and spoke to such a horrific time in our history gave me a great deal of insight and understanding in what Laszlo's past experiences were that he is just on the precipice of overcoming as he arrives to the United States. And so while this movie is a vastly different story and a story about an immigrant's journey and it is also the journey of someone who's endured that and it's quite remarkable how that has lived with me and given me

greater insight years later in a role like this. How did that role give you insight? Because I will tell you, I watched the pianist again and then I watched the brutalist. And so I kind of watched them back to back. And of course, as you said, yeah, there are some heavy times, but really like a very, it was really important for me to watch it that way and I'm glad I did. As you said, they are two very different films and your characters are different, but they do feel like to me that they are speaking to each other. I don't know if that's the right way to put it. Maybe it's that they

both hit a similar emotional note. I'm wondering how you see that. Well, they both reference this time that has changed the shape and face of this world indelibly. And they both reference how intolerance and oppression and anti-Semitism and forces that are ugly exist and have deprived us of so much beauty in this world. This movie, The Brutalist, is a fictional story. And the reason it's a fictional story is because when Brady and Mona were doing their research to try and write a film about a European architect who survived the Nazi occupation and carried on his work in America, there were none to be found because they'd all been killed. And then Brady and Mona had to find references of other wonderful creatives who were similar

and like Marcel Brouwer who has left a wonderful legacy of work and you know. As an architect. As an architect and but had left in the mid-30s, fortunately. So I think the films obviously speak to this horrific time and speak to the power of art and the beauty and the capacity for the human spirit to endure and the power of the ability to create beauty and lightness amidst darkness and to find purpose in art to transcend that darkness. The use of silence in both of the films is also really powerful.

In The Pianist, the silence is because Spielman is alone in his hiding from the Nazis. But in The Brutalist, from my view, the silence plays another role. It plays a lens into the life of an immigrant. Like on a very practical sense, When you are coming to a new country and you don't speak the language well, you are other, you are an outsider. As you're saying, like that's a lonely experience. And so there are probably huge swaths of time where there is silence, especially when you don't have your family with you. Matthew 14 And you don't have the words, you don't have the vocabulary or confidence to speak in another language. I can understand a fair amount of French,

but I am very reticent to start speaking, especially when I'm in France, because I'm just not confident with that. The pressure of coming to a new land and trying to communicate and express yourself in a way, it's very hard for many people. But yeah, I see what you're saying. A lot of the silence that exists or does not exist in a film is also up to the filmmaker and the editor. And, you know, the beauty of this film, and you can

correct me if you feel differently, but in spite of its length, it does not feel long. And the beauty of its length is that you are afforded moments that feel very real and personal because you can sit with the characters and experience those moments and they aren't truncated in an effort to keep a scene lively and edgy for the sake of pace. And that takes a very confident and brave filmmaker and one who understands the nuance of language and storytelling and trusts in his actors and gives them the space and honors those magical moments

that can be created. I know you've been acting since you were very young. How old were you when you first started? I think my first professional job was 12 years old. Before acting I started doing magic and I was, you could call it a professional job. I mean I think I earned $50 to do a children's birthday party in its entirety. But I loved magic and I found that the storytelling that's involved in addition to creating the illusion was a gateway into an understanding of performance and precision in in in performance and and

But I found a love for acting at a very very young age and then was fortunate to Work pretty consistently over the years. I didn't have a big career for many years, but I I was a working actor, and I have always been very grateful for that. 12 years old is a remarkably young age to feel so directed and passionate in what you do. Were your parents leading you? Were you leading the charge?

How did it come about that you took this on at that age? Yeah, I just joked about it last night. I said, acting beats working for a living. It is very hard work in all seriousness, but it is such a joy and it's always different. And I always had a very curious spirit and that curiosity of my childhood lives on in me. And, you know, I grew up in New York City, I grew up in Queens, I took the train all the time. I had to take four trains each way to go to drama school. I got accepted to performing arts and it was a public school and but it gave me

wonderful foundation. It wasn't just a public school. You're talking about the school that the high school that the film fame was based on, right? That's where you went to high school. Yes, I mean it's not it's not merely a public school, but it was a, it was, it's a remarkable school, but it was a public high school, meaning I was, by being selected and making it into the drama department, I was given four acting classes a day within the public school system, which is remarkable,

and was very helpful for me. But along the way to get to school, I'd have to take the train. And I learned so much about character of witnessing characteristics and- Watching people. You name it. Yes. Watching people. What was that first role?

What were your roles when you were first starting out at 12? I was doing theater. I'd first done some work with Elizabeth Suedos at BAM at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. And I'd gotten an off-Broadway play in the Lower East Side that I take the train in from after junior high school and go to work and try not to get jumped in the East Village and, you know, go to work each day. And, you know, I loved it. I really, I really loved it. At just turning 14, I had booked the lead role in a public television film.

I went off to Nebraska and shot a movie. You talk quite a bit about your mother and your father's influence. Your mother, this noted photographer, she used to be a staff photographer for the Village Voice. photographer. She used to be a staff photographer for the Village Voice, you say, like people will say to you, oh you are the son of Sylvia because she's so well respected and your father is an educator. But I'm curious growing up, like how did your mother's work and seeing her in her creativity maybe influence your thoughts on the perceptions on what you could be. And had you thought about being anything else, was acting just like a foregone conclusion?

It's a lovely, lovely question. And, you know, my parents are a unit, you know, they've always stood together an embrace of me and in nurturing me and my individuality and not suppressing my individuality and my rambunctious nature as a child and my enthusiasm and curiosity of the world. And they've only enhanced that. And my mother's work has been so influential on me as an artist. And my, first of all, in me encountering acting is the result of her having an assignment to photograph

the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, which preceded my education in performing arts. Where I started as a very young boy, because she had seen an acting class, they had acting classes for children that were, she saw in me what all these kids were doing and she had that intuition. So even just encountering it came as a result of her photographic work. But then I am also the son, only son of a photographer, so I am very much a focal point in front of the lens that came from an artist's eye. And I

also witnessed her imagery and her immortalization of my city and the world through that very beautiful specific lens since birth. Whereas I grew up with film everywhere in my home,atives being hung from the showers and film canisters in the tub and the smell of fixative in the dark room smelling like home and my mother and film test prints on record racks all strewn around the floor in front of the landing in front of my bedroom. And so since I could crawl, I was seeing imagery everywhere and beautiful imagery. And I think that made art and its accessibility very

tangible and available. Adrian Brody speaking to Tanya Mosley last month. This Sunday he'll be competing for a Best Actor Oscar at the 97th Academy Awards, televised live by ABC. Coming up, another Oscar contender. It's a film from Latvia called Flow, nominated for both Best Animated Feature and Best International Film. Critic-at-large John Powers has a review.

This is Fresh Air. Flow is an animated movie from Latvia that follows an unlikely collection of animals, brought together by a massive flood that overwhelms the countryside. The film, which is now streaming on Macs, already won animation prizes from, among others, the Golden Globes, the New York Film Critics, and the Los Angeles Film Critics. And it's received Oscar nominations for both Best Animated Feature and Best International Film. Our critic-at-large, John Powers, says that flow is, quite simply, wonderful. Perhaps the most famous line in ancient Greek thought comes from the philosopher Heraclitus,

who said, you cannot step into the same river twice. That's because reality is not a static thing, but an ever-changing flux. The fluidity of life runs through Flow, a marvelous animated movie from Latvia, which has already been showered with acclaim. Directed by Gintz Zalbalotis, it takes a simple premise. A sundry crew of animals get caught in a flood, and without a single word being uttered, transports us into a radiant fantasy. At once fun and affecting, Flow made me think of everything from Spirited Away and The Incredible Journey to the story of Noah and the recent floods in North Carolina. Flow centers on a slate-grey cat whose home is a big house in the forest surrounded by

larger-than-life feline sculptures. It sleeps upstairs in a double bed whose emptiness offers our first inkling that there are no people about. And indeed, no humans will appear in the film. Instead, we follow this watchful, eloquent-eyed loner as it prowls around and gets chased by a pack of dogs, a pursuit interrupted by a deluge that comes whooshing towards them. The water keeps rising higher and higher. And just as the cat is about to be washed away, it's able to jump on a sailboat occupied by, of all things, a capybara. Soon they're joined by a scene-stealing lemur,

who has scavenged various human knickknacks, like the mirror it keeps looking at itself in. It's like the opening of a joke. A cat, a capybara, and a lemur walk into a bar. As the three float together on their small arc, they're joined by a golden retriever and a predatory secretary bird, which boasts a crazy beautiful headdress of feathers and a body like an eagle's glued onto a heron's legs. This odd band of survivors seeks to ride out the flood, a dangerous enterprise

that forces them to work together and leads them to rescue others in distress, even if they don't always want to. Sobelotus pays these animals the respect of observing them closely. He deftly captures the cat's yawns, the movements of the lemur's ringed tail as it's preening, and the amiable torpor of the capybara, a creature whose meme-inducing cuteness was recently celebrated in The New Yorker by Gary Steingart. Forgoing all dialogue, but using genuine animal sounds, Flo is a long way from Zootopia or Eddie Murphy's smart aleck donkey in Shrek.

While it does humanize its characters a bit, my own beloved cat Niko would sooner drown than team up with a lemur, Flo captures the way animals behave in the wild, as in the ruthless fight for dominance between two secretary birds, which leaves one of them unable to fly. The movie weaves together bursts of adventure. Your heart may pound as the cat has to swim for dear life. With poetic moments of transcendence, I won't spoil by describing. Like Miyazaki, Zobolotus uses animation to conjure a big, thrilling world of imagination. Where too much American animation feels frantic, desperate to keep our attention,

Flo's images possess a kinetic elegance. They have the alluring immersiveness of a video game, complete, alas, with a few visual glitches you won't find in Pixar. Then again, this is not a big budget Hollywood project. It was made on the open source software Blender and cost just $3.7 million. To put this in perspective, that's less than one-fiftieth the budget of Inside Out 2.

Flow is conceived as a universal story that weaves together magic and realism. While the cat and dogs could live in our own neighborhood, the rest of the cast comes from the likes of Latin America, Africa, and Madagascar. There's even a whale from the briny deep that surges up, almost biblically, from the floodwaters. This whale's appearance inland is one of the film's suggestions, melancholy but never overt, that the great flood we're seeing may be a product of climate change. Yet flow is far from a political tract. Rather, it's a classic fable about learning to adapt

to life's ever-changing flow. No matter how dire, things may sometimes get. And like most classic fables, it offers an enduring lesson. A group of creatures overcome their differences and learn to help one another. It's solidarity, not selfishness, that will save them. John Powers reviewed the animated film Flow, which is up for two Oscars and is now streaming on Max.

On Monday's show, How Life Can Change in a Second, the first film by Hanif Kureishi, 1985's My Beautiful Londrette, starred Daniel Day-Lewis, was directed by Stephen Frears, and won Kureishi an Oscar for Best Screenplay. In 2022, he fell, and when he regained consciousness, his limbs were paralyzed. He'll talk about life before and after the fall. I hope you can join us.

Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Sam Brigger is our managing producer. Our senior producer today is Roberta Shorrock. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham with additional engineering support by Joyce Lieberman, Julian Hertzfeld, and Diana Martinez. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David B. Nkouli. Support for NPR comes from this station and from National Geographic Lindblad Expeditions, committed to taking travelers deeper into the wonders of planet Earth. Each Expedition Cruise is guided by a diverse team. natgeoexpeditions.com slash cruises. And from Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people.