Brady Corbet Looks Back on ‘Mysterious Skin,’ Which He Knew Was Destined to Be an ‘Important Movie’

The actor-turned-filmmaker reflects on Gregg Araki's 2004 adaptation, how it shaped Corbet's own directing, and what he makes of those Steven Spielberg theories.

Few films get banned in multiple countries and then, twenty years later, become the subject of theories as how they might have influenced a later Steven Spielberg movie. “Mysterious Skin” has managed to do both.

Gregg Araki’s 2004 adaptation of Scott Heim’s novel is back in a new 4K restoration this month. Filmmaker and former actor Brady Corbet, who co-starred in the film with Joseph Gordon-Levitt, hasn’t talked about it in years, but he recently sat down with IndieWire to discuss the seminal feature on the eve of its return to theaters.

Corbet was just fourteen years old when he played Brian Lackey, a boy whose response to being molested by his Little League coach is to convince himself he was, instead, abducted by aliens. Gordon-Levitt played Neil McCormick, who was abused by the same coach, and processes it by chasing older men as a teenage rent boy.

The film follows the two boys from that abuse in the summer of 1981 through a decade later, tracking two very different coping mechanisms. Brian has blocked the memory out almost entirely — he remembers only an unexplained blackout and recurring nosebleeds, which sends him down a rabbit hole of amateur alien-abduction research trying to explain the gap.

Neil remembers everything, and doesn’t repress it so much as romanticize it, chasing older men who might replicate that feeling. The film’s back half brings the two together, as Brian’s search for the truth collides with what Neil has known all along.

A growing corner of the internet has started tracing a Froot Loops match cut and childhood bedroom-set scene in Spielberg’s recent alien-centric “Disclosure Day” straight back to Araki’s masterpiece. Corbet hasn’t seen Spielberg’s latest, and told IndieWire, “Sometimes a coincidence really is just a coincidence. But if I see Steven Spielberg, I definitely am going to ask him.”

It’s a subject he knows from more than one angle. As the conversation turned to real UAP disclosures — the Pentagon’s UAP office just released its latest annual report, tallying 319 sightings with roughly 1,000 still unresolved, following 2023 whistleblower testimony alleging the government has retrieved non-human craft — he said, “I think, like the rest of the world, I remain a curious skeptic. That’s an important thing to always be. That is my relationship with mysticism as well. I do think it’s pretty clear, though, and very well documented, that there is certainly something going on. We’re living in an age of a lot of campfire tales and distortions of reality.”

Corbet said that running his own film sets has reshaped how he thinks about conspiracy theories, though. “I became a lot less open to conspiracy theories because I know how hard it is to steer a very big bus up a windy hill,” he said. “I remember all of the sort of small change conspiracy theories about 9/11, which were really particularly preposterous. Look at the people that are in power. Do you actually think that this group of people could be organized enough? I’ve also had the good fortune or misfortune of meeting my fair share of politicians. I’ve rarely been incredibly impressed.”

Still, he doesn’t rule out the government keeping something back. “In a way, I would find it sort of comforting to think that the government functioned well enough that it was able to keep a secret from us for a century,” he said. “That said, the facts are the facts, and there are facts that can’t be argued with.”

As we moved away from government secrets, we landed back on safer ground. As he reflected on his experience filming “Mysterious Skin,” Corbet’s director’s point of view came into focus, as he talked about the atmosphere created on set. “Gregg created an atmosphere where all of us felt really safe,” he said. “It was a really pleasant experience to shoot the movie. It’s a very happy memory.”

That’s not the answer most people expect from a film this unflinching, and Corbet knows it. “I think it’s hard for people to imagine that you can have a great time making something that’s got content like this,” he added.

He credited Araki with making the experience far gentler than the material itself. “I had the sense that, when we were working, the only thing that mattered was what was directly in front of him,” Corbet said. “It was one of the happier film sets that I’d ever worked on.”

Even the film’s most demanding scene, a middle-of-the-night reunion between Corbet and Gordon-Levitt’s character, is remembered warmly by “The Brutalist” director. “We’d only spoken once or twice, and that last sequence, I remember it was a bonding experience, mostly because it was such a long scene,” he said. “We had a sense while we were making that film that it felt like an important movie.”

There’s one question Corbet has fielded many times over the past two decades. Starting with interviews for the film’s 2004 release, he was repeatedly asked, did anything happen on set? “Did I or did I not get molested on the set of this film? Of course I didn’t,” he said. “Gregg was so kind, not just with Joe and me, but with everybody.”

Because of his experience with Araki, Corbet deliberately makes his own sets safe for young actors. Two of his earliest films, “The Childhood of a Leader” and “Vox Lux,” both lean heavily on young performers. “I learned a lot of good tricks on ‘Mysterious Skin,’ of how to shoot scenes with very young people that don’t compromise their innocence,” he said.

He’s also made a habit of staying close to the young actors he directs, long after the cameras stop. “It’s quite painful for a young person to have this sort of summer camp experience, making a movie, and then to come out the other side of that and no one from it ever calls you again. I’ve always stayed in touch with any of the young people that I work with,” Corbet said.

Corbet traced some of that protectiveness back to his own youthful discomfort in front of a camera. “I was never a very passionate performer because, when I was younger, I was quite shy in a way,” he said. “What’s tricky about being a performer is that you have to have a level of self-awareness that can easily become a sort of self-absorption. I just wanted to be.”

Money pressures during the 2008 financial crisis collided with his acting career, as his mother worked in the mortgage industry at the time. “At a certain point, we weren’t doing very well,” Corbet said. He was taking studio acting jobs just to survive, but it kept eating away at his ambitions behind the camera. “I had to decide to quit acting really quite officially, because every time I would have managed to raise a few shekels to make a movie, I’d go off and I’d shoot someone else’s film. And then I would lose that investment,” he said.

What he found on the other side of the lens was deeper satisfaction than he’d had as a performer. “Directing a film for me was a much easier thing to qualify. I had a much stronger sense of whether things had gone according to plan or they hadn’t,” Corbet said. “I had worked on big projects, and they were miserable, I would work on something that was much more artisanal. Of course, it was much more validating.”

He’s made peace with the trade-off. “In the long run, I’ve prioritized my life over my pocketbook,” he said.

Corbet’s next film, rumored to be titled “The Origin of the World” and starring Michael Fassbender, Cate Blanchett, and Selena Gomez, is being made under the same terms. “It’s 100 percent independent. Truly independent. There’s no boutique studio money in it at all,” he said.

He’s equally blunt about an organization he calls outdated. “The MPAA is a dinosaur of an institution that has been shaping American values for too long. My production company is called Precode for that reason,” Corbet said. “I’ve always had a great affection for punks. Gregg was and still is one of the best of them.”

That punk instinct never crowded out Araki’s tenderness toward the material, and Corbet clearly shares the director’s view. “I found the book to be incredibly empathetic,” he said. “It’s something that I’m constantly dealing with in the films that I make as well, that to represent something doesn’t mean to condone something.”

For everything “Mysterious Skin” gave him, Corbet’s account of his role in it remains modest. “It’s so nice to celebrate what Gregg achieved,” he said. “In a way, I was just a very small part of it.”

“Mysterious Skin” returns to select theaters from Strand Releasing starting Friday, August 14, following its new 4K restoration by the Academy Film Archive and UCLA Film & Television Archive in conjunction with Sundance Institute.