Former 'Pain in the Ass' Tony Kaye is Back, Vito Schnabel is Jacked, in Big Tribeca BetAfter sparring over 'American History X,' and with help from Kevin Durant and Olivier Sarkozy, the embattled filmmaker makes (another) comeback bid
Happy Thursday, everyone, particularly to those of you who joined me for a live taping of the Prestige Junkie podcast on Monday with the team behind ABC’s hit procedural High Potential. You’ll be able to hear the whole conversation on an upcoming episode of the pod, which is busier than ever these days. We’ll have special weekend episodes this Saturday and Sunday featuring even more interviews with contenders, including some I had the rare treat of conducting in person. I won’t spoil which collaborators were holding hands through much of their interview with me, but promise you’ll be able to guess correctly after listening. Today, however, I’m taking a bit of a break from Emmy season, looking at two new trailers for some very big swings coming later this fall. But first, let’s get into what might be the biggest swing of the spring, premiering at the Tribeca Festival this weekend. A lot of movies will try to tell you they are unlike anything you’ve ever seen; almost none of them follow through on that as much as The Trainer.
Training Day
Tony Kaye is getting ready to travel to the Tribeca Festival for the premiere of his new movie, and has several projects in the works, including one with Lenny Kravitz and a hoped-for reunion with Adrien Brody, who starred in Kaye’s 2011 feature Detachment. But make no mistake about it: “I’ve been in the wilderness,” Kaye tells me. “I still am in a way.” Then again, he says toward the end of our conversation, “We’re all in a wilderness every day. And we have to start again and consolidate what we’ve got and try to open up new possibilities where we can.” Kaye’s new film, The Trainer, which had its world premiere at the Rome Film Festival last fall and plays Tribeca on Saturday, is about a man making his way out of his own wilderness and toward an even stranger one: Hollywood. Written by and starring art world icon Vito Schnabel (son of renowned painter and filmmaker Julian) in his first acting role, The Trainer follows a scheming would-be fitness influencer who arrives in Los Angeles to pitch his Heavy Hat — an absurd, glowing helmet he has designed and believes is his ticket to fame. Through encounters with real-life celebrities like Paris Hilton and Kravitz, and with the support of a shopping network employee played by Julia Fox, Schnabel’s Jack Flex refuses to give up on his deeply unlikely dream. “My first real encounters with Hollywood began with this movie, trying to tell this story in various forms over the last 11 years,” Schnabel told me via e-mail. “I heard a lot of no’s, and Jack hears a lot of no’s. And it was on both of us to simply not give up.” Financed independently, with a long list of executive producers that includes two-time NBA champion Kevin Durant and former French president Olivier Sarkozy, The Trainer is a well-connected passion project, but a labor of love all the same. For a sense of just how many famous faces appear in this, as well as some of Kaye’s guerrilla tactics, take a look at this teaser. That footage of Bono? According to Kaye, he captured it on his iPhone when he happened to run into the rock star at the Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills. 
History Lessons
The Trainer is also the first feature film in 14 years for Kaye, who broke through as a director of commercials in his native England, and made his feature directorial debut in 1999 with American History X, which became one of the most infamous examples in Hollywood history of a director trying to disown his film. Speaking this week from his home in Los Angeles, his own art commanding the Zoom frame behind him, Kaye calls the American History X experience a “baptism by fire” and jokes that when Covid lockdowns began in 2020, “I’d been in lockdown already for 20 years.” Kaye went to war with New Line over final cut on the film and lost. “I was being a nightmare to New Line,” he wrote in a 2002 essay. “I had started communicating exclusively through advertisements in the trade papers. I would say whatever I needed to say to them in a full-page ad in Variety or the Hollywood Reporter, sometimes quoting Lennon or Shakespeare; sometimes trumpeting myself as the greatest British director since Hitchcock.” He’s working now on a documentary about the American History X experience, titled Humpty Dumpty X (after one of the pseudonyms he toyed with using for his credit on the film when it was released in 1999). Otherwise, he doesn’t sound too much like the director who once called himself a “spectacular pain in the ass.” But that doesn’t mean he’s become a conventional director, either. “I'm very easy to work with,” Kaye insists, in a way that makes you believe him. “I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I just work. But I’m very intense, and I’m not a cheerleader or anything like that. And Vito knew how to work with that.” Reworking Schnabel’s original story, which the writer-star had initially intended to direct, Kaye wanted the film not just to be about Jack Flex but also to take on what he calls the “tactile sensation of delusional thought.” The energetic, entirely unpredictable visual style of The Trainer is challenging to describe but unforgettable, both a timeless story of Hollywood ambition and very deliberately built, in Kaye’s words, “within a modern vernacular of TikTok and Instagram.” Kaye embraces the idea of the film being watched on a phone by “some kid hanging on a bus rail,” and when the Oscar-winning Brody asked to see it, Kaye insisted the actor view it on his phone while walking down the street. (He hasn’t yet heard back on whether Brody actually did.) “No one on earth makes a movie the way Tony Kaye makes a movie,” says Schnabel. “He is his own cinematographer and his own camera operator. He’s in better shape than most 30-year-olds holding that EZ rig and can be anywhere to grab any angle he wants. That anything-can-happen and that energy is something I miss every day, and I know my other castmates miss it too.” When Detachment was released in 2011, Kaye said he hoped it would mark the end of the fallow period that had followed the American History X saga. Since then, he’s developed a handful of projects that never materialized and credits Schnabel’s tenacity for getting The Trainer over the finish line. So is this the beginning of a comeback? “Look, ‘no’ is the first step towards ‘yes,’” says Kaye, who, like Schnabel, has heard plenty of “no” in his career. “I stole that from Jonathan Glazer, who was my mentee, but now he’s become my mentor.” U.K. filmmaker Glazer’s career, taking more than a decade to make The Zone of Interest and then watching it win an Oscar for best international feature, certainly indicates that long waits in Hollywood can pay off. No matter what it takes for his next film to come to life, Kaye knows that the hours he’s put in behind the camera have at least placed him in rarefied company. “With all the mediums I’ve worked within, I’ve shot and directed for nearly 15,000 days now,” Kaye tells me. “I worked it out once that Steven Spielberg was on about eight or nine [thousand], Quentin was on about three. So that’s a lot.”
A Monster and a MusicalI’m a little late to this, since the firehose of announcements from Netflix’s Tudum event last weekend was a bit much for anyone to keep up with. But the first trailer for Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, starring Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi, also has me thinking about Oscar season, and specifically just what kind of fate we can expect from a monster movie, even one with all the prestige in the world behind it. Over on Kalshi, the best picture prediction betting has already begun, and Frankenstein has been near the top of the charts for months now; the market currently gives it a 56 percent chance of a nomination, better odds than any other Netflix title. It’s easy to see why. Del Toro is a multiple Oscar winner whose best picture winner, The Shape of Water, was a romantic monster movie that defied all conventional wisdom about what an Oscar frontrunner could look like. Even his follow-up Nightmare Alley, which wasn’t nearly as well-received, made it into the best picture lineup, in large part thanks to the halo still surrounding del Toro’s name.  Del Toro’s Frankenstein was in the works long before last December’s release of Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, but surely that vampire movie is making Netflix feel even more bullish. A dark and brooding alternative to the usual Christmas season fare, Nosferatu earned $181 million at the global box office and four Oscar nominations; there’s reason to believe that if it had opened earlier and had more time to build awards season buzz, it could have even broken into best picture. Given that The Substance did pull off that best picture nomination, could we be entering an era in which beautifully crafted monster movies finally get taken seriously by the Oscars? Much as I will keep my hopes up for Frankenstein, the better bet for a breakthrough may be Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, which imbues a vampire story with a deeply resonant social message that’s helped keep it in the box office top 10 even as it arrives for at-home viewing. Sinners ought to still be too big to ignore come Oscar time, and even though Netflix has qualifying releases for its awards hopefuls in keeping with Oscar rules, there’s no way del Toro’s film will be able to make the same box office impact. Being financially successful is still, of course, no guarantee for a genre movie at the Oscars — just ask every non-Black Panther Marvel. But with Avatar: Fire and Ash also coming in December and looking to score that franchise’s third best picture nomination in a row, it might start getting crowded for an Academy voting body that is leaning more arthouse than ever. Can Frankenstein be gorgeous and prestigious enough to break through anyway? I’ll keep my hopes up if you will.  Last but most fabulous, an unusually glitzy Sundance premiere earlier this year, Bill Condon’s adaptation of the Kiss of the Spider Woman musical. is finally making its way to theaters, courtesy of Roadside Attractions, and launched its first trailer today. A recent inductee into the Diego Luna ride-or-die club thanks to Andor, I will be there no matter what. But it’s also a little hard to tell how much of the movie is the story between the inmates played by Luna and Tonatiuh, and how much will focus on the fantasy musical numbers starring Jennifer Lopez. In the original 1986 film, a pleasantly surprising discovery for me a few years ago, the fantasy sequences are only a tiny part of the story. But Lopez is an undeniable star, and watching her in the spotlight (and in the hands of Dreamgirls director Condon) is a pretty strong sell.
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