SANTA CRUZ — Growing up a budding cinephile in Santa Cruz worked out well for Nick Gordon. His father would frequently take him to see films ranging from the 1922 silent classic “Nosferatu” to the 1979 science fiction thriller “Alien.”
“Santa Cruz is a good film town,” he said. “I used to go see movies with my dad at the Nickelodeon, at the Del Mar, the Rio on the east side all throughout my childhood. … It was certainly one of my favorite things to do as a kid.”
Now, Gordon has evolved from just watching movies to helping make them as a producer and president of the indie film company Brookstreet Pictures, which is currently riding high off the success of its newest movie “The Brutalist.” A film about a Holocaust survivor who emigrates from Hungary to America and rebuilds his life as an architect, has received widespread critical acclaim, won five awards at the Venice International Film Festival, won for best dramatic picture at the Golden Globes and is currently up for 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
Gordon was pleased with the nomination.
“It feels pretty surreal,” he said. “It doesn’t come around every day, that’s for sure.”
Nick Gordon, who grew up splitting his time between Santa Cruz and Boston, is a producer on the Best Picture-nominated movie “The Brutalist.” (Contributed – Linda Kimball Grace)
Gordon moved to Santa Cruz in 1977 as his father, Richard Gordon, became a professor of politics at UC Santa Cruz. The family lived in a dorm at Stevenson College where the film producer — just 4 years old at the time — said he was basically “the mascot of the dorm.”
He recalled, “UCSC in the ’70s was a pretty strange place, so I was getting a little kid’s view of that.”
Gordon said the school would sometimes do on-campus movie screenings, and he recalled sneaking into a screening of François Truffaut’s 1970 French film “The Wild Child” when he was 4, joking that it was not a movie for him at that time.
Shortly after moving to Santa Cruz, Gordon’s parents separated and he would fly back and forth each year to live with his father in Santa Cruz and his mother in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“I became bicoastal,” he said.
While in Santa Cruz, he attended elementary school at Natural Bridges and Bay View, seventh and eighth grade at Mission Hill Middle School and a semester of his senior year at Santa Cruz High School to spend time with friends one last time. His friends included now-professional surfer Darryl “Flea” Virostko, and he also trick-or-treated with Jake and Zach Wormhoudt, the sons of then-Mayor Mardi Wormhoudt.
However, most of Gordon’s high school years were spent at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School in Massachusetts where he became heavily involved with its theater program — including acting alongside future stars Matt Damon, and Ben and Casey Affleck — but it sent him on a path toward cinema.
“I had this really inspiring theater teacher that made me only ever want to do this,” he said. “Yes, that was mostly theater. It was a good theater focus in high school, but in college, I took screenwriting classes and film review classes and things of that nature and leaned into film.”
Gordon began his career as a screenwriter when he has hired by Brookstreet CEO Trevor Matthews to write the 2010 short film “Old West.” He ended up joining the company as head of development and then climbed the ranks as chief operations officer and then as president. The company has made 10 films, including “First Kill,” “Skin,” “Brothers By Blood,” “The Forgiven” and “Knox Goes Away.”
“We just keep building from what we’ve learned in the past ones, and ‘The Brutalist’ really feels like something of a culmination of everything we’ve learned over the years about how to do this,” he said. “It’s certainly the most special film we’ve been involved in.”
The film stars Adrien Brody as a Hungarian-Jewish man named László Tóth who survives being interred at the Buchenwald concentration camp and immigrates to Philadelphia where he seeks to put his architecture skills to use, but struggles to make it in America until he meets a wealthy client named Harrison Lee Van Buren.
Gordon said Brookstreet received the screenplay by director Brady Corbet and his partner Mona Fastvold through the Creative Artists Agency in 2020 as they were looking for producers and financiers. Upon reading it, they determined it was the best screenplay ever sent to Brookstreet.
“We spent a lot of time trying to get this right because in the indie space, it can be so tricky to get enough money to make the film and then deliver at the level that we’ve got here,” he said. “You’re trying to provide the filmmaker every resource you can to give him a real path to executing his vision and succeeding, and that’s what we did.”
The crew spent five to six months in the suburbs of Budapest, which Gordon said was a great experience.
“It’s a wonderful country,” he said. “We had an amazing local crew that came on, and you know you’re part of something special when the writing is this good and the cast that you pulled together is this good.”
However, Gordon said indie films have their challenges.
“They’re long days,” he said. “We shot this in 33 days, and everybody’s really gotta be paddling in the same direction. You’re working long hours, and you’ve really got to trim the fat and make sure that everybody is hip to the vision and giving it their all. Every department involved has to be as lean and as focused as possible because there’s not a lot of time to mess around.”
Gordon is grateful for the positive reception “The Brutalist” has gotten, especially the experience of walking out of the Venice Film Festival to a standing ovation and walking into a bidding war for distribution rights. The movie was ultimately distributed in America by A24, the indie production powerhouse that already won Best Picture in 2023 for “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”
“It feels so gratifying to have people connecting to the film in this way and to have everyone’s work acknowledged,” he said. “It’s a very special and important film for what we were able to achieve in the indie space, and we’re all incredibly proud of it.”
Gordon is happy to be nominated for an Oscar, but making the movie itself was more important to him.
“I guess it’s a cliche to say it’s an honor to be nominated, but it is,” he said. “Nobody makes a film to win an award. That’s not what you’re setting out to do. You’re setting out to tell a story to the best of your ability, so all of this is gravy, but it’s really good gravy. It’s fun and exciting.”
There are many themes to “The Brutalist,” including ambition, rebuilding one’s life and a critical view of the American dream and capitalism, but Gordon said audiences have taken away many different things.
“What’s great is everyone seems to be connecting with it very deeply, so regardless of what particular view they’re taking, it seems to have made an impact on a lot of folks, which is terrific,” he said.
The 97th Oscars will take place March 2.
