Firebrand Director Karim Aïnouz on Jude Law Smelling Like Rotting Flesh Every Day on Set

Brazilian filmmaker Karim Aïnouz (Mariners of the Mountains) admits that the Tudor England historical drama Firebrand isn’t exactly in his typical wheelhouse. He tells Collider’s Steve Weintraub that the story of King Henry VIII and his final wife, Katherine Parr, played by Jude Law and Alicia Vikander, was “a big challenge for [him] to imagine how to tell a story that was very far removed from [his] experience.“ What he perceived at first as a weakness, however, became his strength as he set out to tell not a historical retelling but a character-driven psychological thriller. “The movies that I’m interested in making,“ Aïnouz says, “they’re really about characters and the strength of the characters.“ This was the director’s way into the dramatized look at Katherine Parr’s survival of her volatile husband. The film aims “to sort of forget the idea of monarchy and go into the intimacy of a couple and to see how that couple is falling a