David Byrne Teams With 'The Brutalist' Director Brady Corbet for 70mm Concert Film Shot in Baltimore
David Byrne's hometown Baltimore shows have been captured for a concert film directed by Brady Corbet, shot on 70mm film across multiple nights at the Hippodrome Theatre. The film is currently in postproduction, with release details to follow, according to Rolling Stone.
Corbet, the director of the 2024 epic The Brutalist, told Byrne he wanted to shoot the show in 70 millimetre — a large-format film stock prized for its wide-screen visual scope and resolution far beyond standard digital capture. Byrne said in a statement that he was struck by how the format captured the breadth of the stage presentation. Corbet, in his own statement, said he was grateful to Byrne and his team for entrusting them to capture the hometown show on 8-perf and 15-perf 70mm, two formats that expose wider strips of film per frame than standard 35mm.
The concerts were filmed during Byrne's Who Is the Sky? Tour, launched in September 2025 in support of his album of the same name. The tour features an ensemble of 13 musicians, singers, and dancers in constant motion onstage — a staging approach Byrne has honed across decades of live work. The tour is set to end on 19 September at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, New York.
The production is a partnership between Corbet's company Pre-Code and The Deep End Films. The choice of Baltimore as the filming location carries personal weight for Byrne: though born in Scotland, he was raised in Baltimore County, Maryland. The shows at the Hippodrome served as a homecoming.
Byrne has a notable history with the concert-film format. He previously collaborated with director Jonathan Demme on Stop Making Sense, the 1984 Talking Heads film widely regarded as a landmark of the genre, and with Spike Lee on American Utopia, the 2020 adaptation of Byrne's Broadway show. Each project paired Byrne with a director working at a high level of feature filmmaking, and the Corbet collaboration follows that pattern.
What gives this project its particular texture is the film-stock choice. Shooting a live concert on 70mm — and specifically on 8-perf and 15-perf configurations, which capture more image area per frame — is rare and expensive. The format is more commonly associated with sweeping cinematic landscapes than with stage performers in a theatre. Corbet's stated rationale, that the wide-screen scope suited the show's visual design, suggests the film will lean into the spatial choreography of the production rather than the close-up intimacy typical of many concert films.
The Baltimore connection runs deeper than the venue. According to The Baltimore Banner, Byrne planned to dine at Clavel, a Baltimore restaurant, during his visit — and it was Corbet himself who emailed to make the arrangements, doubling as Byrne's videographer for the trip.
No release date, distributor, or platform has been announced for the film.
