A $10M Budget Didn’t Stop ‘The Brutalist’ Production Designer Judy Becker From Leaning Into the Film’s Titular Architectural Style
“It’s not all Brutalism,” reads the bio line on production designer Judy Becker’s Instagram. “It’s pictures of my black cat, too.” Years before director Brady Corbet hired Becker to help him realize the designs of his fictional protagonist, architect László Tóth, in The Brutalist, Becker was a devoted fan of the concrete-heavy, minimalist style, sharing buildings that appealed to her on her social media account. “I used to love that everyone else hated it,” Becker says of brutalism. “There’s nothing ugly about it to me. It’s just so plain and soothing. I look at it, and I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s so beautiful.’ “
When it comes to admiring the brutalist style, Becker has a lot more company now, partly thanks to evolving tastes but in some part because of the world she helped create in Corbet’s movie. The Brutalist, which is about a Bauhaus-trained Holocaust survivor played by Adrien Brody, has collected 10 Oscar nominations, including best production design for Becker and set decorator Patricia Cuccia and best picture.
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The Brutalist only works if the audience believes that Brody’s László is a master architect — and Becker’s designs, made for the movie’s less-than-$10 million budget, have to convince them. Becker, who also was Oscar-nominated for her work on 2013’s American Hustle, created an elegant library that László builds in the Pennsylvania home of wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce) and a sprawling modernist community center Van Buren commissions known as The Institute.
Becker came up with the design for the library while location scouting at an old mansion in Hungary with Corbet and producer Andrew Morrison. The description of the room in the script by Corbet and his writing partner and wife, Mona Fastvold, was more metaphorical than practical, Becker notes. “They build these new shelves, and they’re lying in the center of the floor, and the men pull them up by ropes, like a flower opening,” Becker explains, describing the library scene in the script. “I couldn’t wrap my head around how that was going to work. How do they stay in place?”
Becker was puzzling over that question at the mansion they were scouting when she saw that the home had a glass winter garden and got an idea. “It was great, except it was all glass,” she says. “I was staring at it, and thought, ‘Ah, we’re going to build these wooden floor-to-ceiling shelves that are enclosed and it’s going to be forced perspective.’ I drew a little sketch of it and showed it to Brady, and he really liked it.”
Corbet says Becker’s input affected not only the visuals but also the screenplay. “One of the big changes that was so smart on Judy’s part is that in the screenplay, they were renovating a raw space that was in disrepair,” Corbet says. “She was like, ‘I think it’s much more interesting that it’s art deco. It’s 30 years old, it’s fallen out of fashion, and it’s time for a renovation.’ And I was like, ‘Oh yeah, of course. That’s exactly right.’ “
The library is a centerpiece set that had to shine, and to build it, Becker needed a laminated plywood that became difficult to source. “There’s almost no wood [in Hungary] because of the war in Ukraine,” she explains. “They get their wood from Russia, and they can’t get any. So it was very, very, very expensive and hard to find.”
While the library set served to illustrate László’s talent, The Institute had to tell a much broader story, communicating both his ambition and his trauma. Becker first shared her design for The Institute with Corbet during an early meeting about the film, pulling pictures of concentration camp structures to show how she could conjure a building that would reference László’s history as a Holocaust survivor, a key theme in the script. “Judy did a remarkable job and with limited resources,” Brody says of the designs for The Institute. “She not only created the structure that László envisions but also somehow materialized into this structure all of the nuances in Brady’s and Mona’s writing that speak to his journey.”
Another key piece of the design storytelling in the film is the art and furnishings in Van Buren’s home — Pearce’s character, the film’s primary antagonist, is meant to be a voracious collector. “There are cubist sculptures and a lot of unusual pieces around the house,” Corbet notes. “That’s something that Judy really, really thought a lot about — how to establish that he does have real taste.”
Becker and Cuccia hired an artist to create paintings for Pearce’s home and found the furniture locally in Hungary. “He had a lot of money,” Becker says. “And people with a lot of money can pay people to give them taste.”
This story first appeared in a February stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
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