Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold on ‘The Brutalist,’ His ‘Bad History’ with the MPA, and Michael Haneke’s Lasting Friendship
There was a moment when “The Brutalist” could have gone into theaters unrated. It’s not like it hasn’t happened before this year — thank you, “Terrifier 3,” for opening in more than 2,500 theaters unrated and ultimately grossing over $53 million stateside — and the choice only would have fueled the publicity around the Brady Corbet-directed movie, were it to enter theaters sans the MPA imprimatur. Or, the theatrical kiss of death, an NC-17, eliminating play from most major exhibition chains.
An unrated release looked possible, at least, when the full trailer premiered online December 10, less than two weeks out from opening, without the MPA seal. Sources told IndieWire that A24 was prepared to release the film unrated, while another said that the MPA just hadn’t screened the film until late last week. “The Brutalist,” IndieWire can confirm, ultimately received an R rating this week for “strong sexual content, graphic nudity, rape, drug use, and some language.”
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In those terms — sure to be attention-grabbing on a poster — the potential for puritanical noise over a seemingly Oscar-tailored, classy joint like “The Brutalist” is undeserved but also unexpected. The VistaVision-shot film stars Adrien Brody as László Tóth, a Hungarian-Jewish architect who successfully emigrates to America. There, he ends up in Philadelphia under the employment of deep-pocketed industrial power player Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce) while also coping with the arrival of his osteoporosis-ridden wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), from whom he was separated in the Holocaust. There’s a flaccid, drunk-limp dick (a prosthetic) in the first act, some fervid (and futile) handjob-giving in the second, and a bender of heroin-induced sex in the third (as well as an assault).
“The last conversation I had about it was months ago. … It was back in September, and then no one has poked the bear on the issue, so I also haven’t asked,” Brady Corbet told IndieWire in a December interview prior to the MPA rating announcement. Dating back to the film’s Venice premiere in September, the filmmakers had planned on going unrated if the MPA went the way of NC-17.
“I can’t say anything about the MPA that hasn’t already been said, but it could be about anything. It really could be. There are all sorts of films that have been slapped with an NC-17 for no reason. The thing about the ratings system is that if you want to challenge a rating, you have to accept the rating. It’s a very complicated thing where you say, ‘I’m guilty,’ to prove your innocence. It’s a big decision to decide whether or not you want to actually engage with the MPA at all. That really is the issue. Once you engage them, it can become a real problem,” said Corbet.
(According to an MPA spokesperson, filmmakers need to accept with the intent to appeal the rating. If they lose the appeal, they can accept the rating, make cuts to the film, or go out unrated. The ratings board is comprised of non-industry participants with children between 5 and 15 when they start the job; the appeals board is comprised of industry professionals.)
Sources mention that if filmmakers lose the appeals process, filmmakers are still required to make the necessary cuts to satisfy the MPA or accept the initial rating. Certainly, Corbet would not have made any cuts to satisfy the MPA. Recall when Derek Cianfrance’s “Blue Valentine” received an NC-17 in 2010, back when the MPA was still the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), for a scene involving cunnilingus. After The Weinstein Company appealed, no cuts were made, either, but it pointed to a double standard within the ratings board’s history.
“They hate that. They’re very against that. Female pleasure? It’s, like, no,” Mona Fastvold, the writer/producer of “The Brutalist” who is married to Corbet, said when I noted that the board was very “anti-male-on-female sex” with regard to “Blue Valentine.”
Corbet remarked on what he perceives — as his peers do — to be another double standard at the ratings board around sex vs. violence onscreen, where violence passes muster for an R but sex onscreen is, after a certain point, verboten for even the most self-governing of teenage audiences. The last time a filmmaker lit up over an MPA slap of disapproval was Ira Sachs about the NC-17 for “Passages,” which he deemed as censorship.
“’Vox Lux’ opens with a very graphic school shooting, and there was never a discussion about the rating — you can shoot in a face, but a husband goes down on his wife, it’s like, definitely not,” Corbet said, pointing to his 2018 movie starring Natalie Portman as a school shooting survivor who grows up to be a traumatized pop star. “If you want to challenge the MPA, you have to take the rating in the event that they don’t change their mind. That’s the reason we’ve been waffling for months about whether or not to even engage with them. The film is opening in major cinemas, AMC, Regal, and in IMAX, so at this point, [the rating] doesn’t seem at all relevant. … I have been really trying to stay out of it.”
Corbet, 36, got his start as an indie acting icon of the aughts before revealing his first feature film, “The Childhood of a Leader,” in 2015. An early experience starring as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse in Gregg Araki’s 2004 “Mysterious Skin” did not set the ideal tone for Corbet’s future dealings with the ratings board. The film was, yes, shocking for its unflinching depiction of abuse across generations, but neither in luridly bad taste or sexually provocative for its own sake. (A key assault, though, has elements in common with moments of “The Brutalist.”)
“I have a bad history with the MPA because when I was 14, I did a film with Gregg Araki called ‘Mysterious Skin,’ which we ended up releasing unrated. It was unbelievable,” said Corbet. “That film is not graphic at all. It’s very frank, but there’s nothing in the film which is pornographic. I remember that Gregg [Araki], and Joe [Joseph Gordon Levitt, his co-star], and Scott Heim, the writer, we were all challenging the rating. We went through that entire process, and ultimately they still stuck it with an NC-17. I think the film was banned in Australia. It’s a shame because the film has such empathy for victims. Yes, it’s a movie for adults, but that’s what the R rating is for.”
The “Brutalist” sex scene in question, involving Brody and Jones’ characters strung out on heroin later on in the film, was shot entirely with body doubles and essentially directed by Fastvold, who has a background in dance (which she applied to a film they shot last summer, the musical “Ann Lee,” starring Amanda Seyfried as the founder of the Shaker movement).
They used doubles because of “the level of how graphic it is, and also I had a whole day to just shoot that over and over again and figure out the right movement,” Fastvold said. “It’s a funny thing because people are always talking about it as being something that we have to approach sparingly, like, ‘Oh, the sex scene, don’t indulge in sexuality.’ Sexuality says everything about a relationship.” And it says everything that, until this moment, László is basically impotent.
Corbet and Fastvold were a little dazed and dazzled at the Venice Film Festival when “The Brutalist” received drop-to-the-floor rave reviews — then Corbet won Best Director. “We design movies to be divisive,” said Corbet, with Fastvold noting, “We were not expecting this.” (All three of the Corbet-directed movies have gone to Venice, as did director Fastvold’s 2020 queer period romance “The World to Come.”)
“If you go into a process where you want to be well-liked, you will certainly fail. It’s not such a noble thing to try and make something that everyone will give you a thumbs up on because it’s important to challenge audiences and yourself,” Corbet said. “There has to be some aspect of every project that’s a little bit of an experiment. To make something that is in good taste is not very difficult. To make something solid, like ‘ah, a lovely drama, good performances, I liked it very much.’ That I don’t think is very difficult because there’s a formula for that.”
Tipped for major Academy Awards nominations and already shortlisted for Best Original Score and a predicted nomination for Best Actor Adrien Brody, “The Brutalist” could wind up more divisive with real audiences, the actual human beings outside the festival and awards industry bubbles that nurture grand-scale dramas such as these until they pop.
“The idea with this film was to — and with all the films, in a way — is to set it up in a very classical way and then slowly have the project derail into something that’s much more progressive and modern. I’m not interested in homage. I never wanted to make an homage picture to hark back to ‘Once Upon a Time in America,'” Corbet said, seemingly challenging the across-the-board critical comparisons to great American they-don’t-make-em-like-they-used-to epics of the 1980s. “These movies are in our DNA, but for me, this film is much closer to Visconti or a tradition that’s more radical. Visconti’s movies are very interesting because they’re not perfect films. My favorite movies have an unusual, jagged architecture. It’s such a young medium, it’s a century old, but it’s not a very daring moment in time for cinema right now. It’s important that we encourage filmmakers to not just rehash the same thing over and over again.”
One filmmaker also in his DNA and hailing from the early Corbet acting days in Michael Haneke, the scalpel-process “Cache” and “Amour” filmmaker who puts the austere in Austrian. He directed Corbet in a shot-for-shot remake of his own “Funny Games” (2007), and while Haneke is widely known for his control-freak approach to actors — more as pawn pieces meant to hit their marks on a broader board — he and Corbet actually became friends and remain in touch. (Haneke, 82, has retreated into teaching and has not directed a feature since 2017’s “Happy End.”)
“Michael is one of the only filmmakers that I’m still in touch with. Michael and I were very close, and he was also incredibly kind. Unexpected, I think, because of the tone of those films,” said Corbet, who in “Funny Games” plays a sadistic sociopathic killer. “And [Michael is] a professor. He loves young people, and he’s devoted his life to working with young people. … There’s not a lot of room for play, but I think that’s OK. When I was growing up in front of a camera, I wanted one or the other: total freedom, or to be told exactly what to do. Whenever I was in the middle, I felt really lost.”
Another collaborator who influenced Corbet is Lars von Trier, who directed him as a hapless guest at Kirsten Dunst’s pre-apocalyptic wedding in “Melancholia.” “Lars von Trier and Michael represent two ends of the spectrum. With Lars, you’re getting very little to no direction, and there’s something about that that creates a little bit of chaos that he’s pursuant of with his handheld camera. With Michael, it’s ‘take two steps forward, two ingressive breaths, put your hand on the right, open the door with your left.’ In a weird way, learning it has a sort of choreography I quite liked.”
Fastvold wondered if maybe there was “a tiny bit of your Haneke nurturing and influence” in the enterprising way Corbet directed the production to under $10 million, a figure that continues to be touted with amazement in headlines given the scope of the project.
“It’s funny because people always say, ‘Maybe those limitations are what forged the style of the project.’ To a certain extent, that can be true, but it’s also looking at the glass half full,” Corbet said. “To be honest, if we had had more money to make the movie, the movie would’ve been exactly the same except we would have had a more peaceful time making it. I’m extremely rundown. It’s been three years now that we have not had a single weekend or any time off. We’ve made two films back to back because we also shot Mona’s film this summer. Post-production on this film, because of the length, was 22 months. It’s been really physically taxing and grueling. If we’d had a little bit more money, it would mean we could work from 9 to 6 and not work on weekends. That’s the only difference.”
“It’s just allowing everyone involved to have a more normal life,” Fastvold said.
“And pay people what they’re worth. I’m always begging everyone to ‘hang in there. I promise it will be worth it in the end.’ You can only ask for favors for so many years. We’ve made six feature films together, and I think we’re starting to run out of favors,” Corbet said.
As to what audiences will think of the 215-minute (including intermission) epic panorama of the American dream at its most soul-pulverizing (and soul-edifying), Fastvold said, “Maybe we’ll be more divisive when it comes out and relax. Because now we’re suspicious,” given the strong reviews.
“Whether people love or hate something, you really just cannot anticipate that. You have to do what you think is right for the project, full stop,” Corbet said. “You’re never going to be able to please everybody. We’re talking about tens of thousands of strangers. As much as I would love to go into someone’s house and calibrate their television for them, at a certain point, you just have to give it up. You’ve made it for other people, and it becomes a piece of public art. People can paint on it, they can piss on it, they can love it, they can hate it. All of that’s OK. I think because of the way that I grew up, I’ve learned not to take things too personally. If someone gives a film a bad review, it’s just their perspective, and they’re not attacking you personally. They’re doing their job. For me, with the projects, I’m delighted that some people love them, and for me, that’s enough.”
“The Brutalist” opens in select theaters from A24 on Friday, December 20.
Editor’s Note: This article previously stated that an MPA spokesperson disputed that filmmakers have to accept the film’s rating in order to appeal. Corbet’s statement is true, and the story has been updated to reflect that.
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