In ‘The Brutalist,’ Size Matters
In the months leading up to the production of The Brutalist, writer-director Brady Corbet texted his leading actor, Adrien Brody, from Italy, where the filmmaker was struggling to find a location he had envisioned. In a key sequence in the film, Brody, as Jewish Hungarian refugee architect László Toth, travels with his wealthy patron, played by Guy Pearce, to obtain white marble from quarries carved into the mountains of Carrara, Italy. Corbet and his co-writer and romantic partner, Norwegian filmmaker Mona Fastvold, had written the dramatic landscape — where Michelangelo got his marble — into their 168-page script to supply an emotionally resonant backdrop for a dark turning point in the story, but Corbet couldn’t locate a spot for filming until Brody intervened. “I texted him back, ‘I got you,’ ” Brody says. “And I called a friend of mine who actually owns the quarry.” In a few hours, Corbet sent Brody a picture of himself having a glass of wine with Brody’s friend. The result of the serendipitous introduction is a scene that lends The Brutalist a sense of scope and devastation. “It’s otherworldly,” Brody says of the Carrara sequence. “These cavernous, hollowed-out sections where you’re encased in wonders of the Earth, the excavation of that beauty is harsh.”
The Brutalist, which A24 will release Dec. 20 in the U.S., tells the story of a fictional brutalist architect who comes to America after World War II to rebuild his life. The independently financed, less than $10 million epic is the product of the kinds of moments of ingenuity and creative kismet that Corbet encountered in Carrara — and seven years of grinding effort. Shot on film with a running time of three hours and 35 minutes — including an intermission, and in a large-screen format, VistaVision, that was last used for a full feature in 1961 — the movie is a throwback to an earlier era of cinema with a very modern idea at its core: that the American dream is a myth. “The first half of the movie is optimism, and the second half is realism,” Corbet says. “I’m interested in how trauma begets trauma, and the whole movie is about that.”
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Corbet, 36, who started acting at age 11 and appeared in such indie films as Thirteen, Mysterious Skin and Melancholia, has directed two previous features, 2015’s The Childhood of a Leader, about a boy turned authoritarian ruler, and 2018’s Vox Lox, about a pop star in post-Columbine America played by Natalie Portman, both co-written with Fastvold. The Brutalist is his most ambitious film to date, winning Corbet the Silver Lion for best director at the Venice Film Festival in September. “We felt that if Brady was given the opportunity to execute his vision, this could very likely turn him into the next great American filmmaker,” says Brookstreet Pictures president Nick Gordon, one of The Brutalist’s producers. “I think that’s what’s happening right now.”
Brookstreet came aboard the film after CAA sent them Corbet and Fastvold’s script in 2020. “We read it right away and all realized this was the best screenplay to ever come into our company,” Gordon says. “Nothing about it screamed commercial in today’s indie landscape, but we just knew we had to figure out how to get this made. When we watched [Corbet’s] earlier films, we could tell he was the perfect filmmaker for the moment.”
There’s an undeniable similarity between directing a movie and designing a building. As Fastvold says, “You employ 250 to 300 people, and they come together to realize the dream you had.” Corbet and Fastvold, who met on Fastvold’s 2014 film The Sleepwalker, brought together complementary skills as writers to hone Corbet’s idea, one that links the experience of the artist and the immigrant. “Mona has a great talent for just getting on with it in a way that I really don’t,” Corbet says. “I’m obsessive, and I have a hard time moving on from something until I am totally, totally happy with it. If we hadn’t met, I can imagine myself having been somebody who just never finished anything ever.” On The Brutalist, the couple allowed themselves to write as if money and logistics would not be concerns, Fastvold says. “I want the story to be as expansive and as ambitious and as operatic as we want it to be, and then figure it out later,” she says.
It’s possible to read Pearce’s character in The Brutalist, a mercurial industrialist whose patronage of László’s art is revealed to be a dark bargain, as a version of some of the kinds of fickle financiers whom an indie filmmaker might encounter while building a career. “Making movies is hard, and convincing people to part with money to make something that’s bold or ambitious and then fighting for it to stay that way, it’s complicated,” says Fastvold. “So, yeah, the writing process felt a bit like an exorcism.”
In the case of The Brutalist, the filmmakers say, their relationship with their producers was a positive one — Brookstreet was joined by Kaplan Morrison, ALP, Budapest-based Proton Cinema and Intake Films. A first attempt to set up the film in 2021 with a cast including Joel Edgerton, Mark Rylance and Marion Cotillard fell apart amid the expense of new COVID protocols, however, and when Corbet ultimately shot in the spring of 2023 in Hungary and Italy, it was with Brody and Pearce, and with Felicity Jones in the role of László’s wife, Erzsébet.
Brody’s casting feels, in a way, fated. His mother, photographer Sylvia Plachy, and grandparents moved to New York fleeing the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, and his Oscar-winning role as a Polish Holocaust survivor in 2002’s The Pianist (read more here) has thematic and practical similarities to his character in The Brutalist. “Because of Adrien’s heritage, talent and his grace, I felt that he had exactly what I needed for the character to really break your heart,” Corbet says. “Vulnerability in a man between 40 and 50, it’s pretty hard to capture. I needed somebody who still had that fragility, and that’s something that he just naturally possesses.” Brody says he “felt very, very well suited for the role. I knew what to give. I witnessed the hardships my family faced being immigrants and being foreign and how difficult it was, particularly for my grandfather, who had quite a thick Hungarian accent. There were enormous challenges that they faced in order for me to have my path.”
Corbet cast Pearce as “a man of a certain age who still had real virility and was sexy.” The director sees contemporary resonances in Pearce’s character’s rapacious cruelty in both the president-elect and in the sexual abuse allegations against Sean “Diddy” Combs. “The level of degradation and abuse that’s been reported in the P. Diddy case, the question is, why would anyone do such a terrible, terrible thing?” Corbet says. “And the answer is very simple. It’s just because they can. I am sure that there’s some real fancy tickled when you go, ‘Oh, no one else can get away with this, but I can.’ “
László’s wife, Erzsébet, weakened by near starvation during the war, emerges as a character of surprising strength in the movie. “Of course there were a lot of women who were doting spouses of these brilliant male artists,” Fastvold says. “But more common, I believe, were these marriages of equals, intellectuals who really enjoyed each other’s company and understood what the other person was doing.” Corbet had known Jones since he was a teenager, and they almost made a film together. “I love casting in a way that’s very unexpected,” he says. “And for me, I felt like no one would see her coming.”
As an actor himself, Corbet says it’s easy for him to empathize with anyone in front of a camera. “Sometimes it’s clear that someone needs a break,” he says. “Sometimes it’s clear that someone just needs to do 20 more takes. So much of the job is reading the room.” On The Brutalist, the cast was shooting an average of seven to 10 often-dialogue-heavy pages a day. “To try to make something perfect usually requires pushing people to their very limits,” Corbet says. “I always say, ‘Look, I know you’re uncomfortable, but today is today and cinema is forever. If you can’t do it anymore, let me know. But my opinion is that we don’t have it yet.’ It’s very rare that someone says, ‘No, I don’t want to do it again.’ “
The Brutalist succeeds or fails depending on whether the audience believes that László is in fact a great architect, a master of the brutalist style that emerged during the 1950s with a focus on minimalist construction and bare building materials. As Corbet says, “It’s difficult to represent extraordinary talent.” The task of creating that illusion fell largely to production designer Judy Becker, who had to source and construct László’s creations, including a huge, emotionally freighted building Pearce’s Harrison Lee Van Buren commissioned, known as The Institute. Becker, a fan of brutalism who had worked on the mid-century-set Todd Haynes movie Carol, had been wanting to work with Corbet since his first film and had her agent arrange a call when she heard about The Brutalist. Over bagels and lox, Becker presented Corbet with a design for The Institute that referenced László’s past in Nazi concentration camps and won the job with her vision. Becker also built an elegant library in Van Buren’s rural Pennsylvania home, which is revealed in the movie as a kind of magic trick this anonymous immigrant has conjured. “There was one mansion that was right for us to shoot in and only one,” Becker says of a grand house in Hungary that the filmmakers had scouted as the Van Buren house. “The only room that could have been the library was this glass winter garden, three walls of glass, two straight and then this little rounded area. It was great, except it was all glass. And I was like, ‘What are we going to do about making this into a library?’ I was staring at it, and I just thought, ‘Ah, we’re going to build these wooden floor-to-ceiling shelves that are enclosed, and it’s going to be forced perspective.’ ” On the spot, Becker sketched her idea. “It was such a pure, simple, beautiful touch,” Corbet says. “Judy dared to be truly minimal. Minimalism is really, really hard. There’s nothing to hide behind.”
Despite its use of minimalist design, The Brutalist traffics in maximalism, from its extra-long running time to its use of the large-format VistaVision cameras. Cinematographer Lol Crawley, who had shot Corbet’s previous two films, had to execute the reveal of the library, as well as the film’s sweeping Carrara sequence, all while working in the little used format. “There’s huge scope to what we’re talking about, and thematically there’s a maximalism,” Crawley says, “but also combined with an intimate portrayal of these characters. So we’re contrasting photographically between these large VistaVision images and many sequences of handheld.” There are fewer than 10 cameras left that can shoot in VistaVision, which Alfred Hitchcock deployed in films like Vertigo and North by Northwest, and only one that syncs sound. The format is ideal for architecture, Corbet says, because the camera can be physically close to a structure, capturing all the details, the grains of wood and the minerality of concrete, and at the same time capture an entire building inside the frame.
Another challenge of the film was how to represent brutalism sonically, which Corbet achieved with the help of Britain-born experimental musician Daniel Blumberg, who incorporated brass and piano into the score, evoking the 1950s with jazz instrumentation. “There’s a lot of music in the film that folks would probably not even realize is music,” Corbet says. There are trumpets playing bird sounds and audio of news events like presidential debates layered within the score, for instance. “This was a way of encapsulating the atmosphere of the era so that even when you aren’t seeing something, you are always hearing it.” The sound, Corbet says, is part of what gives The Brutalist its sweep. “If anybody actually watched the movie with the sound off, they would see that the movie visually is not that big because we couldn’t afford to make it that big. It’s actually voiceover dialed up to nine or 10. It’s music dialed up to 11. It is design and effects and foley and all of these things fighting for space.”
Since the movie’s triumphant premiere at Venice, Corbet has braced himself for feedback about some of The Brutalist‘s most unorthodox choices, like the intermission. “I have a hard time sitting for more than two hours,” he says. “It’s a communal experience, and I think it’s an exciting one, but the idea isn’t for it to be pretentious. It comes from trying to give people a very well-rounded experience.” He is also anticipating his movie being divisive, what with its optimistic first half and shattering conclusion. “Of course, you want people to connect with it, but if everybody likes something, it’s not usually a great sign,” Corbet says. “It’s a little like, ‘Oh, I guess we checked a few too many boxes.’ It’s important for a work of art to be something which is at times inviting but also at times confrontational.”
The movie’s second half, in which László and Erzsébet’s vision of a new life in America has crumbled, is its most confronting section. “The fact that they choose to leave the U.S., it’s the one thing that I never see in movies,” Corbet says. “In the end, the place has chewed them up and spat them out.”
This story first appeared in a December stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
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