‘They Want to Own the Artist’: Inside the Making of ‘The Brutalist’
Step into the lobby of the midtown New York offices of A24, the film production company that’s earned its reputation as an auteur-friendly studio and distributor. Walk away from the tidy receptionist’s desk and through the tastefully decorated lobby, past the long, slab-like conference table and the surprisingly comfortable couches and the small glass coffee tables. As you approach the large picture windows that offer a lovely view of Herald Square, look to your left. What appears to be a light-wood wall panel is actually a door, leading into a semi-secret library. The entire room is lined with backlit bookshelves, most of which house a collection of a hundred-plus film-related books, omnibus comic collections, and oversized tomes on everything from modern design to postmodernist painters; the rest of the shelves are filled with Blu-Rays and bound copies of scripts. It’s an introverted, Dimes Square hipster-cinephile’s wet dream.
This is where you will find Brady Corbet, former actor, contemporary filmmaker, and current strong contender for the title of ambitious American cinema’s savior. He is, by his own admission, exhausted from doing nonstop press since the end of summer. The first time we spoke in September, his new film — The Brutalist — had just made it’s U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival the evening before, a little less than a month after it won him the Best Director prize at Venice. It’s now the beginning of December, and he’s still at it. His cowriter and longtime professional/personal partner Mona Fastvold is putting in a lunch order for both of them with a publicist, and will return to join him in a moment. But for now, Corbet is staring intensely at the bookshelves attached to the walls. Not the books themselves — he doesn’t pull out or page through any of them. He’s just hovering in front of the shelves, silently eyeballing the decor, sizing everything up, nodding approvingly to himself. You imagine a host of camera angles whirling through his head.
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What László Tóth, the Hungarian emigre and world-class architect played by Adrien Brody, and who sits squarely at the center of The Brutalist, would think of this room is anyone’s guess. But it’s a library, after all, that turns Tóth’s fortune around after he arrives in the U.S. after World War II. The son of a wealthy industrialist hires him to renovate his father’s book-filled den as a surprise gift. The sleek, chic, modernist result initially throws the rich man into a rage. Then, filled with admiration for this person who has turned a simple space into a something transcendental, the patron hires Tóth to oversee construction on a community center in the modest burg of Doylestown, Pennsylvania. The architect decides that this building will not just be a work for hire. It will be his Great American Masterpiece, done in the brutalist style. And for the remainder of Corbet’s own Great American Masterpiece, we watch as art and commerce beat each other bloody, both love and violence leave psychic scars on all involved, and Tóth slowly loses his mind.
Any resemblance between the struggles of a visionary who designs buildings for 20th century pharaohs and that of a modern-day filmmaker aiming for brilliance in an industry in thrall to the bottom line is, of course, not a coincidence. But The Brutalist is a movie about much, much more than just a single architect or the elaborate settling of scores. Clocking in at close to four hours and channeling the scope, the scale and the mercurial moodiness of those 1970s epics made by Coppola, Cimino and Bertolucci — complete with overture and intermission — this drama digs deep into the American immigrant experience, the agonies and ecstasies of the creative urge, the class structures that breed class warfare, the fallout of those who survived the worst of WWII and a lot more. It’s a film that Corbet and Fastvold toiled for nearly seven years to make, and like its hero, the director came close to breaking more than once while trying to realize it into existence.
“I mean, every movie that gets made is a miracle,” Corbet says, as Fastvold returns and sits down next to him. “Even bad movies are miracles. Because the sheer amount of keys that have to turn for something to be greenlit is just…” The two exchange a look and simultaneously sigh. “Never mind a movie about architects.”
“With a really limited budget… ” Fastvold chimes in.
“… And made in a style that hasn’t been used in decades,” Corbet adds. (More on that in a second.)
“Normally, we are very practical,” Fastvold says. “I think that filmmakers of our generation have to be practical. But I remember when we were approaching what we wanted to do here, there was a point where I went, ‘I want to just have fun with this. Let’s write this as big and expansive as possible, and let’s not even talk about how we’re going to execute it. We’ll figure it out later. Right now, let’s just let it be as big and as rich as we want it to be.’ Then, later, we had to figure out how to realize what we’d come up with, and…” Both she and Corbet laugh. “That was not, um, easy.”
It’s not as if they didn’t have experience making big-swing movies with big ideas and scant budgets. Corbet started his career as an actor when he was a kid, logging in work in big studio films (Thunderbirds) and popular TV shows (24). His passion lay in the more complicated, challenging international arthouse fare and the darker side of the Amerindie street, much like the kind he devoured and obsessed over as underage cine-omnivore. A colleague remembers meeting Corbet when he was at the Venice Film Festival in 2004 with Mysterious Skin, Gregg Araki’s dreamlike, boundary-pushing drama about two young men dealing with the aftermath of sexual abuse. His castmates were all leaving, since their screening was done, but Corbet planned to stick around for another few days on his own dime — the new Claire Denis film was screening, and there was no fucking way he was going to miss it! He was 16.
Corbet eventually decided that, after getting the chance to see how directors like Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier worked on set, he really wanted to be behind the camera rather than in front of it. This was around the time that a mutual friend of his and Fastvold’s, the actor Christopher Abbott, introduced the two of them. Like Corbet, the Norwegian filmmaker had started out as a performer, and they shared the same taste in edgy, less mainstream fare. The two began writing together, starting with her 2014 film The Sleepwalker (Corbet also has a part in it), and then on his 2015 directorial debut The Childhood of a Leader. The story of a diplomat’s son growing up in France at the end of WWI — and who will eventually turn into a Mussolini-like fascist — it’s a dark, unapologetically dour and ambiguous character study that nonetheless takes its period-piece trappings very seriously. The movie is also exhilarating, and clearly striving to be more than your average independent film made for the price of salted peanuts. His sensibility was already there from the jump.
By the time they began working on Vox Lux, his 2018 drama about a pop star forged in the fires of a public tragedy, Corbet and Fastvold were also a couple; they’d soon become parents as well. “I think, because writing together was how we got to know each other, that’s why we’re able to make films together,” he says. “If it had been the other way around, where we were a couple that then started working on projects… maybe it wouldn’t have been so functional.” They also shared a mutual love of architecture, and each have architects in their family: Fastvold’s grandfather designed buildings in Norway, and Corbet’s uncle studied at Frank Lloyd Wright’s “desert laboratory” Taliesin West in Arizona. Neither can remember who first suggested the idea of doing a movie about an architect, though they both remember an early key point of reference.
“This is St. John’s Abbey,” Corbet says, pulling out his phone and showing a shot of the modernist cathedral that Marcel Breuer designed and built in Collegeville, Minnesota. “He started working on this in the 1950s, and finished it in 1961….”
“What’s interesting to me, besides the beauty of this building,” Fastvold notes, “is that Breuer is this Jewish emigré, who comes to America from Hungary after fleeing the Holocaust, and one of his first commissioned projects is a church in the midwest.”
“There’s this great book from a very small press, called Marcel Breuer and a Committee of 12 Build a Church,” Corbet adds. “We’d already discussed doing something on the relationship between postwar psychology and postwar architecture. Then we came across this memoir from a monk who was there, and you can detect certain inferences of the bigotry that Breuer was facing while he was doing this. But no one is saying the quiet part out loud. And no one is saying the quiet part out loud in our film, either.”
Neither Corbet nor Fastvold were interested in making a biopic — “Virtual histories are a slightly more honest contract with viewers,” Corbet declares, “because otherwise, you’re a slave to the details: ‘So was that really how it went down with Napoleon?! I don’t think so!'” Instead, they began to fashion an amalgamation. László Tóth has a little bit of Breuer in him, as well as generous amounts of Louis Kahn, Paul Rudolph, and Charles-édouard Jeanneret, a.k.a. “Le Corbusier.” When they started sending their script around to actors, one of the first people who read it happen to see a personal connection to it as well.
“I think they knew about my Hungarian background,” Adrien Brody says, a few days after my second interview with Corbet and Fastvold. “But they didn’t know my mother’s backstory. My mom, Sylvia [Plachy], is a Hungarian immigrant who fled to America in the 1950s. She later became a major photographer in the 1960s; the Museum of Modern Art has her in their collection. And I just kept thinking, ‘So much of László’s story is her story as well.’ When I was reading it, I was hearing my grandfather’s voice. The entire idea of someone coming to America to be free, to be an artist, and then experiencing the difference between the fantasy of the American dream and the reality of it — I get to have the life I have today because she lived through that.
“But even without that personal aspect,” he adds, “I still would have gone after this movie no matter what. You could already tell on the page that Brady wanted to do this as big as possible, no matter how much money they had or didn’t have, and that he and Mona wrote the kind of epic movie that I grew up watching in the New York in the ’70s. Those films are part of why I wanted to be an actor. No one dares to make them any more. And they were actually doing it.”
Or at the very least, Corbert and Fastvold were trying their damnedest to do it. Early on, a line producer told them that, in order to make The Brutalist the way they wanted to, they could probably cut corners and still pull it off for $28 million. They countered by saying their budget was closer to a third of that, all the better to retain creative control. Anything less than final cut was a dealbreaker. Plus Corbet was intent on not just shooting on 35mm celluloid but filming it in VistaVision, an old-school widescreen format that had not been used since 1961, when Marlon Brando directed his Western One-Eyed Jacks. He felt that, because the process had been used so much during the 1950s, it would be a shortcut to evoking the era portrayed in the movie. (“You’d get footage back,” he gushed, “and I’d find myself going, ‘Oh my god, this looks exactly like North by Northwest!'”)
So, armed with a list of demands and a commitment from crew members and several actors including Brody, Corbet and Fastvold began going hat in hand to “15 to 20 production companies and financiers that would invest in a movie of that size and budget. It’s called ‘exposing’ the film to potential money folks.” Corbet turns to his partner. “And when did we expose the project?”
“March of 2020,” she replies. “Literally the week Covid shut down New York.”
“And once you’ve exposed the film to buyers, it’s extremely hard to reintroduce it to them years later,” he notes. “Pandemic or no pandemic, they still think something is wrong with it, or else it would have been made by now. We really shot ourselves in the foot. There was a lot of ‘Yes, we know you’ve read it. But read it again.‘”
Eventually, they were able to cobble together just enough to get The Brutalist going. (The final budget would end up being $10 million, or roughly 1/20th of the cost of Joker: Folie à Deux.) Fastvold worked as assistant director. Corbet and his longtime cinematographer Lol Crawley were able to get VistaVision cameras and still not bankrupt themselves. The trade-offs came in terms of what they could and could not shoot with them; Corbet recalls telling his collaborator that they could include the floor or the ceiling in a particular shot. It would be too expensive to dress both, however. “I’d say to Judy [Becker, the legendary production designer], ‘For this close-up, we can use leather,'” he says. “‘For the ultra-wide shot, we’re ok using pleather.'”
Both Brody and Felicity Jones, who plays László’s wife Erzsébet — he eventually brings her and her niece over from Hungary to America — had become unavailable during the intervening years, then become available again just in time to start shooting. For the other major role of Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr., the patrician businessman who hires Tóth to build the community center and proceeds to make his life hell for close to a decade, Corbet reached out to Guy Pearce; affecting a mid-Atlantic accent, a stiff posture and the sense that absolute financial power over a person corrupts both parties absolutely, the Australian actor gives what may be the single greatest performance of his entire career.
“He’s a bit of a cross between Rockefeller and Salieri,” Pearce says over a separate Zoom call. What’s surprising, he adds, is not that the villain of The Brutalist would be a melding of a real-life industrialist and the Mozart-envying composer from Amadeus. It’s that you could glean those inspirations from how the character was written. “Have you ever read a great book — like, a really great novel — and you can tell what someone is like from the construction of the sentences describing them? That was the script that Brady and Mona gave me. And even though we shot this really quickly, and for little money, Brady never made you feel rushed. If you wanted a rehearsal or needed another shot at something, he’d go, ‘Sure.’
“He said something really interesting to me,” Pearce recalls. ”It’s not enough for some people to own the art. They want to own the artist as well.’ And I just felt myself going, yes. I don’t just get what you’re going for. I know what you mean.”
When this quote is mentioned to Corbet, he quickly notes that “when we wrote the screenplay, it was as much from a place of rage as it was from passion. I mean, Mona has described the process as something close to an exorcism. We’ve had experiences where we’ve been exploited, and there’s a real anger to it that’s being channeled into this. I mean, there’s an act of violence near the end…” He stops himself and glances at his partner. Fastvold finishes his thought.
“That moment was always in the script,” she says, referring to what has proven to be the most divisive scene of The Brutalist. “It’s the representation of that quote you just mentioned. And it was cathartic to write it because it’s so operatic. But it had to be operatic. It had to be horrific.”
“It had to be direct,” Corbet agrees. “It couldn’t be a half measure, but then again, that’s the whole movie. You know the whole appeal of brutalism for us as a style is… it’s a lot of minimalism.” He glances around at the bookshelves, as if appreciating their tastefulness in form and functionality. Then he opens his arms wide. “But there’s a lot of maximalism in it as well. I love minimalism and I love maximalism. I just personally don’t like the in between, in any medium.”
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