Art and commerce clash in Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist. The filmmaker, who battled for years to realise his vision for the epic drama, can relate personally — as he tells Screen.
Great art evolves at its own pace. The Brutalist took Brady Corbet seven years to make, and in the same way that his fictitious architect Laszlo Toth demonstrates unbreakable resolve to bring a tortuous architecture commission to life, nothing was going to stand in the director and co-writer’s way: not the pandemic, not his leading lady’s pregnancy, and absolutely not the entreaties of financiers.
For the record, Corbet appreciates the support of his backers — “some private equity people we’d worked with before” — on his third feature and American Dream cautionary tale. Fair play to them, given that the 215-minute run time with 15-minute intermission and rarefied subject matter must have made the project seem like the mother of all return-on-investment longshots.
Their faith was repaid. The Brutalist — a US-UK-Hungary co-production from Brookstreet Pictures, Kaplan Morrison, Andrew Lauren Productions, Proton Cinema and Intake Films — premiered at Venice, earning Corbet the Silver Lion for directing and immediately thrusting the drama into the awards conversation. The New York Film Critics Circle and other groups have more recently anointed it best film and Adrien Brody best actor, with a number of Critics Choice Awards nominations also in the bag.
A24 came on board the film as US distributor on the eve of its debut in Venice last year, and Universal Pictures releases it internationally from mid-January after Protagonist Pictures licensed international rights to Focus Features.
However, the first thing the actor-turned-director wants to talk about are financiers who have crossed his path in the past. He does so with an eye-rolling exasperation that all independent filmmakers will find relatable. It also explains what informed the central relationship of The Brutalist between post-war Hungarian émigré Toth and his wealthy US patron Harrison Lee Van Buren, played by Guy Pearce.
“On this movie, we had great partners that were there for the right reason,” Corbet says from his New York home in early December. “But I’ve had experiences in the past that were awful. I have absolutely worked with real sadists. The number of dinners that I’ve had with oligarchs… it’s not exactly what I would have expected or anticipated of my future creative life.”
People with money like to collect things, and the filmmaker says the idea of possession is a key theme in The Brutalist, his third feature after The Childhood Of A Leader (2015) and Vox Lux (2018). Toth, an established architect in Hungary who has survived the Second World War, arrives in the US in 1947 with nothing. He becomes acquainted with Van Buren, who persuades him to design a vast hilltop monument/institute in honour of his late mother.
The initially cordial mutual respect curdles over time as schedule delays and changes of heart lead to an agonising process, before a sequence in the Carrara marble quarry in Italy where the frustrated rich man attempts to assert control in a shocking act of sexual violence.
“The whole movie is about this idea of possession, and collectors wanting to possess not just the art but the artist,” says Corbet. “With Carrara, you’re shooting in this place where people are trying to possess a material that should not be possessed, to line our bathrooms and kitchens. In 500 years all that material is gone, those mountains will not exist. It was a place that was historically rich and offered this extraordinary visual allegory for what’s happening at that point in the story.”
Mining the truth
Corbet’s insistence that the $10m production shoot on location in the very quarry that provided the raw materials for Michelangelo’s Renaissance Pietà sculpture in Vatican City concerned potential financiers during the development of the film. Travelling to Italy would be expensive, they said. Could he just shoot in a granite quarry? “I was like, ‘Well, you know, it’s not quite the same and I think it’s very important for every frame to be imbued with meaning and thought and ideas.’”
Corbet and his wife and co-writer Mona Fastvold were intrigued by Brutalism, the architectural movement that emerged in 1950s reconstruction projects in the UK and adorned buildings with exposed concrete and brick. They wanted to tell a story that linked the post-war design style with post-war trauma and the immigrant experience.
The way the co-writers see it, the polarising reactions to Brutalism mirror the way immigrants are perceived. They met the late architectural historian Jean-Louis Cohen, and Corbet read Marcel Breuer And A Committee Of Twelve Plan A Church, Hilary Thimmesh’s 2011 account of the construction of Saint John’s Abbey in Minnesota by the Hungary-born Bauhaus-trained architect.
The filmmakers brought The Brutalist to the European Film Market in February 2020, days before the world began to shut down due to the pandemic. “It was very complicated,” recalls Corbet. “It’s very difficult to put the jack back in the box once you’ve exposed a project.” The filmmakers eventually partnered with their financiers, who stuck by them throughout the process, and “twisted a few arms to make an international deal happen”.
Corbet shot the film’s epilogue in Venice in September 2020 and as production prepared to move to Poland in December, that country closed its borders amid the Covid crisis. “I’m quite accustomed to having the plug pulled,” declares the filmmaker, “but I’m also accustomed to getting things back on track. I was pretty relentless.” On another occasion, Corbet waited for his leading lady when Felicity Jones (who plays Erzsebet, Toth’s wife who suffered in the camps and joins her husband in the US several years later) announced she was pregnant.
Principal photography resumed in 2023 in Hungary, with Budapest and the surrounding countryside doubling as 1950s Philadelphia and rural Pennsylvania. Corbet worked closely with Oscar- and Bafta-nominated production designer Judy Becker, an essential collaborator on the film, who built a giant facade and practical models “literally the size of my living room” to bring Toth’s Pennsylvania monument to life. “She’s a huge Brutalist architecture fan, and she had done some of the most iconic movies set in the mid-century in America like Carol, I’m Not There and Brokeback Mountain,” he says.
“Judy wasn’t scared off by her small budget,” Corbet notes with an impish titter. “She was accustomed to working with small budgets. She prioritises great projects over cash.”
Corbet, a devout cinephile with huge admiration for the European arthouse sensibility, shot in VistaVision, a higher-resolution 35mm variant that Paramount Pictures engineers had created in 1954 for the premiere of White Christmas at Radio City Music Hall and became largely obsolete in the 1960s with the rise of CinemaScope and 70mm.
The film stock weighed hundreds of pounds and post-production was predictably difficult. Corbet needed to scan in 6k, and many facilities struggled to accommodate his needs. “This was not a Christopher Nolan movie so we were not always in the most high-profile facilities,” the filmmaker says with a laugh. “We were mostly editing the movie in basements all over the world.”
Corbet is full of admiration for his cast, which includes Joe Alwyn as Van Buren’s son, the oafish Harry. Brody — whose mother, photographer Sylvia Plachy, was born in Budapest before she fled the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 — and Jones both learned Hungarian well enough to speak at length on screen.
“The roles were very, very challenging, because it’s many monologues [for all the lead cast],” says Corbet. “With Felicity and Adrien, it’s more obvious why it was difficult. I mean, if you do a Hungarian accent incorrectly, you end up sounding like Bela Lugosi.”
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