‘The Brutalist’: Venice Winner Brady Corbet Opens Up About the Tireless Seven-Year Journey Behind His Buzzy Epic

A monumental triumph of independent filmmaking is coming to a cinema near you. Brady Corbet’s 3.5-hour-long, seven-years-in-the-making historical epic The Brutalist finally secured a U.S. distribution deal over the weekend. The movie, which won Corbet the Venice Film Festival‘s best director prize Saturday, will be released by indie tastemaker A24 sometime later this year with a major awards season campaign expected to follow.

The buzz around The Brutalist has been building into a roar ever since its first press screening in Italy a little over a week ago. First came the curious talk surrounding the 10-minute intermission that bisects the movie — a commercially challenging choice that nonetheless feels integral to its construction. Then there were excited comparisons to Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, or favorable references to the works of László Nemes and Jonathan Glazer. Awards season pundits, meanwhile, have already projected the film’s star, Adrien Brody, deep into an effective campaign for his second Oscar — whether he realizes it yet or not. And for movie buffs, this factoid: The Brutalist is the first American movie since Marlon Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks (1961) to be shot entirely in VistaVision, a beautiful retro format that reportedly required the production to transport 26 reels of 70mm film stock, weighing some 300 pounds, across the Atlantic for the Venice world premiere. Appearing at his first press conference in Italy last week, Corbet was rocking shades, gravitas and scruff like a latter-day Rainer Werner Fassbinder. He was also palpably emotional, evincing the film-world equivalent of a prize fighter moments after finishing the title bout that almost broke him — triumphant, punch-drunk, adrenalized and defiant.

Brody stars in The Brutalist as László Tóth, a Jewish Hungarian architect of the Bauhaus who survives the devastation of World War II and emigrates to the United States, hoping to rebuild his life and career. Initially forced to toil in poverty, he soon wins a contract from a mysterious and wealthy client, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), which shapes the course of the next 30 years of his life. Felicity Jones co-stars as Tóth’s wife Erzsébet, while Joe Alwyn plays the industrialist’s mercurial son. Corbet co-wrote the film with his wife, Norwegian filmmaker and actress Mona Fastvold. Raffey Cassidy, Stacy Martin, Emma Laird, Isaach De Bankolé, and Alessandro Nivola co-star.

Summing up the film in a rave review from Venice, The Hollywood Reporter‘s chief film critic David Rooney wrote: “Brody pours himself into the character with bristling intelligence and internal fire, holding nothing back as he viscerally conveys both exultant highs and gutting sorrows… The Brutalist is a massive film in every sense, closing with a resonant epilogue that illustrates how art and beauty reach out from the past, transcending space and time to reveal a freedom of thought and identity often denied its makers.”

The Brutalist‘s Italian debut was something of a homecoming for Corbet. A former child star with unmistakably high-brow inclinations, as a young actor he went out of his way to land parts in projects from leading European auteurs like Michael Haneke (Funny Games), Lars Von Trier (Melancholia), Olivier Assayas (Clouds of Sils Maria) and Ruben Ostlund (Force Majeure). His first film as a director, The Childhood of a Leader, announced him as a talent to watch at the 2015 Venice festival, winning the event’s best director and best debut film awards. Loosely inspired by a Jean-Paul Sartre short story, the film depicts the early youth of a future fascist strongman in the wake of World War I. He followed this with 2018’s Vox Lux, a musical drama starring Natalie Portman that examines the nature of pop superstardom. That film somewhat divided critics, but it continues to be reexamined and reassessed. 

THR sat down with Corbet at Venice’s Hotel Excelsior the morning of The Brutalist‘s world premiere. The film will receive its North American premiere at the Toronto Film Festival on Tuesday.

What was the personal origin of your interest in The Brutalist‘s subject matter? 

Well, what I’m interested in is how we got here — how we arrived at this moment right now. All of my films are historical movies. Vox Lux was a more recent history. The film was made in 2018, but it was set between 1999 and 2017 very much on purpose, so viewers watching it in 2018 would receive it as a recent history as opposed to a contemporary movie. My approach was heavily influenced by my favorite author, W.G. Sebald. For fans of his work, it’s very easy to access these movies, because they are virtual histories. Sebald created fictions that feel like very authentic accounts of the past — as a way of accessing the past.

I grew up working in a used and rare bookshop called Glenwood Books in my hometown in Colorado. And when I discovered Sebald as a teenager in 2005 or 2006 — several years after he died — it was like something cracked wide open for me. V.S. Naipaul was another influence. The first part of the movie is called “The Enigma of Arrival,” which is named after a Naipaul book that I really love. He’s become a slightly controversial figure in recent years, because at the end of his life he was quite senile and he made a lot of disparaging comments about female writers — stuff, which, obviously, I’m not on board with as the son of a single mother and the father of a young woman. But Naipaul, like Sebard, explored conflicts in the Congo by representing Africa by means of a fictional character set in a very specific place and period. As a filmmaker, I think that that is just a more honest contract with the viewer than doing a straight-up biopic, because, instead of everyone constantly wondering how much you made up, they know from the outset that this is a fictional film, but one that is closely related to many real people. So, it’s a way that the viewer can access the past but let go of the fact checker inside of themselves. You know, everybody naturally has that, myself included, and it’s not helpful. So, this is a way of really being overwhelmed and consumed by historical events without wondering whether the actor got, like, the real person’s accent right. You know what I mean? 

Absolutely. So why the Brutalist architectural movement and this period in particular?

There’s a few things I’m very interested in. The film is about how the artistic experience and immigrant experience march in lockstep, which is to say that, in general, if someone moves into a suburban town in America and they don’t look like everybody else — because of the color of their skin or because of their beliefs or traditions — everybody wants them to get the fuck out. With Brutalism in the 1950s, when people were erecting these monuments, many people wanted them torn down immediately. Now, there is a very interesting thing which has been happening and I don’t know how much people are following it. I’ve been researching this area for the past decade, so I’ve been paying very close attention. Donald Trump is on a mission to have all of the Brutalist bureaucratic buildings in Washington torn down — and I think he will pursue this if he’s elected for a second term. While he was the sitting president, he had a tour created that was a celebration of all of the neoclassical architecture in Washington D.C. He regularly went on a diatribe about how he wanted all of “the ugly, horrible, modern buildings” torn down. (In December 2020 at the tail end of his term, Trump signed an executive order that attempted to cement neo-classical designs as the Federal government’s officially preferred architectural style, specifically taking aim at Brutalist and Deconstructivist buildings — all part of a plan he dubbed “Make Federal Buildings Beautiful Again”). 

If you examine Trump’s plan with any kind of historical perspective, you very quickly discover that his concept of architecture is very close to Hitler’s and his relationship with Albert Speer. Now, Hitler killed 6 million people. Donald Trump hasn’t done that yet. So, you can’t equate them. However, the reason that so many of us are so concerned is because this rhetoric is very, very close to Mussolini, Hitler, or Viktor Orban. 

So, for me, Brutalist architecture is representative of something that people do not understand and that they want torn down and ripped away. And I think it’s just really fascinating. This movement all came out of the Bauhaus — Marcel Breuer, Paul Rudolph, or Louis Kahn, even though Louis’ buildings are a very different style — their work was all wrestling with what the entire world had been through in the first half of the century. So, the film is about how post-war psychology shaped post-war architecture. Even many of the materials that were used to construct these buildings — a lot of it was developed for wartime. These buildings would not exist if it were not for the trauma that so much of the world went through. 

For a film called The Brutalist, it’s interesting how little Brutalist architecture we actually see in the film. 

I try to remain relatively agnostic in the way that I live my life. I’m not a fan of very much. I’m not a fan of architecture. I see it and I’m fascinated by how it shapes our lives. And I sometimes appreciate it, and other times — well, you know, I live in New York and like a lot of people, I’m watching with dismay as these awful highrises go up — I struggle with it and I grapple with it. I have a little girl and we have conversations about what is good architecture and bad architecture. We agree about some things and we disagree about others. It’s important for her to have her own opinion, because I don’t want her to have a parent who is just telling her what to think. Obviously, there’s a very good chance that I’m wrong and that she’s right. Similarly, I try to make films in a way where they’re not propaganda movies. We’re representing something, but we are not telling people how to feel. I think most viewers nowadays are so accustomed to the other type of cinema that they almost don’t know what to do with a movie like this. They come to the conclusion and they wonder, well, what was the intention? The intention is really for the viewer to grapple with their own point of view. That’s how they are designed. 

Let’s talk about the film language you devised to tell this story. There are many aspects to it — the tumult and desperation of escaping Europe, the almost primordial economic momentum of post-war America, and the brutality, grace, and solemnity of Brutalist architecture. All of this felt reflected in the cinematic language and the score.

Yes, that’s right. 

Can you talk about the choices you made and how you achieved this? It blew my mind, frankly. 

So here’s the thing: It’s really difficult to represent architecture on screen because it’s inanimate. If you speak to any cinematographer or most filmmakers, they’ll tell you the most difficult thing to do is to shoot a still life. For example, if we take our table (Corbet gestures to the table between us where two espressos are sitting). If we were to put a frame around this table, we would instantly be like, “Something about this feels unnatural.” And it’s a weird thing because we didn’t set it up this way, but something about it feels staged as soon as you start trying to shoot it. So you start moving the glasses around. (Corbet rearranges our coffees). But it still feels fake. So I think I learned very early on that we couldn’t shoot architecture. We had to represent architecture. We did that with the score. We did that with the film format. With VistaVision, its field of view is such that you can be right up against the corner of a six-story building, and with a regular 50-millimeter lens — which is what you normally would shoot a human face with — you can see from the top of the building to the very bottom. So we had this idea that for brutalism, there should never be anything ornamental about the score. It should be both minimalist and maximalist. But it also had to represent movement in a way. And it was predominantly created with instrumentation from the period. We were talking about all of the normal things you would talk about when you think about New York and Philidelphia in the 1950s — a lot of jazz, the Beat movement, the Northeast, etc. Somehow, the cumulative effect of all of those decisions, we hoped, would result in something that felt like a Brutalist movie. I think in the entire film, like you said, there’s probably only about four minutes of concrete shown. A lot of people today find these monuments to be like otherworldly spaceships, but they actually came from a period that was very I Love Lucy. There’s something very interesting about that for me. So it’s an effort to recontextualize. I liked how the Brutalism is sort of a specter that haunts every frame of the film, where everyone’s kind of waiting for it. I remember thinking, “wow, what a perverse sort of pleasure it would be if I could have the audience sort of waiting and becoming excited about this inanimate object that will eventually be revealed to them.” Ultimately, it’s just a building. But to experience every creative choice that this character has made, and where those choices came from — it felt like we were chasing something very elusive. It remains elusive. I could make 15 more movies on Brutalism, but this film was what I could do with the raw material that was available to me at this moment in time. 

The film’s epilogue and how it relates to the rest of the story that precedes it is very compelling. You essentially give us, at the very end, the classic museum retrospective of a great artist. The facts we learn in this sequence shed new light on everything we’ve seen the character live through over the preceding three hours, while those same three hours have simultaneously given us a taste of the richness and drama of his lived experience, which is what’s always missing from a museum retrospective, no matter how informative. There’s a fascinating interplay and filling-in-the-blanks going on between the two segments. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like that in a film before.  

One thing that I’m very interested in is the dissemination of information in a film. With 99 percent of what I see these days, I know the themes from the first two or three minutes of the film — usually before the opening credits. I immediately know what I’m watching. And when you already know what it is, it’s not an exhilarating experience anymore. To completely disrupt everyone’s comfort is actually an important part of the cinematic experience. Of course, when you disorient people, you can make some viewers quite upset. But these are important public-facing decisions. It’s not about saying “Fuck you” to the audience. It’s about making people wake up and really engage with the material — and then investigate their own feelings about what is good taste and what is bad taste. It’s not very difficult to make a movie where everything is in good taste. People would be shocked by how easy that is to deliver. Truly. 

But when you are on a ride where the bus is tipping halfway down the hill, and all of a sudden, you’re in an area where you don’t recognize anything — that’s what we’re after.  This is something that I get from many great filmmakers. David Lynch, Bertrand Bonello, Elem Klimov and his wife Larisa Shepitko, who passed away way too young — these are filmmakers who were constantly teetering on the brink of making something terrible. They dared to suck. If you don’t dare to suck, then you’re really not doing very much. What I love about Brutalism, and what I love about this character, is that they are always daring to do so. 

Do you think what he creates is a beautiful building? 

I’m not able to answer that question. On Vox Lux, people asked me many times whether I think she’s a good artist or a bad artist. And I don’t know. I can tell you that the score and the music that’s in it is very accurate — those songs in the film were produced by Britney Spears’ producer. But whether it’s good or bad music is up to you. I was just fascinated by how every time I got in a cab or went to the supermarket, it was just there and I didn’t have any choice about whether or not I wanted to engage with it. It was just there. Architecture is very similar — and so is fascism. That’s what I explored in The Childhood of a Leader. These movies are about what’s in the atmosphere. You know, in Camus’ The Stranger, the character is forced during an interrogation to explain why he pulled the trigger. Why did he commit this act of violence? And he essentially says, “Well, it was really hot out that day, and there was sweat in my eyes, and I was blinded by the sun, and I was stressed, and somebody happened to give me a pistol, and I just pulled the trigger.” People are so interested in motive that we forget that there are so many contributing factors.

Picking up what you said about not delivering on expectations, let’s talk a little more about the structure. The film is divided into two halfs, with an intermission that feels like a thematic break. But it’s much too simplistic to say that it’s a rise-and-fall biopic or character study. The first half does have the exhilarating upward sweep of the American dream immigrant saga, but then the second half very much complicates that mythology. 

Yeah, that’s right. The first half of the movie is American optimism and the second half is Greek tragedy. There’s a reason the characters descend into the depths of hell. What’s going on inside of the mountain? I wanted to talk about that too. For this, our artist and his patron go to Carrara, in central Italy, where most of the world’s fine marble has come from. Carrara is a super disturbing place. Apparently, there’s enough marble in those hills to last us roughly 500 years — to tile our bathrooms and ornament our kitchens. But 500 years to deplete all of the world’s marble is not very long. When you go there, you can see and feel that we have literally taken a bite out of the earth. So Carrera is indicative of what Western capitalism has done to the planet — how we are trying to possess that which is not possessable. The same way that patrons exploit artists. So Carrera is very important in the film, because it’s a visual allegory that’s very tangible. You can feel that ominous exploitative energy. And this is a story about a capitalist and the artist he has decided to possess. 

I’ve read about the challenges you faced in getting this film financed — how it took seven years. It’s natural to also read the film as reflecting your personal struggle to make uncompromising art in today’s industry. 

Well, this is something I think most filmmakers can relate to — because art and commerce are frenemies. Especially in architecture and in cinema. They’re very similar in this regard. You can write a song in your bedroom, but you can’t make this kind of movie that way. You can’t build an ambitious building without dozens of collaborators either. I don’t need as much money as some people need to make movies. This film was made for under $10 million. But I still need millions of dollars. That’s very complicated because it means I often have to interface with people with whom I don’t share the same ethics and morals. Any filmmaker who would say otherwise is being dishonest, because whether it’s the studios or private equity, if you follow the money, it generally doesn’t come from a great place. And so this relationship between the artist and their patrons is something that people don’t talk about enough. I think the reason it’s so taboo is that people are worried that if they talk about it, no one will write them another check — which means they won’t be able to make more work, and they’re not going to be able to take care of their families. And I get that. Cinema, for me, is labor. I can barely keep my head above water financially. Most filmmakers I know in America — they live in one-bedroom apartments until they die. It’s not a very lucrative medium. You work on something for years. You don’t get paid much, or if you do, it’s not enough money to live on for four to seven years unil you’re able to get your next film off the ground. It takes a lot out of you. It’s even worse for musicians. Dancers? Journalists? It’s terrible for any artist today. We are living during a very disturbing moment in time where we are expected to do more for a lot less. We have to fight to be able to do our jobs. I’ve had enough of it. I’m tired, you know? I should be able to do my job in peace. (Corbet pauses for a moment after growing emotional) I’m sorry… I’m very emotional today. This film is very personal in the sense that it’s about how many obstacles are put in my path and my wife’s path just to bring our projects to life. This movie should not have taken seven years to get made. But it did — and my cortisol levels are still through the roof.

Let’s talk about some of your collaborators. I noticed that the film is edited by Dávid Jancsó, who I believe is the son of the great Hungarian filmmaker Miklós Jancsó? 

Yes, he is. And Miklós and his films were absolutely a huge influence on my work. Dávid also edited my first film Childhood of a Leader, so we’ve worked together for a decade. Lol Crawley, my DP, also shot all three of my films. It was my first time working with the extraordinary production designer Judy Becker, who did films like Brokeback Mountain and Carol. She’s a Brutalist obsessive and as soon as I met her I knew she was the person for the job. 

Your previous two films were scored by the late, great Scott Walker, who passed away in 2019. 

Yeah, that was the biggest transition. When Scott passed away, it was really devastating. He was in his early 70s, but I always felt like I was hanging out with a peer not my grandfather. He always seemed so young. His passing was a really bitter pill to swallow. It happened suddenly and it rocked my world. But Daniel Blumberg had scored my wife’s previous film and he worked with Scott’s team — the same producer, Peter Walsh, and all the same folks. He was already one of my best friends so the transition was as natural as it could have been. 

Daniel’s only 30 years old, but I knew he would understand the assignment. And I think the score he did for us is just extraordinary. 

There will inevitably be a lot of discussion of the film’s runtime and intermission. Given everything we’ve been discussing, it feels almost crass to talk about commercial calculations and implications, but I’m amazed to hear that the film was made for just $10 million, given how big it feels and the way it was filmed. That feels like a triumph. Was part of your wager based on a belief that indie movies can have monumental scale too — and perhaps even need to be event-like to break through? 

Yeah, I do agree with that. This movie is a lot of things that everyone tells you you’re not allowed to do. But in my experience, whoever cares the most wins. So you can probably imagine that the entire journey of this film was me being in conflict with virtually everybody — over many years. In my personal life, I’m actually very conflict-averse. I’ll let shit go unsaid for years. (Laughs) But when it comes to the films, I am not that way. I’ve devoted my life to this one medium, you know. I’ve worked on film sets since I was seven years old and it’s the only thing I can do. I’m a high school dropout. So this is everything to me. And I want the landscape to be healthier for people in the future. You meet so many young people in this industry who are full of promise — and then you realize that they’re facing one of the worst times ever for the medium. So, even though all of my films carry optimism and cynicism almost in equal measure, I really hope that the core of them is the idea of a better future. We’re all going through an age of anxiety and dread. Like a lot of people, I feel like I’m on fire a lot of the time. But I refuse to be cynical about the future. That’s part of the reason I use the same actors to play characters’ kids in the epilogues in films. It’s about the cyclical nature of history, and the notion that maybe this next generation could get it right. It’s a way of saying that we can be cynical about many things, but we cannot be cynical about the world our children will inherit.