The purpose of the Brutalist was to depict the aspirations of immigrants.
The Brutalist is expected to meet high standards. In September, Brady Corbet, who is now a filmmaker, won the Silver Lion at the Venice International Film Festival. He now has seven Golden Globe nominations going into Hollywood’s major award season, including Drama Motion Picture, Director of a Motion Picture, and Screenplay of a Motion Picture.
A famous Bauhaus architect named László Tóth (played by Adrien Brody) travels from Budapest to Pennsylvania following the Holocaust in the historical epic The Brutalist. He meets the Van Burens there, a wealthy family with an abundance of resources that may help a gifted architect’s career take off. Despite the first work being derailed by a sequence of circumstances, László is tenacious and eventually invited to build a large, ambitious community center.
We see László residing on the Van Burens’ property following the intermission—yes, there is one. Even his family members who were taken from him during the war have been reunited thanks to their connections. László isn’t as easy to support as he seems. Because every victory is accompanied by a setback. And the things that wear him down are drugs, alcohol, and philandering. For the most shocking sequence in the movie, The Brutalist eventually leaves Pennsylvania for a marble quarry in Carrara, Italy.
Brady Corbet, who co-wrote the script with his wife Mona Fastvold, and I talked about the film’s nearly four-hour duration, its prickly protagonist, and why wealthy individuals feel compelled to acquire artists more than their artwork.
The Verge: The story of doing whatever it takes to live in unpredictable times lies at the core of The Brutalist. Why did you feel that this story was so urgent?
Brady Corbet: No matter how long it takes to get a subject off the ground, I truly always aim to work with themes that will remain important to me. The films I made, such as Childhood, Vox Lux, and The Brutalist, are rich in themes and have a strong historical foundation. The content is rich. It might take a while to get this one off the ground, as I had thought when we reached page 173 or whatever and wrote the conclusion.
Additionally, the movie explores topics of capitalism, individuality, immigration, and assimilation—all of which, in my opinion, almost everyone has some firsthand experience within their area of work. It goes without saying that I am aware of the struggles journalists face in order to report on their subjects and earn a living income and that it has gotten harder for authors, artists, filmmakers, architects, and everyone else. I believe that everyone can identify with it. Naturally, I believe that people are particularly concerned about immigration at the moment since everyone is waiting to see how the new administration will handle it.
The line “I’m not what I expected either” that László says to Audrey really resonated with this character’s survival instincts. Could you and Adrien Brody discuss discovering that?
Adrien is an extremely intelligent man. Not to disparage the actors, but he is exceptionally sensitive to the concepts and essentially everything that the picture was thinking about. I believe he simply grasped the information and knew when to emphasize a certain syllable. Additionally, he reminded me of a performer from a different period, and I felt that he had a particularly graceful aspect when I first saw him.
He reminds me of early De Niro or Gregory Peck. There are many actors I adore who have undergone extensive plastic surgery, and as we enter a new era, I find it really challenging to cast period pieces. This is because you can’t put someone who has undergone extensive plastic surgery in a movie that is set before 1975. I genuinely care about these artists, both men and women and a lot of young people who are just naturally 18 or 19 years old are getting plastic surgery. And I believe Adrien is also experiencing this sorrow. I’m not sure exactly where that originates, but it seems obvious to me that this is a person who has experienced a lot. He has extracted a significant amount of juice from the lemon.
And I believe that I found all of that to be really appealing. Naturally, I believe that his heritage played a role. I was aware of his past. I knew that his mother had escaped during the 1956 revolution in Hungary. He was a special fit for the position.
A certain kind of affluent individual enjoys collecting people. Harrison Lee Van Buren, played by Guy Pearce, is the epitome of a people collector.
The customers who wish to do more than simply purchase the artwork captivate me. Their goal is to amass the artists.
The guy grasped it right away. I believe he understood the screenplay completely when he read it. I would say that the film was self-selecting because of all the people who persisted in the project despite its several breakdowns and rebirths. For what this was about, they all had a really strong point of reference.
It’s just a really particular individual. I see them everywhere.
It really is. Listen, I believe that after two and a half hours, the scene in Carrara really begins to take shape, turning reality into a liquid and eventually reaching Greek mythological stature. The fact that Carrara marble is a material that shouldn’t be owned but is used to line our kitchens and baths is what really appealed to me about it. However, the substance will disappear in 500 years. There won’t be those mountains. They’re like Swiss cheese right now, of course, and there are rock slides all the time, so that’s unsettling.
Although it’s not as risky as it was seventy years ago, when people were really slicing off their hands on a daily basis, it’s still rather risky. There are helicopter pads there, and they have two functions. The primary objective is to transport individuals who suffer severe injuries. The second reason is that a lot of customers want to come in and pick out a sculpture, slab, or whatever else they want for their house.
I find this VIP thing to be both humorous and unsettling. And that concept of what cannot and should not be possessed is what I believe. There were a lot of great visual allegories there.
You’re slipping into all these romanticized historical ideas of Pennsylvania during the first act. Why did the story have to be set there? What did you find significant about Pennsylvania?
When the Nazis closed the Bauhaus Dessau in 1935, Walter Gropius was able to place a large number of his professors, apprentices, artists, and designers at universities primarily in the Northeast. The fact that so many of the greats settled in that region of the nation has a purpose. That’s precisely why, but for me, particularly in light of Paul Rudolph and Louis Kahn, it was crucial to locate the movie in an area with extremely rich architectural design.
I’m hoping to meet a fascinating stranger.
And the only genuine way I was able to learn so much about Pennsylvania history was while working on the film. The intriguing thing about filmmaking is that, although it’s crucial to have sufficient knowledge to create a film about the subject, there should also be room for you to learn something new because you’ll be working on it for years and it must be exploratory. I want the audience to be learning something. Telling or instructing the audience doesn’t really interest me.
How can a director establish trust with the audience such that they remain interested throughout the entire film, including the intermission?
It just seems intuitive to me. I watch quality content. I watch negative content. I watch everything. And at this point, I feel like I know a fair much about the language of cinema. At this moment, I feel rather fluent. And it becomes instinctive, I believe. All I can say about this movie is that, although it is lengthy, it is not durational cinema. Many outstanding durational films are available. Lissandra Alonso, Bela Tarr, or Miklós Jancsó—the father of my editor, David Jancsó—all have work that I adore. However, that wasn’t a part of the film’s composition, goal, design, or editorial.
It’s intriguing because, in my opinion, some viewers may find it really annoying at times since I purposefully leave out a lot of material that, in my opinion, amounts to exposition in the first half of most films. All they’re doing is teaching you about the histories and experiences of these folks. And that just doesn’t seem all that intriguing to me. I’m hoping to meet a fascinating stranger.
And throughout the film, I want to learn more about them. I don’t want to watch a movie where you can tell how it will end in the first five to ten minutes. And that’s pretty much it.