An epic saga of assimilation, architecture, and the artist’s struggle to endure, Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” tells the story of László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian-born Jewish architect who escapes postwar Europe by emigrating to the United States, where he labors to rebuild his life, career, and marriage to wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones). Eventually settling in Philadelphia, Tóth attracts the interest of local industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce) and is soon offered the commission of a lifetime, albeit one that comes at an increasingly steep personal cost.
Toiling on a hill overlooking Doylestown to build a massive community center—known as The Institute, and to contain a library, a gymnasium, an auditorium, and a chapel—over a fractious decade, Tóth must navigate not only aesthetic principles of simplicity, functionality, and design but also a fraught partnership with the sadistic patron whose finances control the destiny of both the project and its architect. And as Tóth works to ensure safe passage to America for Erzsébet and niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), still stranded in Europe, he endeavors to create a monument that will stand the test of time, a work of art that will testify to the profound suffering he and his people experienced during World War II.
Corbet describes the film as being “about a character who flees fascism only to encounter capitalism,” though it’s also a fantasy of postwar trauma and its physical manifestations, a meditation on the uncertain legacy of the Holocaust, an imposing collision of poetry and concrete, and a film about filmmaking. Making “The Brutalist” was in itself an odyssey for writer-director Corbet and co-writer Mona Fastvold, also his wife and creative collaborator. It took seven years for them to develop, finance, and independently produce the film, which spans three and a half hours (plus a 15-minute intermission), After various fits and starts, from COVID-related delays to financing woes, the film was finally shot, at a $10 million budget, on 70mm film stock in the midcentury VistaVision format, known for its higher resolution and wider field of view.
Broadly acclaimed as one of the year’s best films since its premiere last fall at the Venice Film Festival, where Corbet won the Silver Lion for best direction, “The Brutalist” is now expanding in U.S. theaters, via A24, throughout January, with select theaters projecting it in 70mm and IMAX; it’s a heavyweight awards contender heading into Oscar nominations this week, having already racked up accolades such as three Golden Globes (including best drama, best director for Corbet, and best actor in a drama for Brody).
“It’s been quite a bit of whiplash for us,” Fastvold reflects. “It was such a difficult film to make, it took so many years to make, and to experience its reception all of a sudden has been really wonderful and special.”
In a wide-ranging conversation with RogerEbert.com, Corbet and Fastvold reflected on brutalism’s enduring relevance, the oscillation between pragmatism and ambition it reflects, concepts of premonition that pervade their work, and the literal weight of their epic historical drama.
This interview, conducted in two parts, has been edited and condensed. It contains spoilers for “The Brutalist.”
I wanted to start by asking you both about the appeal of brutalism as a subject, the origins of that interest, and your thoughts on its continued relevance in our modern era. Clearly, brutalism still provokes strong opinions and controversy today.
Corbet: That’s precisely the reason it felt relevant, because it’s had this enduring power to, 70 years later, still be pissing people off. The film was written during Trump’s first term; one of the mandates he had in Washington, D.C., was called Make Federalist Buildings Beautiful Again. His idea was to knock down all of the brutalist architecture in the city and replace it with neoclassical architecture, in the Albert Speer style. And so brutalism certainly feels as relevant today, especially being released on the eve of his second term, as it did in 1954.
The film came from a few places. Mona and I had spoken about making a film on architecture. We had spoken at length about working on a film about the postwar years and brutalism as it relates to postwar trauma; postwar architecture and postwar trauma seem to be intrinsically linked. I had read two books; one was called Marcel Breuer and a Committee of Twelve Plan a Church, a memoir written by one of the monks working on the project with Marcel, and it featured some inferences about the antisemitism Marcel Breuer was facing at that time, when he was working on that project. I’d also read a book from Jean-Louis Cohen, called Architecture in Uniform, that was more of a long essay about postwar architecture as it relates to postwar trauma, about buildings that were built with materials developed for life during wartime. It’s this fantastic tome. That was the jumping-off point for the movie’s narrative.
Fastvold: Brady and I have always been drawn to historical pictures and to period pieces, but we didn’t want to make a straightforward biopic. We believe it’s more of an honest contract with the audience when you get to just watch the story instead of constantly wondering what actually happened, especially in the intimate moments: “Would Napoleon have said that, to his wife, in their bedroom?”
Corbet: With all history books and biographies, even autobiographies and memoirs, once you start writing, it all becomes fiction. I remember when I was very young, and I must have been 10 or 11, but Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes was such a popular book at that time; I grew up working in a bookstore, and I remember reading it at a very young age and thinking, “How could he remember what his parents were eating for breakfast when he was six years old?” [laughs] It was funny to consider, though it’s a beautiful book. We always try to free ourselves of the obligation to tell the truth; in fact, it allows you more freedom to speak about the past when the characters are fictional. There’s so much allegory in the movie, and the characters sometimes are just symbolic of an ideology.
Fastvold: We’ve seen characters like Erzsébet portrayed in a very specific way, as the wife of a brilliant man, who’s frustrated and sitting at home waiting with a cold dinner. We’ve seen that a lot, because that did happen. A lot of women did not have the same opportunities as the men, in that era particularly. But we wanted to show a different story that I identified with more, that reflected what I have seen more in spending time with couples who are both intellectuals and equals. If we’d had to stay completely true to some of these architects’ personal lives, it would have been perhaps a less interesting story—or maybe not. I think, actually, Marcel Breuer and his partner had a very interesting relationship.
Corbet: As did everybody that was part of that scene in Springs, New York, like Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock. Once everybody had emigrated to the northeast, all these artists and sculptors were part of a community. They were fascinating people; it was this post-Beatnik crowd, and they were all having tea parties. It was a very specific moment in time. If our film had continued beyond 1960 through the 1970s, it would be equally as interesting, but the movie was already three and a half hours long. [laughs]
Fastvold: We couldn’t have continued on. What we’re trying to say is that having the freedom to show a different female archetype in this type of film was important as well to us when we were writing the story. Brady and I both direct, write, and produce, and we are both Erzsébet and László within our own lives.
Corbet: We’re oscillating between pragmatism and ambition.
Fastvold: And ego. [laughs] Which you have to have, if you want to make anything. Obviously, this film is as close as I think we will ever get to making a film about filmmaking. There are a lot of similarities between erecting a building and trying to get hundreds of people together to realize your fantasy or the dream that you had.
Your conception of László Tóth is fascinating to me; here is a fictional architect whose identity and history in many ways reflects the stories of real-life architects like Marcel Breuer, Paul Rudolph, and Louis Kahn. But László’s characterization also reflects a certain brutalism. He’s so raw and exposed, so bold and monolithic. Tell me about finding László as a physical manifestation of these conditions.
Corbet: Honestly, I don’t think I can put it any more eloquently than you just did yourself. I mean, because I think that’s exactly right, the way you describe his character as it relates to the project, as it relates to the film.
When they sit down to write anything, a lot of folks think about narrative and characters. That, for us, comes later. We start with a theme and an era that we are interested in working on. We’d wanted to explore the postwar years, following the second World War, for quite some time, because we had also worked on “The Childhood of a Leader,” which explored the postwar years and interwar period between the First and Second World War. That was always on the agenda.
That combined with an interest in architecture that we’d always had, for various reasons. It’s been sort of narrativized that it’s because of our family histories and relationships with architects, but that’s not really the case. It’s true that my uncle is an architect that studied at Taliesin West, [the home and school of Frank Lloyd Wright,] and it’s true that my wife’s grandfather was a midcentury designer in Norway. But all of that is peripheral. We’ve lived in cities all over the world, and we are fascinated by the architecture we all coexist beside. Brutalism was the perfect visual allegory for exploring postwar trauma as it relates to postwar architecture. Architecture in Uniform, that book, is about many things but is in part about the relationship between postwar trauma and postwar architecture, about how materials developed for life during wartime had a major impact on midcentury buildings.
We started with these themes, then we worked backwards from there, and we wrote characters to their circumstance. These characters were always Central European Jewish immigrants, because it was predominantly Eastern and Central European Jews that attended the Bauhaus in the 1920s and 30s before it was shut down by the Nazis. You start knowing who these people are, based on the period of time that you’re working on, and that goes for all of our projects.
We then imbued these characters with our own experience, in terms of the patron-artist dynamic, which is endlessly complex. Not only have we ourselves experienced this, but we see so many artists and filmmakers—and architects, for that matter—being exploited by the people writing the checks. That’s not always the case; we had extraordinary partners on this movie, and that’s not hyperbole. But I’ve worked on projects in the past where I was treated as if everyone was doing me a favor, for doing a very difficult job. Filmmakers frequently—and independent filmmakers, especially—make either very little money, or often $0, because they are forced to reinvest in their movie, or they’re told their movie will not be greenlit if they keep their fees in the budget.
What that means, because no one can live on $0, is that you have to take on other jobs. In Mona’s case, and in my case, we do writing jobs while we are in post-production. Now, being in post production on a movie, you’re working 12- to 14-hour days in a studio, every day. So, what does that mean? That means that you have to then work on Saturdays and Sundays. I mean, I haven’t had a day off in many, many, many, many, many years. I do not remember the last time that I didn’t have something in the diary, and that’s exhausting physically and spiritually, especially when you do a job where you need energy and sleep to be able to focus and do your job well. It spreads people out too thin, and it’s just simply not sustainable. I always find it interesting that there are so many people that reap the benefits of the projects that we conceive of and realize, and there’s something very odd about that imbalance.
There’s real presumption from the public, and I would presume as much myself, that artists are doing a lot better than they’re actually doing. I know many people that are currently campaigning for best picture for their movies, and they’re still struggling to pay their rent. You’re not paid to promote a movie, but it takes you off the calendar for six to nine months, depending on when you premiere your picture. The whole situation is quite tricky, and it’s a lot of plates to spin.
All of these things are inside the movie; for us, the film was written as an exorcism of sorts, so that we could finally shake it off and get over it. We had a period of our life when our apartment building burned down, we had a project fall apart, and we worked on several things where, ultimately, we were not paid a living wage, or we were not paid at all to work on projects. We felt really exploited. We wanted to explore something adjacent to filmmaking, because architecture is much more cinematic than the filmmaking process, which is, in reality, quite administrative. It wouldn’t make for a very interesting picture.
The story of your seven-year battle to make “The Brutalist” is well-documented, but I’d heard one anecdote I was curious to ask about: is it true that insurance companies refused to insure the production because the script was too long, that you shrunk the margins to make it fewer pages, and that this tactic actually worked?
Corbet: [laughs] Yeah, absolutely. And that was because I know how much time I require to shoot a scene. There was an incorrect assumption, because these things were being evaluated by people who do not make films, that if a scene was long, that it was going to take a long time to shoot. A scene that’s one sentence can take three days to shoot, depending on the action, the quality of light, etc. Two people talking for eight or nine pages is actually not very complex to shoot. You shoot it with two cameras, generally, and you mop it all up inside of five or six hours. My thing is: Give me a number, but let me move the sand around in the box. I will deliver on that number, but don’t tell me how to make my fucking movie, period.
With regard to final cut, if you write and realize a movie, then that’s your right to have final cut. It’s yours. You made it. You created it. Of course, you should decide all of its final outcomes. For me, that’s very obvious, especially when you’re making films under a certain amount. If you’re making something that’s sub-$25 million, there should be a lot fewer cooks in the kitchen, because that’s also what audiences want. Audiences want daring, original movies. They want things that they haven’t seen before. When you get 25 people weighing in on every single decision, it turns it into something which is betwixt and between, and that ultimately has zero cultural impact.
To the point of impact, you filmed in VistaVision, and the film’s presented on 70mm, across 26 reels—there’s literal weight to that.
Corbet: “The Brutalist” is, in and of itself, a brutalist object; it is a physically heavy object when it screens the way it’s meant to be seen, on 70mm. It notoriously weighs hundreds of pounds.
It was really funny, because I remember getting the Pelican cases for the first time with all 26 reels inside of them. And I was like, “This feels right,” because the whole movie had been such an imposition, in a way, for us and our family and everyone involved. Everyone was passionate about it, but we had to mix a movie that is three and a half hours long in the same window of time we would have mixed a 100-minute movie in, because we didn’t have time or a budget to support doing an additional month in the mix.
I remember I always felt so bad, in a way, when I was making the film. It was an imposition for everyone. And now, physically, it requires several people to carry it around. It is a big object, but that is also the beauty of the project, and I think that’s what attracted people to it. It’s both. It’s a pain in the ass, but it’s also a beautiful object. These projects, that’s just what they are. It’s a lot more agony than ecstasy, but the ecstasies are what keep us all coming back, I suppose.
In the films you’ve both made prior to this, from “The Sleepwalker” to “The Childhood of a Leader,” “The World to Come,” even “Vox Lux,” the idea recurs of premonition, which I mean as both an atmospheric foreboding and a narrative sense of history that casts a long shadow.
Corbet: Absolutely—it’s the trauma of the inevitability of a historical story. In this film, there’s something that people frequently miss—which I understand, because it’s a 30-second shot in the middle of a long movie, but there’s an interesting moment in the film where, prior to Adrien’s character getting kicked out of the furniture showroom where he’s staying with Attila and his wife, he has what seems to be a memory of Raffey Cassidy’s character, as a young girl. And yet, what you later realize, when the film arrives in Venice, especially for anyone who’s watched the film more than once, is that it’s not a memory of her as a young girl, because she’s standing on one of these iconic bridges in Venice. It’s in fact a premonition of what’s to come, 30 years later.
There’s a mystical quality to the films; the movies don’t rule out those metaphysical possibilities. With “The Childhood of a Leader,” the whole movie is this exploration of an ambient tyranny: “Is it the maid’s fault? Is it the nanny’s fault? Is it the father’s fault, the mother’s fault? Is it the priest’s fault?” And so it’s really a fable, in that way, but it’s also about the Treaty of Versailles and Americans inadvertently paving the way for fascist uprising 20 years later, in drawing up new borders that they fundamentally didn’t understand. The movies actually have a very spiritual relationship with history, which is something that I don’t get out of most biopics.
Fastvold: In a way, for me, films are the closest we get to dreams. We speak in images and try to create as much meaning, symbolism, and subtext within those images as we can. The more that you can allow yourself to play with that dream logic—which I think Brady captures so beautifully in how he ended up editing the Carrara sequence in the film… [to Corbet] When you showed that to me the first time, I was so excited, because all of a sudden you are pulled out of this straightforward realism and into something else.
Corbet: Suddenly, it’s not so linear. I don’t believe time is linear. What’s interesting is that when you’re working with a timeline, when you’re editing a movie, you are literally, as Tarkovsky famously put it, “sculpting in time.” Every movie has to be a reflection on the form itself, because the form is the content. For me, all of these things are very interrelated, and these are also notions that are very difficult to verbally describe or articulate. That’s what cinema is for, is to express the inexpressible.
Fastvold: And you can intuitively find little portals in the filmmaking where you break that linear way of thinking. Sometimes they’re constructed that way in advance, and sometimes they come upon you in the process of making it. Those are the exciting moments. That’s what transports me in other films.
Corbet: I feel that cinema has become increasingly conservative in many ways, I think politically but also creatively. With Nicolas Roeg, what he was doing editorially in movies like “Bad Timing,” that film is a masterpiece. It’s so experimental, it’s like music; it operates in this other way.
Fastvold: I’d say as well Claire Denis and David Lynch…
Corbet: That’s true. It carried through into the 1990s. But it feels to me like there’s been really less and less of that exploration in the last quarter-century. We’re always interested in trying to reignite that flame and carry that forward.
Fastvold: Filmmaking is a young art form, compared to painting or to the novel. There’s so much opportunity to play around narratively.
Corbet: Even beach novels!
Fastvold: [bursts out laughing] What do you know about beach novels?
Corbet: [sheepishly] I’ve read a few in my life.
Fastvold: Have you?
Corbet: Sort of! I like mysteries! But what’s interesting to me is that even middlebrow bestsellers are always structurally much more daring than anything that contemporary cinema is doing right now. So I think it’s interesting that, with the novel, you see how far it’s really advanced. It’s not that we’re coming up with some great invention, but every project is an experiment. Every project is an exploration. I want to make films about subjects that I’m interested in, because it’s a process of discovery for us as well. It’s not interesting for us to try and teach a course on a subject.
I know as much about architecture as I know about popular music, as much as I know about tyranny in the beginning of the 20th century. I’m not an expert, but I’m passionate about the subject matter, and through these processes I have learned so much about these topics that I would not have an opportunity to learn about otherwise. In the years that I was working on the soundtrack for “Vox Lux,” these 11 original songs from Sia and all of her collaborators, I was introduced to a world that I never would have dabbled in otherwise. And I actually walked away with a lot more respect for the artisans.
Pop music is, ultimately, a construction of the label, 95% of the time, but the artisans that are making this piece of candy very digestible, they all have pretty radical backgrounds. Most of them had worked with David Sylvian, with some of the most radical writers of the last 30 or 40 years. It was interesting that it wasn’t as bankrupt as one might expect it to be. It was nuanced, and there were a lot of gray areas. That’s the beautiful thing about our job. It allows us a sort of access that we wouldn’t have otherwise.
The artist-patron dynamic, as it plays out between Tóth and Van Buren, is one of exploitation but also alliance, which reflects this experience of independent filmmaking. You take their money to make your art, but then they claim ownership over it in some way. Even if you succeed in realizing your vision, its meaning can be misconstrued or co-opted to service their ambitions or ideology, as we see in the film’s epilogue.
Corbet: Well, 100 percent. That co-opting of the narrative, that happens all the time. But, also, with public art in general, people imbue their own meaning into it, and you have to get over that as an artist. As much as I would love to set the record straight with people over and over about how I feel they’ve misinterpreted my films in the past, that opens up a can of worms, because if you start explaining everything away until you’ve completely undressed the thing, it no longer means anything.
If you leave room for interpretation, you also leave room for misinterpretation, and that’s okay. And like all public art, it means different things to different people, and you just have to accept that. It is there to provoke discussion. It is there to provoke new ideas and to unpack old ones. That is, historically, what good art is supposed to do. If this film were not a little bit divisive, I would not be very comfortable, frankly. There was no universe where I expected this film to be celebrated inside of the mainstream system. No one makes a three-and-a-half hour film on midcentury design and assumes that it will have the commercial impact that this has.
Which has been incredible to see.
Corbet: I’m thrilled about it, for a few reasons. First and foremost, I am a cinephile. I always have been. For this film to succeed or work commercially—and forget about critical acclaim, but for the film to work in the way that it has been working… I must say, to A24’s credit, they’ve done a bang-up job with this movie. If you write something and anticipate it’ll get nominated for an Oscar, that’s a psychotic way to function. And I’ve met people who actually do things that cynically, but it’s a terrible hole to dig yourself out of. I’m already working on my next movie, and I can’t think about how it may or may not be perceived. I can’t anticipate that, and I don’t want to.
I will make films throughout the course of my life that work for more people, for bigger audiences, and I will continue to work on films that have a slightly more niche demographic. It’s important to do that, because if you suddenly are trying to please everybody all of the time, you’re not going to end up making something that’s particularly interesting. And we see that. The algorithm and the data that many companies now rely on to decide what they do and do not greenlight is an inherently flawed, bullshit metric. How on earth would would we get the work of David Lynch, Sofia Coppola or Wes Anderson, or any of these very commercially successful auteurs? We wouldn’t, because the fucking algorithm would never, ever support a “Mulholland Drive.”
What I’m hoping the film industry gleans from this year—and I don’t mean just our film—is that whether you like or dislike the movies in the conversation this year, they’re pretty radical, independent films made by auteur filmmakers. Everyone should take a signal from that. Making very daring, original films, totally outside of what the algorithm is telling them to greenlight, is something they should think about, moving forward.
Brady, your last two films were scored by experimental musician Scott Walker, a great talent whose later work was so structurally overwhelming and dramatically disconcerting, very brutalist.
Corbet: Absolutely.
I was sorry to hear of his passing. Would you be willing to share any special memories of collaborating with him or discuss his influence on you as an artist?
Corbet: I really appreciate the question. I have to say it’s a loss that, even this many years later, I’m still processing, because it was very unexpected. He died of natural causes, but there was no warning. I’m constantly being asked, “Who are your influences?” If I could name only one, I’d name Scott, quite specifically. There’s a variety of reasons for that. He made some of the most cinematic music that I’ve ever heard in my entire life. I remember when “Tilt” came out; I was very young when that album came out, and it was a very important record for me growing up. I was listening to Kate Bush and Fugazi, to a lot of alternative music. And, for me, he was the alternative to the alternative. I would listen to his albums the way that I watch a film: always from front to back. Still, to this day, I don’t listen to tracks. If I listen to Scott’s music, I listen to it as an album.
I think of his daring and his obsessions, because we had so many of the same historical obsessions in common. We were really good buddies. I feel so lucky to have had him participate in my early projects. His work gives me the courage to continue on with my own, because who wants to be disliked? Nobody wants to be disliked, but you have to have the courage to be disliked. You cannot please everyone, and if you are pleasing everyone, it probably means you’re doing something wrong. Scott was the most capital-A acquired taste of them all. And yet, for those that dedicated the proper time to it, I think it’s one of the greatest treasures that we have in music from the 20th century.
“The Brutalist” is now playing in theaters, expanding through January, via A24.