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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.
Guy Pierce, Adrien Brody and Isaach De Bankolé in ‘The Brutalist’
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.
