The expectations of The brutalist They are tall. Actor-turned-director Brady Corbet already took home the Silver Lion at the Venice International Film Festival in September. And now he enters Hollywood's big awards season with seven Golden Globe nominations, including Motion Picture Director, Motion Picture Screenplay and Drama Motion Picture.
The brutalist is a historical epic that follows László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a renowned Bauhaus architect, who travels from Budapest to Pennsylvania after the Holocaust. There he meets the Van Burens, a wealthy family with vast resources, the kind that could revive the career of a talented architect. Although a series of events would derail the initial work, László is resilient and is eventually invited to design a huge, ambitious community centre.
After the intermission (yes, there is an intermission) we see László living in the land of the Van Burens. He has even been able to use his connections to reunite his family who were forcibly separated from him during the war. But if it seems easy to support László, it is not. Because at the end of every victory comes a loss. And it is alcohol, drugs and womanizing that wear him down. Eventually, The brutalist leaves Pennsylvania for a marble quarry in Carrara, Italy, to experience the most surprising scene in the film.
I spoke with Brady Corbet, who co-wrote the script with his wife Mona Fastvold, and we discussed its prickly protagonist, the film's nearly four-hour running time, and why the rich feel they need to collect artists more than their art.
The Verge: In the heart of The brutalist is a story about doing whatever it takes to survive in uncertain times. What made this story so urgent for you?
Brady Corbet: I really always try to work with themes that will remain relevant to me, regardless of how long it takes to get them going. when i did Childhood either voice lux either The brutalistThey are historically charged and thematically rich films. It is rich material. When we got to page 173 or whatever and wrote the ending, I suspected it might take a while to get this off the ground.
And the film deals with themes of individualism, capitalism, immigration, and assimilation, and I think these are all things that pretty much anyone has some real experience with in whatever line of work they're doing. I obviously know how much journalists have to fight to cover what they want to cover and get paid a living wage, and it's become increasingly difficult for artists, writers, architects, filmmakers, you name it. I think it's something that anyone can relate to. And of course, as everyone is anticipating how the new administration will handle immigration, I think it's something that's especially on viewers' minds right now.
The moment when László tells Audrey, “I'm not what I expected either” really spoke to this character's survival instinct. Can you talk about finding that with Adrien Brody?
Adrien is a very, very smart guy. And I don't want to speak ill of the performers, but it's extraordinarily in tune with what this movie was doing in terms of its themes and really everything that it had in mind. I think he really understood the material and understood where to put the emphasis on the syllable. And I think when I met him, he had this really elegant quality and he also reminded me of an artist from another era.
I'm so fascinated by patrons who don't just want to collect the work. They want to collect artists.
To me, it's like Gregory Peck or early De Niro. As we move into an era where I find it very difficult to cast period pieces, there are a lot of actors that I love who have a lot of plastic surgery, and it's very difficult because you can't cast someone who has had that much plastic surgery. plastic surgery in a film that takes place before 1975. I really latch on to these artists, men, women and young people, so many young people who are having plastic surgery, as well as 18, 19 year olds who are just natural. And I think Adrien has this angst that's there too. I don't know exactly where that comes from, but it's clear to me that this is a person who has lived a lot. You have squeezed a lot of juice from the lemon.
And I think all of that was very attractive to me. I think, of course, his heritage was a factor. I knew about his background. He knew that his mother had fled Hungary in 1956 during the revolution. He was exceptionally well prepared for the role.
There is a certain type of rich person who loves to collect people. Guy Pearce's character, Harrison Lee Van Buren, is the pinnacle of a people collector.
I'm so fascinated by patrons who don't just want to collect the work. They want to collect artists.
Guy really understood it right away. I think when he read the script he fully understood the piece. The film was self-selecting, I would say, because all the people who stayed with the project as it fell apart and got back together so many times. Everyone had a very strong point of reference for what this was about.
He's just such a specific person. I see them everywhere.
Absolutely it is. Listen, I think the sequence in Carrara, and when it really starts to kick in, when reality becomes liquid and reaches Greek myth status after two and a half hours. What was so important to me about Carrara is that Carrara marble is a material that should not be owned and yet it lines our kitchens and bathrooms. But the material will disappear in 500 years. Those mountains will not exist. And that's incredibly disturbing because now they're like Swiss cheese, of course, and there are constant rockfalls.
It's not as dangerous as it was 70 years ago, when people literally cut their hands off every day, but it's still pretty dangerous. There are helicopter pads and they serve two purposes there. The first purpose is to remove people who are seriously injured. The second reason is that many buyers like to fly and choose a slab for their house, a sculpture or whatever.
It's this VIP thing, which I think is totally hilarious and disturbing. And for me, I think that theme of what one cannot or should not possess. The visual allegories were very rich in that place.
Throughout the first act, you slide through all these romantic historical notions of Pennsylvania. Why would the story have to take place there? What was important to you in Pennsylvania?
In 1935, when the Nazis closed the Bauhaus Dessau, Walter Gropius managed to arrange for many professors, protégés, artists and designers to be located mainly in northeastern universities. There's a reason so many of the greats ended up in that part of the country. That's specifically the reason, but for me, especially because of Paul Rudolph and Louis Kahn, it was important to set the film in a place that is very, very architecturally rich.
I want to meet a convincing stranger
And it was really only through the process of working on the film that I really learned so much about the history of Pennsylvania. And that's the interesting thing about making a movie: it's important that you know enough to make a movie about it, but there also has to be some room for you to discover something because you're going to be working. in it for so many years that it has to be exploratory. I want to discover something with the public. I'm not that interested in telling the audience or teaching the audience.
As a director, how can you build trust with the audience so that they stay engaged throughout the entire run, intermission and all?
I just think it's intuitive. I see good things. I see bad things. I look at everything. And cinema is a language right now that I feel quite conversant with. I feel pretty fluid right now. And I think it becomes second nature. What I keep saying about this movie is that it's long, but it's not long-form cinema. There is a lot of cinema of extraordinary length. I love the work of Lissandra Alonso or Bela Tarr or Miklós Jancsó, who was also the father of my editor, David Jancsó. But with this film that was not part of its composition, intent, design or editorial.
It's interesting because, and for some viewers, I think sometimes people can find it very frustrating because I intentionally leave out a lot of the things that, to me, I feel like the first 30 minutes of most movies are too much exposition. It's just that they tell you about the background of these characters and exactly what they've been through. And I just don't think that's very interesting. I want to meet a convincing stranger.
And I want to get to know them throughout the film. I don't want to watch a movie where in the first five or ten minutes you know exactly how it's going to end. And that's almost all.
Ecstasy is always accompanied by agony and vice versa.
It's very, very strange. And what was interesting to me was that in terms of subverting the classical structure, I thought, “It's a natural place to end the movie with a retrospective of this character's work.” But what's very unusual, beyond the fact that it's formally quite unusual (much of it was filmed in DigiBeta and it's a big adjustment to jump from 1959 to 1980) is that Adrien's character doesn't have a voice in that sequence. You are physically present for your achievement, but you may not be mentally present for your achievement. His wife is dead. And there's a great quote, and he's one of the Southern Gothic writers. I don't know if it's Flannery O'Connor or Faulkner or Cormac McCarthy. It's one of them. But there is a great quote that says: “The spirit of man is exhausted at the peak of his achievements. Its noon marks the beginning of midnight.”
(Editor's note: It's Cormac McCarthy and the exact quote is “His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. Its meridian is at once its dimming and the evening of its day.”)
And I think that's very true. It is interesting that those moments that seemed to the public or to anyone outside were moments of glory. You're usually too spiritually exhausted to really appreciate it in any way. And it was important for me to make something that was, yes, absolutely classic in terms of A, B and C, but the quality and the tone are really melancholy. And a lot happens at the end of the movie. Ecstasy is always accompanied by agony and vice versa. And it's important that movies represent that.
And then the last thing I'd like to say is that I think I've always been concerned about the way survivors are portrayed in film, who are often altruistic. They are like saints. My problem with that is that it suggests that we can only empathize with someone if they are perfect. And for Adrien's character, it was important to me that it be a love story. He loves his wife deeply, but he also has a wandering eye. He is very much a mid-century man. He is a womanizer. However, both things can be true. We can empathize with him even when he misbehaves.
The high manufacturing cost weighs heavily on László and his entire family. Did you know that in the end, when we get to the epilogue, it will be worth it?
I don't know if it's worth it for him. I don't know. I think there's something a little ambiguous about the film's conclusion: When you talk to most people at the end of their lives, they usually say, “Believe me, spend more time with your kids.”
