Director Brady Corbet on architechting The Brutalist

The expectations for The Brutalist they are tall Actor-turned-director Brady Corbet has already picked up 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 Director of a Motion Picture, Screenplay of a Motion Picture and Drama Motion Picture.

The Brutalist is a historical epic that follows László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a famous Bauhaus architect, who makes his way 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 will make the initial work, László is resistant and, over time, is invited to design a massive and ambitious community center.

After the entertainment – yes, there is an interval – we see László living off the Van Burens’ land. He was also able to use his connections to reunite his family who had been separated from him during the war. But if László sounds easy to root for, he is not. Because at the corner of every victory comes a loss. And it is alcohol, drugs and jokes that use it. Eventually, The Brutalist he leaves for Pennsylvania for a marble quarry in Carrara, Italy, for 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 his prickly protagonist, the film’s nearly four-hour length, and why rich people feel the need to collect the ‘artists more than their art.

The Verge: At the heart of The Brutalist it’s a story of 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 topics that continue to be relevant to me, regardless of how long it takes to get them off the ground. When I did The childhood o Vox Lux o The Brutalistthey are films that are historical, rich in themes. It is a rich material. I suspected when we got to page 173 or whatever he wrote at the end that it might take a while to get this out.

And the film deals with themes of individualism and capitalism and immigration and assimilation, and these are all things that I think almost anybody has real experience with in whatever line of work they do. Obviously I know how much journalists have to fight to cover what they want to cover and receive a living wage, and it has become increasingly difficult for artists, writers, architects, filmmakers, you name it. I think that’s something anyone can relate to. And of course, as everyone anticipates how the new administration is going to handle immigration, of course, I think that’s especially on the minds of viewers right now.

The moment when László says to Audrey: “I don’t know what I expected yet” really spoke to the survival instincts of this character. Can you talk about finding this with Adrien Brody?

Adrien is a really, really smart guy. And not to speak badly of the performers, but it is unusually in tune with what this film was doing in terms of its themes and really everything it had in mind. I think he really understood the material and understood where to put the stress on the syllable. And I think when I met him, he has this really graceful quality, and he also reminds me of a performer from another era.

To me, he’s like Gregory Peck or earlier De Niro. Since we’re moving into an era where I find it very difficult to cast period pieces, there are many actors I like who have a lot of plastic surgery, and it’s very difficult because you can’t cast someone who has had so much. plastic surgery in a film that takes place before 1975. I really like these artists, Men, women and young people, many young people who do plastic surgery – like 18, 19. years old who are just natural. And I think Adrien, he has this angst that’s there too. I don’t know exactly where it comes from, but it is clear to me that this is a person who has lived a lot. He squeezed a lot of juice from the lemon.

And I think it was just all very attractive to me. I think of course his heritage was a factor. He knew about his background. I was aware of the fact that his mother had fled Hungary in 1956 during the revolution. He was uniquely well suited 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 collection of people.

I’m so fascinated by employers who don’t just want to collect work. They want to collect the artists.

Guy really understood immediately. I think when he read the script, he completely understood the piece. The film was self-selected, I would say, because all the people who attached themselves to the project while it was falling apart and got together so many times. They all had a really strong point of reference for what it was about.

He is just such a specific person. I see them everywhere.

It absolutely is. Listen, I think the sequence in Carrara, and when it really sets in when reality becomes liquid and reaches the mythical Greek state after two and a half hours. What was so important for me about Carrara is that Carrara marble is this material that we should not own, and also our kitchens and bathrooms. But the material – will be gone in 500 years. Those mountains will not exist. And this is incredibly disturbing because they are like Swiss cheese now, of course, and there are constant rock slides.

It’s not as dangerous as it was 70 years ago where people literally cut their hands every day, but it’s still pretty dangerous. There are helicopter pads and they serve two purposes. The first goal is to bring people who are hurt. The second reason is that many buyers like to fly and choose a slab for their home or a sculpture or whatever.

It’s this VIP thing, which I find totally funny and disturbing. And for me, I think that theme of what can not and should not be owned. The visual allegories were very rich in that place.

Throughout the first act, you’re sliding into all these romantic historical notions of Pennsylvania. Why did the story just need to be done here? What was it about Pennsylvania that was important to you?

In 1935, when the Bauhaus Dessau was closed by the Nazis, Walter Gropius was able to get many professors, protégés, artists, designers stationed at universities in the Northeast. There’s a reason so many of the greats ended up in that part of the country. That’s precisely why, but for me – especially because of Paul Rudolph and Louis Kahn – it was just important to put the film in a place that is very, very rich architecturally.

And it was actually just through the process of working on the film that I really learned a lot about the history of Pennsylvania. And this is what is interesting about making a film is that it is important that you know enough to make a film on the subject, but also, there must be a space for you to also discover something because you are going to work. on it for so many years that it must be explorer. I want to be discovering something with the audience. I’m not that interested in telling the audience or teaching the audience.

As a director, how do you build trust with the audience to stay engaged during the runtime – intermission and all?

I just think it’s intuitive. I look at good things. I watch bad things. I watch everything. And cinema is a language at this point that I feel well versed in. I feel pretty fluent at this point. And I think it becomes second nature. The only thing I will say about this movie is that the movie is long, but it is not a long movie. 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 his makeup or intention or design or editorial.

It’s interesting because, and for some viewers, I think people can sometimes find it very frustrating because it intentionally omits a lot of things that, for me, I feel like the first 30 minutes of most movies, it’s just so much exposure. It’s just that they tell you about the backgrounds of these characters and exactly what they’ve been through. And I just don’t think it’s very interesting. I want to meet a compelling stranger.

And I want to know them in the course of the film. I don’t want to watch a movie where in the first five to 10 minutes you know exactly how it will end. And that’s pretty much it.

It is very, very rare. And what was interesting for me about it was in terms of subverting the classic structure, I said: “It’s a natural place to end the film with a retrospective of the work of this character.” But what is very unusual, apart from the fact that formally it is quite unusual – a lot was shot on DigiBeta, and it is a big adaptation to jump from 1959 to 1980 – is that the character of Adrien is not given a voice in that sequence. He is physically present for his success, but perhaps not mentally present for his success. His wife is dead. And there’s a great quote, and it’s one of the Southern Gothic writers. I don’t know if it’s Flannery O’Connor or Faulkner or Cormac McCarthy. It is one of them. But there is a great quote, which is, “The spirit of man is exhausted at the peak of his success. His noon signals the beginning of midnight.”

[Ed note: It’s Cormac McCarthy and the exact quote is “His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day.”]

And I think that is very true. It’s this interesting thing where these moments that for the public or for someone from the outside looking for them seem to be these moments of glory. In general, you are spiritually too tired to really appreciate it in any way. And it was important for me to do something that was, yes, it is absolutely classic in terms of A, B and C, but the quality and the tone is that there is a real melancholy. And there are a lot of things at the end of the movie. Ecstasy is always accompanied by agony and vice versa. And it is important for films to represent this.

And then the last thing I’d like to say is that I think I’ve always been bothered by the way survivors are portrayed in cinema, which is that they’re often selfless. They are like the saints. My problem with this is that it suggests we can only empathize with someone if they are perfect. And for the character of Adrien, it was important for me that it is a love story. He loves his wife very much, but he also has a wandering eye. He is very much a man of the middle of the century. He is a philanderer. Yet both of these things may be true. We can empathize with him even when they behave badly.

The high cost of doing things really weighs on László and his entire family. You know in the end – when we get to the epilogue – what would be worth it?

I don’t know if it’s worth it for him. I do not know. I think this is something that is a bit ambiguous about the conclusion of the film, is that when you talk to most people at the end of their lives, they usually say: “Take it from me, spend more time with your children.”