In the wake of its success at the Golden Globes and its current frontrunner status at the Academy Awards, Brady Corbet’s film The Brutalist has been one of the most acclaimed and discussed films of the year. Not something that its premise as a three-and-a-half-hour film about a fictional architect would suggest.
Andy Hazel from the Curb caught up with Corbet to talk expectations, exhaustion and excellence.
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Since it arrived at the 2024 Venice Film Festival, where you won the Best Director prize, The Brutalist has been collecting prizes and getting rave reviews. Are you surprised by this response?
Brady Corbet: I am surprised. It’s hard to have expectations while making a film. After working on post-production for 20 months, you start hoping for the best but expecting the worst—that’s just life. We knew the film’s length, gargantuan as it is, would be a challenge, especially from a relatively unknown filmmaker. But I couldn’t find a way to make it shorter. Every cut felt like it hurt the film holistically. We always knew the movie would be long, but we didn’t think it would be this long.
But also, time is a very important ingredient in the recipe, and when you’re making a movie about a character's entire life, things could suddenly feel very rushed. The final version of the movie is the screenplay. There's not a single scene in the movie which is missing. My wife [co-screenwriter Mona Fastvold] and I try to remind ourselves to trust the material.
Executing a movie, there are practicalities that you're facing because every single day that you're not delivering a movie it's very expensive, you start accruing interest on the loans and there's a lot of pressure to get it done. We talked about the screenplay for a long time before we executed the draft and we executed the draft very quickly, but because we did it early, we didn't have a gun to our head. I think that you tend to make better creative decisions in that part of the process rather than later.
Is this what success and acceptance looks like for you?
BC: I don't know. I haven't had enough time to process the response to the movie. I've been on the road since we premiered the film in September and prior to that I was shooting another movie with my wife that she directed, a musical that we wrote together, so it's been a sort of marathon after marathon the last couple of years.
I hope making the next one is a little bit more peaceful and it comes together a little bit faster. Ideally, I wouldn't like almost a decade to pass between films every time. But, with success also comes expectations and that’s a reality that I haven't even really thought about yet. Because post-production on The Brutalist was so long, I've already been planning for my next project, and it's a radical movie in a very different way. I think it's very important to never repeat yourself.
Can you give examples of how you’ve done this?
BC: After I'd made Childhood of a Leader, I was like, what's the most dangerous thing I could possibly do? I'd just made a film that was set in the early twentieth century with a lot of heavy drapery and a very specific period style and tone. I thought the most dangerous thing I can do next is to make a movie about right now. I was tired of the lace and linens, and I really needed to do a movie that was all pleather.
Vox Lux was conceived in this bifurcated way, it's missing a second act, which was the film's experiment. To omit the passage which an audience anticipates. There's a sort of brutality to that experience where it's very difficult to let go of part one, and in part two, it's a different group of actors, it's a different tone and style entirely. There was something about that which was quite dangerous and quite interesting to me. But after I made a film without a second act, I was like, maybe for the next one it's the second, third, fourth and fifth act.
So, I think you're always in this sort of dialogue with yourself. And with Mona, we're able to have these conversations where we explore the form and see how much we can bend it before it breaks.
In 2016 you said that you gave up making Childhood of a Leader because the film was too ambitious. Later, you met Mona, and she encouraged you to see it through. Could you talk a little bit about how you work together?
BC: We have different complementary strengths, and we recognised that in one another early on. It’s very helpful to have someone who, when you’re running out of steam, encourages you to keep going. I made Childhood when I was 25, but I had been working on it since I was 20, 21 years old, trying to get this period piece starring a seven-year-old off the ground. I shot the film in 25 days or 24 days, but because we were working with a child, it was only about 8 to 9 hours a day on set. Vox Lux was shot in 22 days, but at least I was working with Raffey [Cassidy] at the time, who had teenage hours that were slightly more forgiving. The Brutalist was shot in 33 days, which felt like a luxury compared to the previous two movies, just to have a little bit more real estate to work with in terms of planning a schedule. But of course, because this was also longer, the screenplay was about 170 pages, so we had to shoot about seven pages or so a day.
That seems remarkable. Your films seem to take a long time to come together, and you have a very clear idea of what you want. What is it that keeps you from compromising?
BC: [long pause] It's an unhealthy way of living. It requires a level of obsessiveness and stubbornness that's probably not so pleasant to be around all the time.
Have you always worked this way?
BC: I'm an only child who grew up with a single mother and my mother was extremely supportive. She really treated me with a lot of respect from a very early age, and I try to treat my own daughter with that same level of respect because I remember how much I appreciated it when I was her age. I'm the first generation in my family to work in movies, and I really kind of fell into it.
Pre-Windows 95, the way that national casting calls worked for young actors is that there were about 10 or 12 hubs across the US where all children were cast. So, whenever you were working with another child actor on a project, they always came from one of a handful of the same places. When I was seven years old, I happened to move to a small town, around 10,000 people, that happened to have this very legitimate casting that was happening locally. Because I was such a cinephile, my family encouraged me to audition for films at a young age. Then it kind of took on a life of its own.
As an actor, you’ve worked with directors like Lars von Trier, Ruben Östlund, Olivier Assayas, Catherine Hardwicke and Gregg Araki. How much did you learn from them, and how much did you learn from your own experiences as an actor?
BC: I'm a hundred percent sure that my experience of growing up on film sets gave me a real sensitivity to recognising the insecurities that folks have. Making a movie is exhausting. You're generally sleeping two or three hours a night because whenever you're not shooting, you're scouting or planning for the next day. There’re simply not enough hours in a day when you're making a movie. So, I think it probably did give me an understanding and an empathy for everyone involved. In terms of performance and anxiety, I really do everything in my power to create a space where people feel really supported. These are serious movies, but it's important to us that no one feels like they're being made by serious people. We want it to be a joy to come to work and we always encourage people to bring their kids and make it a familial experience.
In my experience that’s when some people do their best work. Obviously, there are different philosophies about that, but I think it's important that there are monitors everywhere and that everyone can see what we're working on. Gatekeeping can occasionally happen on set, when some people really don't like having actors reviewing takes or anything like that, but I encourage everyone to participate in the process because it helps to orient them. It's so hard when you're acting for the camera if you have no sense that we're on a wide lens or a tight lens.
Most of my favourite actors and a lot of the folks on this film are very technical. They're very precise about blocking, they're very precise about the text. There is a lot of dialogue in this film and there would be times when somebody would be struggling to spit out a word, and I’d say, ‘that’s okay, just make the words fit in your mouth. It's no problem.’ And, and all of them, Guy [Pearce] and Adrien [Brody], would always say, ‘No. It's written this way for a reason. Just give me a second, I’ll get it’. That was so wonderful.
Can you talk a little bit about casting and working with Adrien Brody? Did you audition him? Did you always have him in mind?
BC: I don't do auditions. The only time that we ever hold casting sessions on any movie is for when you're working locally, like we were when we were shooting in Hungary, and you just need to hear that someone can do an American accent or something like that. Some people do auditions that are 10, 13 pages long. That just ruins a performer's week because they spent so much time memorising the text and I don't like putting people through that.
But with Adrien, I knew a little bit about his background and his mother was a Hungarian refugee who emigrated during the revolution in the mid-50s. I knew that because he had grown up with Hungarian, it was a great place to start. He is a really fine actor. I didn't have to coax anything out of him. He just, he read it, he understood it, and that goes for everybody in this movie, and it’s not always like that.
How much of Adrien Brody is in László Tóth?
BC: It's hard to say. I mean, I always encourage a performer to bring as much of themselves to a role as possible, unless there is a very specific reason not to. Like what I wanted to achieve with Natalie Portman on Vox Lux was something transcendentally maximalist, something like performance art. And so that's a different sort of very theatrical approach. But with this, the only theatricality that I was trying to keep in mind for not just myself but to remind all the performers was the films I was referencing, Rope and a lot of mid-century melodramas. Michael Powell movies and Doug Sirk movies, so we were sure to sort of evoke their style, especially because we were shooting on VistaVision, which is a camera engineered in the 50s. I wanted all of these things to be in lockstep, but because of the nature of the subject matter of this film, it was also important that there was a level of humanity and that the theatricality not overpower the humanity.
Someone who was very good at balancing those things was the musician Scott Walker, who died in 2019 and to whom The Brutalist is dedicated. He scored your first two films; did you also intend for him to work on this one?
BC: I don’t remember. He passed away just after Vox Lux, so it was early days. I expected to make all my movies with Scott because I didn't know any other way. When I was finished with a movie, it was like, ‘okay, well, let's hand it off to Scott’. One thing that was really nice about this project is that Daniel Blumberg, who scored The Brutalist, works with the same co-producer as Scott did, Peter Walsh, so a lot of things about this process were very familiar to me even though Scott and Daniel have a very, very different approach. For this movie, Daniel wanted to construct the tracks. It was part of the philosophy of making a film on brutalism that there were these particular kinds of sounds and processes he wanted to use. With Scott, we did big orchestral sessions and everything was recorded live. The Brutalist score comprises many individual sessions with artists like the saxophonist Evan Parker, pianist John Tilbury or, even Vince Clark from Erasure and Depeche Mode, who worked on 80s Moog synth version of the soundtrack at the end of the movie.
You've said that The Brutalist is not a political film, but you've also said that Donald Trump is on a mission to have all the brutalist buildings in Washington torn down. How do you feel about the film taking on political overtones on its release?
BC: Of course, all movies are viewed very much through the prism of the time that they come out in. But for me, it’s a funny thing, because my films are not made with a political intent. If you make a film with a political intent, it can segue into propaganda pretty quickly, even if its propaganda in service of a more or less righteous or moral cause.
I really resist interpreting the movies in a political way because I feel that we need a space that is outside of politics.
And I think that it's important for us to reflect on historical events without viewing them through a political lens. But that said, even though they're not made with a political intent, a viewer projects onto the vessel and inherently they become political. There's nothing I can really do about that. If I could go and adjust absolutely everyone's televisions and to make sure that they don't have frame blending on and make sure that the movie doesn't sound or look like shit when they see it [laughs]… at a certain point you give it away. People tend to imbue those projects with meaning from their own perspective and I encourage that.
I want to activate an audience. I want them to wrestle with the material. I don't want to do all the work for them. I want to ensure there's enough space for them to really engage.
Finally, how important are awards to you? You won two awards at the Venice Film Festival for Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux was nominated for the Golden Lion. Usually, festival recognition and awards make funding the next project easier but, so far at least, that doesn't seem to be the case for you.
BC: The jury in Venice this year was full of a lot of filmmakers and film workers that I really have a lot of respect for, so that was fantastic and very touching. But, you know, to be honest, I don't even remember who won the Oscar or the Palme or whatever, three or four years ago. I'd have to really sit down and think about it.
I think that it's very important for the commercial prospects for a movie and that's really what they're there for because it allows movies like the fantastic Zone of Interest to make $50 million worldwide. Zone of Interest. That it sold $50 million worth of movie tickets is extraordinary and I think it being recognised by the Academy, the Globes etc. contributed to that. That’s great, but beyond that, to me, it's not… It's a lot of pageantry, and sometimes that can be really fun.
But, when you're done making a movie, you're just so carved out and exhausted that the last thing you feel like doing is going to a party every night. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. So, it won't be until after award season that I'll have time to reflect on the past few years and hopefully just focus on spending as much time with my daughter as humanly possible because she's at an age now where I can't take her out of school as often as I used to. Now, I'm just counting the days until I can be at home for longer than seven to ten days at a time.