Adrien Brody, Guy Pearce, and“ The Brutalist” director break down controversial cave scene: 'We shot it multiple ways'

Warning: this article contains spoilers for The Brutalist.

The artist-patron conflict at the heart of The Brutalist takes a cruel, intense turn about three hours into Brady Corbet's sprawling midcentury epic.

As they scout the mines of Carrara to find marble for their gargantuan Pennsylvania monument, Hungarian architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) and his brooding American financier Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce) stumble into an isolated corner of a cave — and, in perhaps the most controversial moment in the film, Harrison rapes László, literalizing the exploitation, volatility, and power imbalance that already defined their relationship.

The sequence struck Pearce as an unexpectedly sudden escalation of The Brutalist's central dynamic. "In all my conversations with Brady in the months leading up to doing the film, I always kept getting back to that scene, going, 'Just to be sure again — where does this come from?'" the actor tells Entertainment Weekly. "I just wanted to understand where that came from. Obviously, it does come out of the blue, and I think when I see it in the film now, it comes out of the blue, but at the same time, it sort of makes sense as well."

Like most films, The Brutalist (now in theaters) shot out of order, which meant that the pivotal scene in question came "early on" in Brody's schedule. "It might have been the first or second scene I shot," the actor tells EW. "I was like, 'How do you do? Let's go.'"

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The final cut of the scene plays out in one long take, with the camera maintaining a wide-angle vantage point that keeps the action and the characters' expressions at a distance. But that wasn't the only angle Corbet captured on set.

"We shot it in multiple ways," Brody recalls. "We got much more graphic depictions."

"He did shoot from a couple of different angles, and he did come in close for a couple of other angles," Pearce adds. "On the night, Brady said, 'I might just use the one where the camera's at a distance, and I might just hold on that shot,' which is what he's ended up doing. And I think he's right to just hold back. It's as if you're watching it sort of voyeuristically, as if you're standing there, wondering, 'Is this really what I'm seeing?' And you can't quite see."

To Corbet, the scene is a natural manifestation of the film's existing undercurrent of abuse, which is previously suggested in scenes involving László's wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones); his niece, Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy); and Van Buren's son, Harry (Joe Alwyn). "When Adrien's on the ship, one of the early lines in the film is from Felicity's character in voiceover," Corbet explains to EW. "She says, 'I've managed to keep myself mostly to myself.' And then, of course, there's the implication that Zsófia has also been assaulted by Joe Alwyn's character. And then ultimately the feeling based on how Joe's character responds to Erzsébet's allegation — you don't respond that way unless it's true, and then why does he know it's true?"

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Pearce also wonders if Harrison's abuse extends beyond the cave scene. "We talked about whether or not this is something that my character has done before, whether it's been with my own family, et cetera," he reflects. "That was sort of left alone in my mind. And then when I watched the film and saw Joe Alwyn running around at the end looking for me going, 'Father, Father, Father, Dad' — there was just something that felt so palpable that even if he hadn't have remembered it because he was too young, you can't help but assume that there's been some sexual abuse with his young son many, many, many years ago."

Pearce came to another surprising realization when rewatching the film. "When in the middle of the act, I say something to Adrien, like, 'You're just a lady of the night,'" he recalls. "And when we filmed it, my understanding was that I was telling this to him, to just put him in his place and go, 'This is all you are,' that I'm labeling him. When I watched the film, it completely read to me that I'm saying this in order just to justify — I'm actually talking to myself, and I'm calling myself a lady of night but I'm not doing it to put him down."

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He continues, "I'm doing it to justify to myself why I'm doing this. 'That's all you are. Therefore, I can justify doing this.' Whereas it didn't really occur to me so much when we filmed it. So it's interesting, too, that I can have different perspectives on my work once watching it."

Corbet clarifies his intentions as he articulates his themes. "This is not a docudrama, so authenticity is not what I am going for when I make my films," he says. "I love neorealist movies, but it's just not what I do. The way that I was thinking about how to deal with generational trauma after being exploited and violated literally and figuratively was to treat this material the same way that Powell and Pressburger, or Nicholas Ray, or any of the great mid-century filmmakers would've handled it if they were allowed to handle it. Because, for example, when Michael Powell made Peeping Tom, we all know how that went. It went very poorly."

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The director sought to echo filmmaking techniques from the era in which The Brutalist is set. "The way that I was thinking about this picture was: 'How would a 1950s melodrama handle this subject matter?'" he explains. "They would handle it in a very literal way. And so my films always have one foot in the past in the tradition of the filmmaking process and one foot very firmly in the present. But there is a reason that I have handled this without a degree of subtlety or good taste, which is something that I think people put too much stock in because it's not difficult to make something tasteful. It's really not."

He continues, "I think it's very important for a film to be both oblique and then startlingly direct. And in that dissemination of information and that tug-of-war — of what cards are held close to the vest and which ones are on the table — something very, very interesting happens, and it gives the film an inherently jagged architecture, which is something that is very unique to the films that I make."

"It's all pretty harrowing stuff, isn't it?" Pearce concludes.

Reporting by Christian Holub.

These interviews have been edited for clarity and length.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly