'The Brutalist' fact check: Is Adrien Brody movie based on a true story?

It's Lydia Tár all over again.

Two years ago, moviegoers left "Tár" wondering whether Cate Blanchett's imperious composer was actually a real person. The same thing is happening this awards season with "The Brutalist" (in theaters now, expanding nationwide Jan. 24), a 3½-hour saga about a Hungarian-Jewish architect named László Tóth (Adrien Brody) who immigrates to rural Pennsylvania after World War II and experiences antisemitism.

Co-written by partners Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold, the film is a fictional story that pulls from meticulous research of the Holocaust and Brutalism architecture movement, whose structures are characterized by clean lines, blocky features and a monochromatic palette.

Here's what's fact and fiction in the critically adulated movie, which took best drama, best director (Corbet) and best actor (Brody) at the Golden Globes earlier this month.

Interview: Adrien Brody is back with 'The Brutalist.' This time, he's left the 'torment' behind.

Was László Tóth a real person?

The short answer is no. A quick Google search shows that there is at least one famous László Tóth, a Hungarian-born geologist who’s best known for vandalizing Michelangelo's Pieta statue in 1972. But “that’s just a coincidence,” Fastvold says. “László Tóth is like John Smith in Hungary – it’s one of the most common names. We’ve spent a lot of time in Hungary, so that name just felt good for a Hungarian character.”

According to the filmmakers' research, very few European-Jewish architects survived the Holocaust. For instance, in 1933, Germany banned nearly 500 Jewish architects from practicing. While some managed to flee, many were deported and killed in concentration camps.

"Judy Becker, our production designer, looked at drawings and unrealized (building plans) from architects who didn't survive," Fastvold says. "It was our wish to try and pay tribute to them; that if someone had an experience similar to our main character's, we would be mindful in our depiction. But we couldn't find anyone (like Tóth)."

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Who inspired Adrien Brody’s character in ‘The Brutalist?’

The film’s protagonist is an amalgamation of influential American architects such as Paul Rudolph and Louis Kahn, as well as Marcel Breuer. Like Tóth, Breuer was a Hungarian-Jewish architect who worked in the Brutalist style. But unlike the character, he moved to New York in 1937 before World War II.

“There was a book called ‘Marcel Breuer and a Committee of Twelve Plan a Church,’ and narratively, that was one of the biggest inspirations,” Corbet says. “It’s a pretty dry account of the struggles Breuer went through to realize Saint John’s Abbey in Minnesota, and there’s some inferences of the bigotry he faced. But just as it is in the movie, no one says the quiet part out loud."

Corbet also cites another book, “Architecture in Uniform” by Jean-Louis Cohen, which explores post-war architecture and psychology. “Those two books sparked the thing for us,” the director says. “But once you start writing, the story starts to tell itself,” and the filmmakers largely drew upon some of their own family’s experiences.

“Mona thought a lot about her grandfather, who is a midcentury designer in Norway,” Corbet says. “We spoke a lot about his stubbornness and his inability to communicate verbally, but how his sensitivity and compassion always revealed itself through the work.” Men of that era were generally discouraged from discussing their feelings: “My grandfather was shot out of the sky when he was in the Air Force, but he never spoke about these really traumatic things. If something like that happened to me, you’d never hear the end of it! I’m still talking about a bad cold I had a couple years ago.”

So with Tóth, “we felt the beauty of this project was to have a character who is really only able to express himself through his (structures).”

Do Guy Pearce and Felicity Jones play real people in 'The Brutalist?’

The film kicks into high gear with the introduction of Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), a pompous patriarch and industrialist who commissions Tóth to design an elaborate community center. Van Buren is not based on any one historical figure, Fastvold says, although he shares vague similarities with American shipbuilder Henry J. Kaiser and automobile manufacturer Henry Ford, both of whom helped to produce munitions during World War II, and were later accused of war profiteering.

In the movie, “there’s a little bit of backstory of the (Van Buren) family profiting from shipping endeavors during the war,” Fastvold says. “I thought that was interesting for the character: that he would’ve profited from this experience László is a victim of.”

Tóth’s wife, Erzsébet (Jones), is similarly not inspired by any one person. She is Tóth’s biggest defender, challenging him to stand up for himself and hold firm to his artistic vision. The character is an analog of sorts for Corbet and Fastvold, both of whom are film and TV directors.

“We try to be each other’s Erzsébet as much as we can,” Fastvold says. “I wanted to tell a story that shows a more complex partner than we often see onscreen. We frequently see a partner who’s jealous and frustrated, or doesn’t understand why someone has to make something ambitious and difficult. But I don’t recognize our relationship in that. Most people in creative partnerships say, ‘OK, I’ll help you check your ego and push through the hard times.’ ”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'The Brutalist' fack check: Is Adrien Brody movie based on true story?