‘The Brutalist’: It Took Brady Corbet 7 Years to Make His 215-Minute Epic

With The Brutalist, Brady Cobert ascends to the apex of the modern directorial field, crafting a titanic vision of pain, perseverance, corruption, and the indomitable will to survive.

A 215-minute epic as towering, anguished, and severe as the signature work of its protagonist, the writer/director’s film tells the sweeping story of László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian-Jewish architect who, in the aftermath of WWII, arrives in America alone, pining for his beloved wife (Felicity Jones) and niece (Raffey Cassidy), and taken in by his furniture-maker cousin (Alessandro Nivola).

Through employment with his relative, László meets, and comes to work for, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), a wealthy industrialist who commissions him to design and erect a monumental creation. With opportunity, however, come perils that are compounded by László’s—and, later, his family’s—psychological, emotional, and physical torment, all of which threaten this second chance for happiness, success, and artistic expression.

The Brutalist is a masterwork of inspiration and exploitation, suffering and salvation, led by a ferocious Brody performance as a man whose Holocaust-fostered misery is the source of both his debasement and his brilliance. Moreover, it’s proof that the 36-year-old Corbet—who won the Silver Lion directing prize at this year’s Venice Film Festival—is one of America’s most formidable auteurs, navigating majestic and austere interior and exterior spaces with precision, delicacy, and splendor.

Having recently been named the year’s best film by the New York Film Critics Circle (as well as received seven Golden Globe nominations), it’s an imposing saga about the tangled, thorny relationship between geniuses and benefactors, husbands and wives, and ambition, torment, and endurance, sculpted with an overpowering rigorousness befitting its subject.

A portrait of the lingering horrors of war and the way art helps confront, channel and transcend them, The Brutalist is one of 2024’s true standouts. In advance of its Dec. 20 theatrical premiere—and, undoubtedly, its prime role in the upcoming awards season—we spoke with Corbet about his seven-year ordeal producing his latest, its cinematic and literary inspirations, and whether his subsequent project will strive for similar grandeur.

The Brutalist is about an artist and his patron, and the way in which they use each other for their own ends. Do you feel kinship with László’s struggle to create personal, titanic art while dealing with economic forces that want to exploit him?

Mona [Fastvold, Corbet’s co-writer and wife] and I have been pretty open about the fact that we wrote the screenplay as something of an exorcism after having made our last film [Vox Lux]. All my movies have one foot inside the Hollywood system and one very much outside of that system. But that one, because it was shot in the U.S., was just more prototypical—you know, dozens of executives and everybody has an opinion. It was exhausting. I felt like I’d spent years being harassed. I’ve been very fortunate that every movie that I’ve ever released has been my cut, but it’s not a given. In the U.S. system, it is very unusual for a filmmaker to have final cut, and I think that’s reprehensible. I really do. For a variety of reasons.

That’s understandable.

Everyone else on a project, they have other projects—producers have other projects, the cast have other projects. But every time a filmmaker makes a movie, it’s a freelance job. It could be their last. So they really, really have everything on the line. If I am willing to put my career on the line then I, of course, think the buck should stop with me when I’m fulfilling that role. Of course, it’s a big choice to decide who you hire for a job. But once they’ve been hired, you need to put your faith in them.

I see so many films where I can feel that they’ve been meddled with. It’s like a novel. You don’t want a f***ing novel that has been written by 47 people. You want a novel that was written by the author, period, full stop. I think that it has made a lot of what’s out there right now feel like it’s in service of the algorithm. I think that’s very dangerous for the culture. I think it’s terrible for the medium. And I really think we need to all start being a lot louder about the fact that we want films from the filmmaker. I’ve never seen, in a video store, the executives cut, made available for audiences.

On a film this big—and which took seven years to come to fruition—how do you maintain final cut, and by extension, your artistic vision?

I had final cut of the domestic version of this film. Which is to say that if the international partners had wanted to recut the film, they were within their rights to. There are various ways of structuring a movie. The way that I shoot films, there’s only one way to put them together anyway. They’re predominantly shot in one or two setups, every scene. I’ve always done things in the John Ford way, in the sense that the movies only go together one way. They can chop off the tail or the head or whatever, but the film will most likely cease to make any sense.

These are things I had always anticipated, not only in crafting the films, but in writing the films. At the end of the day, whoever cares the most wins. In my personal life, I would say I’m conflict averse. But when it comes to the films, I will stop at nothing to see that they are untarnished. I don’t know where that comes from. The medium is extremely important to me, and it’s shaped who I am, not just as a filmmaker, but really shaped who I am. I have a real reverence for it, and I struggle with anyone who attempts to interfere in these processes.

I can imagine the frustration.

There are lots of reasons why people interfere, but often, it’s just to justify their role, which is something that drives me absolutely nuts. Of course, my film here expresses, not so indirectly, how I feel about that, and how my wife feels about that, as you know that Mona is of course a filmmaker as well. It was a movie that we made for other artists.

Was there a particular moment when you thought The Brutalist wasn’t going to happen at all?

The film fell apart many, many, many times. I think we went into pre-production three times, and that’s not to mention all the times we unofficially had false starts, where it seemed like we were back on track. You know, I couldn’t imagine moving on to another project. Also, I felt, if no one wants to make this, they’re not going to want to make anything that I make in the future either. This, we put everything we had into it, and I felt like if that’s not enough, then why bother?

Have you ever thought about directing someone else’s script?

I’m not interested in making something for the sake of making something. I don’t actually find it to be a particularly enjoyable job unless it’s very much on my own terms. The few times I’ve ever worked in television or been a gun for hire, I find that role pretty pointless. You are essentially just mediating between the studio and the performers. For me, that’s not the job. If it was, I would get a job in HR.

So yes, I was devastated by the project falling apart. The thing is, my previous projects had also fallen apart many, many times. It’s not been a very easy road. Yet I knew it wouldn’t be. When we finished this screenplay, I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. I don’t think that I realized how difficult it was going to be; I don’t think I would have had the stomach for it otherwise. But it’s devastating to raise the money, assemble a cast and crew, and everything comes out of the box, and then everything goes back in the box, and you are back at square one. I’ve experienced that so many times, and now it’s something I almost anticipate [laughs]. I never expect the first iteration of the film to be the film.

Does that struggle take its toll?

Movies tend to get made if you don’t stop making them. But it requires a perverse amount of perseverance, in the sense that everyone is saying, listen, you’re getting fatter, balder, you look like you haven’t slept for however many years. And you’re like, I haven’t! It’s such an unbelievably unhealthy profession, because there are no boundaries. When you’re shooting, you’re working 18-hour days on the regular. When you’re setting up a film, you’re working seven days a week.

It’s grueling.

It’s never occurred to me, the concept of a weekend or a holiday. I haven’t had that in so many years. I really don’t remember the last time we had a break. Even now, we’re busy promoting this film, which took us off the calendar for six months, and we’re losing so much time on other projects that I’m having to make up for it at night. I’m trying to finish revisions on a draft with the next film, and Mona is in editorial right now on a musical that we wrote and that she directed. We’re constantly trying to find the time to be able to do our work. Films take such a long time that if you’ve lost six months, you’ve lost a year. It’s important to always keep the plates spinning, even though it’s emotionally and physically arduous to do so [laughs].

Like Vox Lux, The Brutalist is split into roughly even halves. What about that divided structure appeals to you?

I grew up working in a bookstore, and I have a very novelistic approach to the way the screenplays are written. And Mona’s mother and sister are novelists. I think those literary devices are something we lean on to advance the stories in a very short amount of time. Because a screenplay is just the length of a novella. Even a long script is only about 50 or 60 pages of what would equate to a novel. It’s not that much real estate to work with.

It always depends. On Vox Lux, the intention was, okay, we’re going to employ this Brechtian technique where it’s two acts, not three. I was like, the trauma of a film without a second act—how challenging that is for an audience, because they feel sort of betrayed by it. They get attached to these characters in the first hour, and then suddenly these characters have radically changed, and Natalie [Portman’s] character is speaking with a different accent entirely. It forces the audience to start making connections and filling in the gaps that need filling.

How did that thinking apply to The Brutalist?

With this film, it felt like the first half was so much about this character yearning to be reunited with his wife. I wanted to make the audience wait for her the way that he’s been waiting for her. Then when she finally arrives, she’s so different from what you would expect. There are just all these surprises.

I think the three act structure and the formula that’s applied to 99.9 percent of screenplays is something I’m trying to get away from. I think that every film is a proposal for a new way of doing things. Like good architecture, it’s a proposal for the future.

Adrien Brody wasn’t the first actor attached to the role of László. What made you settle on him?

Adrien and I met for the first time about the film in 2019. At that point, the role was already cast and it was a different iteration of the picture. He and I had this amazing conversation and I was really struck by him. Of course, I knew about his background, and there’s not very many people, frankly, that were correct for the role for a variety of reasons. Because the character had to be a certain age, and there was a vulnerability that the character required that very few actors in that age range really possess. It was a very short list.

Whenever you make a movie, you can’t get too attached to the idea of it only being one person. I’ve done that before, where I’ve written a role for someone and then that person becomes unavailable or they don’t want to do it or whatever, and it’s devastating. So I’ve tried to get used to the idea that sometimes, it ends up being someone totally different than you’d imagine. With Adrien, it was so correct that it almost felt too good to be true [laughs]. I really mean that. I was like, oh, if only that could work out. And eventually it did.

What made working with Adrien so ideal?

I’ve never had a better experience collaborating with someone. We were really marching in lockstep on this. I needed a partner, because I had never had a film where a character was in so much of the movie. I think he worked 31 out of 33 days on the film. Especially because of how my movies are structured, it’s quite unusual for me to work with the same person every day when I come to set. So I really needed a creative ally, which he is and was.

He also set a real tone on the set. Everyone was so prepared because he was so prepared, and Guy and Felicity were so prepared. It set the standard for all of us. Even for the crew and for myself, when people are that prepared, you want to make sure you have answers for all their questions.

Given the effort it took to make The Brutalist, do you anticipate your next film will be a smaller endeavor?

That’s a good question. It’s funny, I promised everyone, and I said to Mona: the next one, I promise it’s going to be like 80 minutes. And I can already tell you, it’s absolutely not eighty 80 [laughs].

Making a long film, it’s kind of a nightmare, for a variety of reasons—it’s just so much work. That said, working with a canvas that large, it’s very appealing for a lot of other reasons. It makes me feel like I get to spend an adequate amount of time with each of these characters, and that nothing feels perfunctory or rushed. So I don’t know how long the next one will be, but I don’t think it’s 80 minutes