“Architecture is a language. When you are very good, you can be a poet.” So wrote the spectacularly good Brutalist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. It’s a fair guess Brady Corbet and his longtime co-screenwriter Mona Fastvold have encountered this quote, and that they recognize the affinities between architecture and movies. Being good in either medium requires a sure knowledge of your materials, an ability to translate imagined designs into physical reality, to assemble and guide teams of inspired collaborators and to know or intuit more than a little about visual textures, space and light and how to move people through them. Another essential requirement: an aptitude for gathering immodest sums of money.
As if to prove how uncomfortably obvious this comparison can be, there aren’t all that many great or even good movies featuring architects as central protagonists, and they almost never leap, as Mies would have it, into poetry. (Notable exceptions include two feverish American movies starring Gary Cooper: Henry Hathaway’s Peter Ibbetson [1935] and King Vidor’s The Fountainhead [1949].) And so The Brutalist stands apart. A passionately inventive epic, bristling with ambition, historical references and allusions to cinematic predecessors, the film showcases larger-than-life performances within a story that both adheres to and challenges timeworn ideas about genius and suffering, art and commerce, personal and collective truth. Yes, Adrien Brody’s dispossessed visionary architect gets blindsided by the contradictions of capitalism after being uplifted and betrayed by a demonic patron (Guy Pearce), but Corbet and Fastvold also want us to track the tenderness and strength of their primary female characters (played by Felicity Jones and Raffey Cassidy), to bring forth a bitter and possibly ironic apprehension of the film’s thematic frame: the Holocaust’s long shadow experienced within the haze of the American Dream.
I made my way through the Brutalistic poured-concrete lobby walls of A24’s New York offices to interview Corbet and Fastvold on December 9th, 2024. We could have talked about their film for a few hours, I felt, and they, on that day, certainly did, as our Q&A was wedged within a tightly crowded press junket. The following is distilled from my allotted twenty-five minutes; the conversation was rounded out later, briefly and over the phone, with Brady alone.
Almereyda: I’d like to start with a blunt, personal question: How did you meet? How did you start working together?
Fastvold: We were introduced by a mutual friend, Chris Abbott, when I first came to New York around 2003, 2004. We became friends right away. I was in the process of trying to make my first film, so Brady and I started working on the script together, then I convinced him to act in it, because he was still doing that at the time. Begrudgingly! You didn’t really want to, but I made you. Chris and Brady both acted in that. Brady and I were editing it together as well and worked on the film the way that we’ve continued working on our films. It’s a very clear director on each, but still we were very much involved with each film from beginning to end. Later on we became a couple, but we made that film first.
Corbet: I think part of the reason we’re still able to work together is because that’s how we met. I think it might have been more difficult if we were a couple and then tried to work together. But it’s sort of the only way that we know how to relate to each other. We’ve always done it that way.
Almereyda: The first time I saw The Brutalist, I was so dazzled by the shot of László (Adrien Brody) emerging into the open light and seeing the Statue of Liberty that I wasn’t really conscious of the voiceover, and I didn’t remember how the movie is framed by shots of the intensely distressed niece: two shots—one dissolves into the next—and then she comes back at the end. Can you talk about why that became important? I assume it was in the script.
Corbet: It was. The screenplay always opened that way, with this brief moment with Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy). I think it’s because we were concerned about contributing to the canon of films about male genius and legacy. These characters were very much written to their circumstances: the character is a middle-aged man because, in the 1950s, of course he would have been a middle-aged man. The characters are Jewish, because it was predominantly Jewish Architects that were at the Bauhaus before it was eventually shut down by the National Socialists. We felt that it was extremely important that the film seems to be about his legacy as it relates to his body of work, when in fact it is about his legacy in the path that he’s forged for his niece having inadvertently given a voice to the voiceless. We wanted to draw everyone’s attention to this character that otherwise would have seemed quite peripheral.
Fastvold: Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) enters into the film right at the beginning through the letters, so we wanted her presence to be strong from the very beginning. She is a female character that we’re not so used to seeing in these types of films about brilliant men. It was important to us to show this relationship that we recognize so much more—other artists that we know, couples with two intellectuals who respect one another—instead of this cliche of the sad housewife at home who’s angry that he’s fulfilling his dreams and she’s not. That’s not Erzsébet at all; she says, “You should go and make whatever the hell you want to make and I’m going to support you. I understand what you’re making and why you’re making it, but stop being such an asshole about it.” What she’s saying is, “Don’t lose yourself in it.” She has perspective that he doesn’t. We can both play that role with one another, to say, “Don’t lose perspective. Come back down to earth. Ground yourself. See this from a pragmatic point of view.” And I thought that her character being portrayed that way versus this other cliche—
Corbet: This doting housewife—
Fastvold: Yeah, or frustrated, where she’s like “I don’t understand why you’re not thinking about money and food on the table.” She says, “I’ll take care of it. I’ll figure out that. Just don’t lose yourself in this toxic relationship.” Because she’s not fooled by him at all. She sees who Van Buren is from the get-go.
Corbet: It’s something that’s usually celebrated after the fact, but as you well know, making something requires a level of obsession that always borders on the unhealthy. You are, in fact, putting all of your relationships second. It’s the only way that these things tend to get off the ground. I mean, now more than ever, when there’s not a real appetite for very transgressive or radical or ambitious movies anymore, or films that have a poetic logic.
Almereyda: That’s a great way to put it.
Corbet: That is just something that’s not widely embraced at the moment. You have to just kick the tires over and over again. Films tend to get made as long as you don’t stop making them. It took seven years, but it could have easily been another 10 to 15. Look at what Jon [Jonathan Glazer] went through bringing Under the Skin to life. How many iterations were there? Or Coppola this year with Megalopolis. It can be an even longer journey. So, I can’t really complain too much about the fact that it took as long as it did, especially given that COVID was smack dab in the middle of all of it.
Almereyda: You landed in exactly the right spot. I read about your initial cast, and it seems like you’ve transcended it. You wound up with exactly the right people.
Corbet: Yeah, these projects are pretty self-selecting. The people that you should be working with are usually the people that you do end up working with, because [the parts are] very difficult. On the page, I think that most actors know right away whether or not they can pull it off, and they’re really big asks. The Hungarian accent alone can easily drift into Bela Lugosi territory if you’re not really careful. Everyone that worked on the movie had a really strong sense of what to do with it. I don’t feel that we teased these performances out of the cast. Everyone came really prepared. We’re fortunate that as we’ve gotten older and have a body of work that gives context to who we are and what we do, normally now the people that show up to work with us know what they’re making. Which is really helpful, because when we first started out, it was different. People didn’t know what to make of it. They thought “OK, I like it enough maybe to be involved,” but they didn’t know exactly what they were making. But with this film, everybody was excited to be making this movie with us, and I feel like that was the first time we’d ever really experienced that.
Almereyda: I know Ethan Hawke is a big fan of the movie, and we made a biopic about a tormented genius that was also made for very little money—much less than yours—and one of my regrets, especially in relation to your film, is that I didn’t allow the character to stop sulking in disappointment, fuming about being thwarted and cheated. Adrien Brody’s performance has so many wild mood swings. So many displays of joy—exaltation and triumph countering every episode of disappointment. The pendulum swings are part of the great energy of the movie. How much were you conscious of giving him these highs and lows?
Corbet: On the page, the character was a lot colder, and there is a natural warmth that Adrien imbued the role with. Even in the sequence that establishes his impotence at the brothel in the beginning of the movie, there’s still something sweet about him. That’s something that’s hard to plan for. One of my good friends saw the film, who also read the screenplay, and was like “I was really surprised by the fact that there’s so much warmth and joy in the movie.” I think that as a filmmaker it’s so important that if somebody has a better idea, don’t shut it down. I’ve really learned that the sort of myopia of conceiving of a project—that’s one thing and that’s one part of the process. But if you don’t share it with everyone—if that warmth was something that I had tried to stifle in Adrien’s performance, I just don’t think it would be the same film. If there’s a new texture or a new color, I always try to remind myself that just because it’s a surprise doesn’t mean that it’s wrong.
Fastvold: And Alessandro Nivola and Adrien had just immediate chemistry. They played off each other so well. There’s that playfulness that Alessandro brought out of Adrien’s character. That was a history that he chose for the characters that’s just hinted at in the script, but they really played into it.
Almereyda: That makes the betrayal more hurtful.
Fastvold: Yes! And I think it was a great choice of Alessandro’s to bring that into the relationship. There’s this little moment when they finished the library and they’re doing this little tap dance moment that they just improvised. Or did you tell them to?
Corbet: No, they totally improvised it. What I loved about it too is that those guys are both so clever—it feels very of the period. Normally, as you know, when you’re making a period piece, you don’t invite a lot of improv because people start saying things like “like,” “um,” “awesome.” But their point of reference for all of this was so strong. Alessandro’s grandfather, for example, is Constantino Nivola, a sculptor that had sculptures in many of Breuer’s lobbies, so he really understood what the film was about. Everyone was really connected to it. And Felicity, who doesn’t have a family history in common with the character, it was just subject matter that she was really passionate about and interested in. 85% of the people that might have been right for the roles physically, they just didn’t get it. That’s what I mean when I say the project was self-selecting, because it ruled a lot of folks out.
Fastvold: Felicity also infuses her with so much warmth and strength, which I thought was crucial for the character. Same with Adrien. It could have been played much darker. Obviously, the successes and failures of the character, they’re scripted. But the specificity of his enjoyment of it all is something that I really love in good performers.
Almereyda: It gives you a full human being.
Corbet: Yeah, Adrien, like, eating an apple! He just keeps on doing it. As I cut, he’s like “I’m not quite done yet.”
Almereyda: I want to get back to what you’ve called the poetic logic of the film. It’s a film of great oppositions, thematically, that get translated into images and dramatic conflicts. But one of the things that’s amazing to me is how history is active within the film. This is shared with The Childhood of a Leader, the feeling that history is like an underlayer, like canvas showing through a painting, but it’s also a shadow pressing down on the characters. One of the ways that you key the audience into this is with archival footage and music, rooted in history. How much of that is done in advance? How thorough and deep does the research go before you start?
Corbet: Some of the archival sequences, for example, were scripted, and some were found along the way while we were pulling stuff for those sequences. That extraordinary footage we found on the history of the Christian tradition and industrialization in Pennsylvania, when we found that we were like, “Oh, well, we’ve got to open the movie this way. I mean, this is so fantastic.” I often speak about W.G. Sebald, Robert Musil, Ingeborg Bachman, V.S. Naipaul and Paul Celan—a handful of writers who have this feeling for history that is in the text that transcends the linear nature of the way that we’ve been taught history, where it’s just basically dates and events, cause and effect.
Fastvold: “This is a fact. This is what happened.”
Corbet: It’s not fungible!
Fastvold: Who knows? I mean there’s of course facts, but when you start writing history, it all becomes slightly fiction as well. There are always details and parts of it that are—
Corbet: —invented by the storyteller. I just feel a more honest relationship with history from Sebald than I do from even great historical writers like David McCullough, because they found a way to this concussed feeling of the trauma and burden of history. And the fact that this is something that we carry with us all the time—
Fastvold: —connecting events that are not obviously connected. I think it’s what Sebald does a lot. He speaks about something that happens in one part of the globe, and then another, completely unaware of each other, but somehow these events speak to him.
Corbet: A butterfly flaps its wings. But it’s one thing to say it, it’s another thing to feel it. And I think it’s the reason that I’m constantly doing these historical projects. I’m using the same actor to play a character and then that character’s child or family member. It’s because it’s one thing to say that history repeats itself, it’s another thing to feel it as a viewer. There’s something about it that’s quite disturbing. It really challenges the system of belief that you have built over the course of the entire film.
Fastvold: It’s a little Brechtian in that way where you’re saying like “Wake up and let’s talk. Let’s look at the ideas and the things that we’re talking, not just be lulled and seduced.”
Corbet: It’s an architecture which reveals its nuts and bolts.
Fastvold: Similar to Brutalism.
Almereyda: Absolutely. There’s a quote from Goethe read in voiceover early on, in Erzsébet’s letter: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” That’s obviously important to you. Did you have that going into the film?
Fastvold: I don’t know when it came to me in writing that letter. I just don’t remember when I stumbled upon it or how. But it somehow felt right. I wanted us to know that the person writing was a person who had knowledge of history and literature. The way she’s writing to László has almost a sense of humor, albeit a very very dark one, but still saying, “It’s as bad as you thought it would be, not worse.” And all these things establish the way that the two of them spoke to one another. It’s important.
Corbet: I also think that there’s never been a period of my life where I wasn’t reading Goethe.
Fastvold: That’s true. (Laughs)
Corbet: There’s only a handful of writers that are just always there. It’s so rich and it just feels like the foundation for almost all great literature. It’s sort of like, okay, well you had Homer, then you had Goethe.
Almereyda: 300 years later, he’s still going strong. But that opposition between freedom and imprisonment is one of the many polarities in the film. It’s very dramatic and very clear. Two words that get thrown around, or woven into the film, are “beautiful” and “ugly.” How conscious or careful were you in how those words come up? Because they felt very intentional and strong.
Fastvold: They are, but they are also funny. I mean, “beautiful” and “ugly” is completely subjective, right? So, it’s funny László is using it as an insult—twice! Most of all “ugly,” to me, is childish, almost because it’s so subjective to say.
Corbet: But artists are sort of juvenile. One has to hold on themselves across so many decades; there is a part of every artist I’ve ever met that has just never changed. I remember working with Michael Haneke many years ago and Michael had quite a juvenile sense of humor—in the loveliest way, because it was very disarming, especially when you’re expecting the maestro. I always found him surprisingly delightful. In my experience, serious work is not necessarily made by serious people, so there is something in this portrait of an artist that we wanted to explore. We didn’t want to rehash the tortured genius in a way that that one might fall victim to.
Fastvold: It’s not about “This is so brilliant, this construct of all my brilliant ideas creates this marvelous thing.” He’s like, “This is beautiful and interesting, and what you’re doing is ugly and stupid.”
Corbet: At least he’s in pursuit of a progressive idea. Whether the building is beautiful or not, I don’t even really know.
Almereyda: One of the other elements of humor comes from Guy Pearce’s performance—nailing Van Buren’s pretension and self-deception. In any case, I think the film carries a lot of traditions on its back, a legacy of references and ambitions, but the way sex works in the story is unusual, unexpectedly bold. How much did you calibrate the explicitness of it?
Fastvold: I love writing sex scenes and love scenes in films, because I think it’s so important. It’s such a wonderful tool to show a relationship, to understand a relationship, without spelling it out, without talking about it. It’s a wordless way that we can communicate through images the subtleties of that dynamic. Of course, there were parts of the story that explore sexual violence, but that is not about sex, that is about power. The love scenes to me were really a way of showing how Erzsébet is stronger in many ways than László, and how she can hold their trauma—not just hers but his as well. They’re reclaiming their bodies, which have been taken from them.
Corbet: That’s exactly why, in the first five minutes, it was so important to be confronted with his impotence—here he is, completely unable to perform after what he’s been through—and then to see the journey of becoming a human being again. Finally, there’s also something kind of funny about the upside of drug abuse, which allows these two characters that couldn’t really connect prior to that night. There’s one last thing, which is a technical thing, but it’s something that I feel like you might really appreciate. The sex scenes were all shot by putting a 435 into service mode. So essentially what it does, because the aperture never closes, is it streams the highlights and gives the images this extraordinary quality where it’s like an Aura-cam. You can see both of them and the glow of their skin. [An “aura cam” is a toylike camera employed by psychics to track a person’s aura, naturally, as displayed in a range of soft gassy colors.]
Almereyda: I was wondering about that. And how did you discover it?
Corbet: Lol Crawley and I love this film, Love is the Devil, about Francis Bacon from the early 90s. John Mathieson shot it and there was something very interesting, which was that they couldn’t access Bacon’s paintings. And because of that effect, without the cardinals and stuff, of the streaming highlights that come from all of the Bacon paintings, they figured out how to evoke those paintings. Lol and I had never seen it before and we don’t think we’ve seen it since, so it was really this insane process of trial and error. Because the first time that we shot with it, nothing ended up on the negative. It was an extremely expensive process because it’s like ceramics; you’re not paying for the bowl, you’re paying for the bowls that broke. It was a bit like that. And you know, the third time was the charm. And Mona shot the sex scene while we were busy shooting something else. Mona shot a lot of the most beautiful stuff in the movie. We kept stumbling when we were trying to do it, because you have to put tape on the camera, so you can’t see anything. Once you put it in service mode, you can’t look through the eyepiece anymore.
Almereyda: The tension between aesthetics and politics is underlined when the story shifts to Italy and a captivating new character shows up, Orazio the stonecutter, who has left the mountains just once, “to beat the corpse of Mussolini with my bare hands.” He says he’s an anarchist, having fought in the Resistance, trapping fascists in caves and dropping stones on them. Is Orazio’s backstory as important as I think it is? How did you decide to present this rhapsodic interlude just ahead of a scene where Van Buren reveals himself to be an absolute villain?
Corbet: The film is sort of a 1950s melodrama. Everything is taken to operatic extremes, and Guy’s character is very much like an antagonist you would have in a film from mid-century a la James Mason. And I felt that this transgression in Carrera had to happen there—it wouldn’t mean the same thing elsewhere. The marble quarries felt like the appropriate visual allegory because the film is very much about this agent who wants to possess that which cannot or should not be possessed. The quarry is a very beautiful place, but a very violent place. We take a bite out of Mother Nature and she gets pretty pissed off about it. There are constant rock slides, it’s quite dangerous, and ultimately it’s one thing for it to be the source of Michelangelo’s Pietà, but now it’s primarily a material that’s used to surface people’s bathrooms and kitchens.
We had this rule that every single character in the film has a backstory and a different relationship with the Second World War. Isaach De Bankolé’s character as well as Guy’s character as well as Joe Alwyn’s character—there are no absolutely peripheral characters. Everyone has a link to the central theme of the movie, which is about this post-traumatic generation processing what happened with the Second World War—with both World Wars really, back to back. I looked at a lot of different guys for Orazio. Salvatore Sansone is predominantly a painter and a writer, and he looks so incredibly iconic, and has this beautiful voice, so I asked if he would do it. He gives it this kind of mystical quality, like the old man in the mountain.
Almereyda: He has a timelessness. It’s rare in a movie for a character to drop in and drop out and have so much impact.
Corbet: He’s a poet. I knew that he would bring this heft to it that other folks wouldn’t, given the short amount of screen time.
Almereyda: It seems that Orazio’s political virtue is fused with his belief in beauty, and then Harrison sort of challenges that idea, with his preening admiration for beauty. Can you talk a little about this moral imbalance?
Corbet: You have two characters, László and Orazio, interfacing with their oppressor. The oppressor has a new face, a new nationality. László and Orazio have a mutual respect, and a respect for the place, whereas for Guy’s character, he’s almost aroused by the impossibility of this two- or three-ton stone that’s been channeled from the earth being pillaged. It really turns him on. When I sent it to Guy, I said “It’s really fetishistic, when he puts his face against the stone.” What’s funny is I watched buyers doing exactly that, putting their cheeks against the marble, when we went to scout. There’s something mystical about it, but it’s also inherently absurd, because it is just a big piece of stone.
Almereyda: Was Orazio’s disembodied dialogue planned to play this way, before you shot the scene, or did you arrive at it in the editing?
Corbet: It absolutely wasn’t conceived that way. The reason we decided to basically lose sync, and trail off in these overlapping voiceovers, was because the fog was impossible for us to control, so we had major continuity issues. I was like, “We’ve already established this language earlier in the film, with the night where Alessandro, Emma and Adrien are dancing to Dinah Shore, when the reality becomes a little like liquid, with flash-forwards and flashbacks to earlier in the evening.” The whole idea was to represent how one might recall that evening, so that when he gets kicked out and Atilla accuses him of making this pass at her, there’s at least a part of you that wonders “Well, I don’t know. Did he? Did I miss that?” So the language had been established that allowed us to do that with Orazio.
Almereyda: When Orazio pours the water over the marble, is that a conventional thing to do?
Corbet: It is a conventional thing to do. It’s essentially the same ingredient that’s in toothpaste, I forget what it’s called, but they cover the stones in it to preserve the stone. Basically whenever a buyer arrives, they pour water on the stone so that you can see veining and assess the quality of the veining.
Almereyda: The whole scene shimmers.
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.
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.
