How The Brutalist’s Brady Corbet made the most monumental film of the year | Canada Voices

The math behind Brady Corbet’s new film The Brutalist should not add up. You simply cannot shoot a 168-page screenplay over just 34 days with a budget under $10-million, and expect anything less than a mess. And yet the 36-year-old Corbet has made the impossible numbers work in his favour, delivering the very best film of the year, the kind of sweeping cinema that makes you believe in the power of the big screen.

Magnificent and massive, The Brutalist is a new touchstone of American cinema

Tracing the postwar struggles of a fictional Hungarian-Jewish architect named Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody) as he builds a massive community centre for a Philadelphia industrialist (Guy Pearce), Corbet’s film – only the director’s third – is a 215-minute epic that takes giant, gnashing chomps on such meaty themes as the tensions between art and commerce, the illusion of legacy, and the nightmare behind the American Dream.

Ahead of the film’s Dec. 25 release, Corbet sat down in Toronto with The Globe and Mail to discuss the making of a new cinematic classic.

Around the time of your second film Vox Lux, you told me that you were exhausted by everyone reaching for hyperbole when describing movies. Everything was a “masterpiece.” Now, “monumental” is plastered across your film’s trailer, quoting five critics who use that same adjective. How do you feel about this instantaneous lionization?

I know to not try to anticipate a response from an audience. It clouds your judgment. No one is above wanting to be well-liked, seen, appreciated. But that said, I always want to do what’s right for the project, and sometimes that is deliberately alienating viewers at times. I try not to concern myself too much with what anyone might think. I’m just thrilled that the movie exists.

You mentioned at last night’s screening that this movie was made for every sadist that you’ve encountered in the industry – patrons who want to finance art, but control the artist. How many safe harbours are there for filmmakers now, aside from the fine folks behind this movie?

There’s not many. It’s been a real joy for me to be working with A24 the last few months because the corporate culture is good over there, it’s been a soft landing for me. But the problem is in Hollywood, everyone is afraid to lose their job. A lot of people operate from a place of powerlessness as opposed to power, and what’s funny is that it seems so obvious that doing the same old, same old is not working. It seems the only films that are breaking through are pretty radical movies: Oppenheimer, The Zone of Interest. Any time we’re able to smuggle a baby across the border, which is how it feels to make these things, you’re facing a lot of adversity. And there’s the other issue, which is that you are getting notes from people who only read other screenplays. They don’t spend their time reading books or anything else – and most screenplays are trash. I mean, 99 per cent of them. It’s bad for the culture, it becomes this ouroboros of trash.

This is one of the more complex movies in recent memory to explore Judaism – the Jewish immigrant experience, contextualized against the founding of Israel. But you and your cowriter and partner, Mona Fastvold, are not Jewish. Why approach the material?

The characters were written to their circumstance. It was predominantly Central and Eastern European Jews that studied at the Bauhaus, so these characters were always Jewish because it was historically accurate. And I had read an extraordinary book called Marcel Breuer and a Committee of Twelve Plan a Church, which is a memoir written from the perspective of a monk at Saint John’s Abbey who observed a lot of the adversity that Breuer faced in creating that cathedral, when he was in fact an Eastern European Jew. I feel a responsibility to getting all of my characters right.

I was also very interested in stories of assimilation – the fact that Laszlo’s wife, Erzsebet, who has converted to Judaism, is actually more devoted than he is. Because with most artists, there just isn’t enough space for them and a deity. I said to Adrien, ‘I think your character only goes to synagogue at the High Holidays.’ Faith and faithlessness, these are things I’ve struggled with throughout my entire life. My mother’s family is also all from Apatin, which was Hungary but is now part of Serbia, so I do have familial connections. But it was less because of that and more because I’ve made movies in Hungary for over a decade and feel very connected to the people there. And I mean, Judy Becker, my production designer, is the quintessential New York Jew. And Daniel Blumberg, my composer. If there was anything I had a question about in regards to something like the vidui [the Yom Kippur prayer] I said, please everyone chime in if there’s something that feels clumsy.

The film comes with an intermission, during which there is a photo on-screen of Laszlo and Erzsebet’s wedding in front of a Budapest synagogue, with a clock superimposed on it, ticking down the 15-minute break. I took that to double as a countdown to the end of pre-war life in Europe for Jews. What was the process like in choosing that image?

The original screenplay, like a W.G. Sebald novel, had pictures throughout the entire draft, and the intermission photo is something that we recreated. It was an image of a Jewish wedding outside of a synagogue in Hungary circa 1934, and there was something so beautiful about the way that this husband and wife were holding each other. This ecstasy. We then recreated with the actors in a totally analogue process, shooting it on a camera from the 1930s.

When I’ve told people about the film, they assume Laszlo was a real architect that they hadn’t heard about before. Why go the fictional route, and not base the film on a real-life figure such as Breuer?

All of my films are virtual histories, and it’s to free myself of the responsibility to quote-unquote the truth. It removes everyone’s internal detective. Most of my favourite novels are virtual histories. Part One of the film is named after V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival, about moving from Trinidad to the U.K. It becomes something representational as opposed to presentational. The realm of virtual history allows me to express that which cannot be easily expressed verbally. It’s about a feeling for history. It’s one thing to say and hear, “History repeats itself” and another thing to feel that history repeats itself.

[Editor’s Note: This portion of the interview details the film’s ending] Laszlo not having room for a deity in his life brings us to the film’s flash-forward, which I found similar to the finale in your first film, The Childhood of a Leader. Now, the presence of a deity is in fact being put into Laszlo’s work. His niece is defining his legacy, perhaps putting words into his mouth, when he himself cannot speak …

For me, the end of the movie is about a lot of things, but one thing is that here he is at the end of his life, being celebrated and he is physically present, but not really mentally. His wife is dead. The tone of that sequence is incredibly melancholic, in a way. But on the subject of legacy, I don’t think that when I’m in my late seventies I will look back on my body of work as my legacy. My legacy is my child, and she comes before everything. At the end of the film, you’re left with his niece because he and Erzsebet have inadvertently paved a route for her, and so there is something sentimental there. Or as sentimental as I get. But her analysis of the project may or may not be what it was that Laszlo was trying to communicate. We project and imbue meaning into various works of public art. The intention was that it’s absolutely true for her.

The Brutalist opens in select theatres Dec. 25, expanding to cities across the country in January.

This interview has been condensed and edited.