When Brady Corbet arrived in Venice last autumn, for the city’s film festival, he had been on an appropriately arduous journey. The US director was hauling 26 film reels – weighing in at more than 130kg – that he had booked extra seats for on his flight to Italy, so he could keep them with him in the cabin.
Shot on VistaVision, a defunct format that enchanted the young Martin Scorsese as he watched John Ford’s The Searchers and Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, the reels contained the result of a seven-year project that is this century’s answer to The Godfather – and is the bookies’ favourite to be named best picture at this year’s Oscars. It scored 10 nominations last Thursday,
When we meet in London, almost five months later, Corbet is still on the road: this is the latest 72-hour pit stop on a worldwide tour to promote The Brutalist, his 215-minute story of a Holocaust survivor’s souring American dream.
“I promised my daughter that we were going to premiere the movie in September and then I was going to be home for three or four months,” Corbet says with a small shake of the head. “That’s not what happened at all. And it’s for very good reasons, of course. I will really appreciate all of this when it’s over. But it’s so exhausting. I’m on a flight every two or three days. I’ve been living out of a suitcase. I’m constantly packing. I never have time to do laundry. I’ve started buying clothes when I get to places. I’m worn out.
His leer was so filthy it would have you reaching for hand sanitiser. A man over 40. A man who knew so, so much better
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“I’m grateful. I’m really looking forward to the spring when all this hoopla has died down. My wife and I can get back to work. Knock on wood, the success of this film means we’ll have support. Who knows? It’s a funny thing. Awards matter so much at the time, but it takes years to determine if something has a lasting cultural impact. I don’t remember what won three years ago.”
The Brutalist, which Corbet wrote with his wife and creative partner, Mona Fastvold, stars Adrien Brody as László Tóth, a Hungarian-born Jewish architect who survives the Holocaust and emigrates to the United States.
The uncompromising modernism of Tóth’s work confines him to skid row until a wealthy Wasp industrialist played by Guy Pearce becomes his benefactor. Tóth is a composite, drawing on such historical talents as Marcel Breuer, the designer of projects as varied as the Unesco headquarters in Paris and the Wassily chair. The character remains determined to make his masterpiece, but at what cost?
The architectural style of the title reflects a long-term enthusiasm for Corbet. Brutalism, which emerged in the mid-20th century, emphasises honest, unadorned materials such as concrete and it values geometry, functionality and minimalist aesthetics. It is a pleasingly paradoxical passion within this maximalist project.
“I’ve always been fascinated by brutalism, because it’s still so polarising to this day,” Corbet says. “There are very few genres in any medium that are still so disruptive. Punk rock has lost its sheen. You can’t have new punk rock; that feels like ‘Urban Outfitters presents’.
“Brutalism is something that was so against the current of that I Love Lucy 1950s ideal. And the fact it’s still disruptive is very compelling. Especially if you’re on Reddit or Twitter. It makes people so mad. Tucker Carlson, as recently as two months ago, was ranting and raving about brutalism for 45 minutes. I don’t think Donald Trump knows who Albert Speer is, but he’s probably a fan.” He smiles. “What is it about autocrats and neoclassical architecture?”
Corbet, who was named best director at this year’s Golden Globes, alongside Brody, who won a best-actor award – The Brutalist won the award for best drama – is keenly aware of the intersections between his protagonist’s struggles and those he encountered building his own monument. The film’s coda, which we will not spoil, suggests that we may have been watching an allegorical journey through the difficult making of Corbet’s first feature, The Childhood of a Leader.
Things have got no easier. The Brutalist, his third film, was first set to shoot in 2020, with Joel Edgerton, Marion Cotillard, Sebastian Stan and Mark Rylance in roles now played by Brody, Felicity Jones, Joe Alwyn and Pearce. Covid-19 derailed the earlier production and its $8 million (€7.7 million) budget on several occasions. Various executives told him the film was unreleasable. In the United States the film opened to $1.39 million in ticket sales from just 68 screens – or about $20,000 a screen. That’s a record for a period film that’s 3½ hours long.
“As you get older you are looking for new challenges,” the writer-director says. “But if you start with a very difficult challenge to begin with, then you’re sort of always operating between 10 and 11.”
A recent review-bombing campaign on Letterboxd, a social-cataloguing site for cinema, hangs around claims that The Brutalist’s Jewish protagonist and geographical journey mark the film as “Zionist propaganda”. Corbet elegantly answered this obnoxious take by using his acceptance speech for best film at the New York Film Critics Circle awards to plead for US distribution for No Other Land, the award-winning documentary made by Palestinian-Israeli activists in the West Bank.
“The characters were written to their circumstance: all of the Bauhaus architects were Jewish and European,” Corbet says. “By heritage, on my mother’s side, I am distantly Ashkenazi, but I grew up going to a Catholic school. I have connections to Hungary, mostly because I work there a lot. My family on my mother’s side is from Apatin, which is now, I believe, in Serbia. But, for me, the characters could be from anywhere.
“The first part of the movie is called The Enigma of Arrival – taking its title from VS Naipaul’s book about emigrating from Trinidad to the UK. Everybody is from somewhere. I think that it’s very strange when people get their elbows out and they feel so entitled to this privilege that they were born into. Borders exist, and that’s complicated too. The film is wrestling not just with immigration but with this otherness, which brutalism represents. It’s unfamiliar. People want to tear it down.”
At the age of 36, Corbet has already made three of the most remarkable films of the 21st century, earning comparisons with a youthful Orson Welles.
Corbet’s films share a diptych structure. Working from a short story by Jean-Paul Sartre, The Childhood of a Leader, from 2015, chronicles the domestic discord around Prescott, a young boy whose father is negotiating the Treaty of Versailles, before lunging into a future that has Prescott (now played by Robert Pattinson) as the military leader of an authoritarian state.
Vox Lux, from 2018, opens with a school shooting and then follows Celeste, one of only three survivors, who is now a Lady Gaga-style pop star (played by Natalie Portman), as she erratically prepares for the first night of a tour for her sixth album.
There are no new stories. There are only new ways of telling stories
The Brutalist, similarly, charts László's fraught early years in the postwar US as he falls out of favour with his anglicised cousin (Alessandro Nivola) and through the cracks into an underbelly of food queues, jazz and heroin.
A title card for part two, The Hard Core of Beauty, covering the period from 1953 to 1960, heralds a swerve into the hero’s stormy marriage to Erzsébet (played by Jones), an eerie journey through the marble quarries of Carrara and the increasingly problematic relationship between the architect and his patron.
“I think the two-part structure has a lot to do with how I think,” Corbet says. “For me, the first half of the film is American optimism. The second half of the film is pessimism. The first half of the movie is one genre and the second half is something else. They are built to disrupt our expectations as viewers. If you think about the great poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann, some of it requires a skeleton key and some is startlingly direct.
“I love that juxtaposition of minimalism and maximalism, because I’m trying to create experiences that are unpredictable. There are no new stories. There are only new ways of telling stories. For me the form is the content.
“Every film is an experiment. I don’t know it’s going to work. If you know, you’re playing it too safe. It’s easier to make movies that will be well reviewed and made in good taste. But good taste is overrated. There’s nothing I dislike more than the middle brow.”
Corbet’s journey to one of European film’s pre-eminent auteurs has been as fascinating as the epic stories he fashions.
Growing up in Colorado, the only child of a single mother, he just happened to live close to a regional casting centre; his grandfather encouraged him to (successfully) audition for a guest role on the sitcom King of Queens.
By his late teens he had worked with indie auteurs such as Catherine Hardwicke and Gregg Araki. He landed a lead role in the 2004 reboot of Thunderbirds before eschewing franchises in favour of working with European auteurs, notably Lars von Trier, Michael Haneke, Olivier Assayas, Mia Hansen-Løve and Ruben Östlund.
“I was such a cinephile at a young age. I was making short films when I was 10 years old. It was always there for me. I think I would have found a path to cinema without acting. It would have been a very different path,” he says.
“I had the great fortune of having access to extraordinary technicians at a young age. Even that I did differently. I wasn’t living in LA. I lived in a small town in Colorado. I came back to a relatively normal life between jobs. I had one foot in Hollywood and one foot somewhere else.”
Corbet is already working on a fourth feature. It’ll be epic, again. Does he ever miss the relatively uncomplicated business of taking direction as an actor?
“Oh, that was stressful in a different way,” he says. “I was never that comfortable performing. And the pay cheques were never very good.”
The Brutalist is on general release
