Before the age of 26, Brady Corbet was a movie star whose directors included Michael Haneke, Lars von Trier, Olivier Assayas, Mia Hansen-Løve, Ruben Östlund, Gregg Araki, and Noah Baumbach. Proving his versatility, Corbet played one of the house-invading torturers in Funny Games, and also a traumatised teen in Mysterious Skin. As a scene-stealer, Corbet adored the great auteurs of world cinema, and they seemingly adored him in return.
Since 2014, though, Corbet, who’s now 36, has been strictly behind the camera, becoming a great auteur of world cinema himself. Most recently, it’s with The Brutalist, a 215-minute period-drama that keeps winning awards and forcing the retired actor to make acceptance speeches, many of them powerful enough that they trend online. “I’m starting to get sick of the sound of my own voice,” Corbet tells me in a London hotel room. “I really am. I mean that.” He sighs again. “I stopped performing because I didn’t want to share myself publicly. I’m a very private person.”
The reason Corbet keeps discussing The Brutalist is to celebrate his co-workers, spread the word of its ideal viewing conditions (projected on 70mm with an intermission), and its ongoing awards success. I’m with Corbet in January, a mere hour after The Brutalist was nominated by BAFTA in nine categories; bookmakers have it as the favourite to win Best Picture at the Oscars. “The thing is, five months ago, this was not a mainstream movie at all,” Corbet counters. “There was a high likelihood it would end up on one screen in the US, if I was lucky. I was told the film may never be theatrically exhibited.”
Set across the 1940s and 1950s, The Brutalist stars Adrien Brody as a Hungarian-Jewish architect, László Tóth, who survives the Holocaust and starts anew in Philadelphia. In “The Enigma of Arrival”, the first of two parts, László is hired by a conceited American businessman, Harrison (Guy Pearce), to construct a community centre with unreasonable instructions; in part two, “The Hard Core of Beauty”, László is joined by his ill wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and mute niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), all while battling heroin addiction and creative interference from Harrison’s son, Harry (Joe Alwyn). If the first half depicts the American Dream, the second section reveals the rot within the foundations.
“Making a movie and building a building are very similar professions,” says Corbet. “It’s a lot of management. You’re dealing with investors. But this is a 1950s melodrama. It’s not a piece of neorealism. Gestures are taken to operatic extremes. I would always think to myself on set, ‘What would Michael Powell do?’” Like Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus? “Absolutely. And the authenticity probably comes from a lot of our own personal experiences, and being so intimately familiar with being in this position.”
Like Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux, The Brutalist was cowritten by Corbet with his wife, the Norwegian filmmaker Mona Fastvold. When I spoke to Corbet in 2019 for Vox Lux, he called it a three-act movie without a second act. In response to criticisms, he teased that his next movie would have a “really long” second act. I remind him of the quote now. “I’m interested in punk songs that are a minute and 30 seconds, and I’m interested in double albums where there’s a track for each side,” he says. “Film festivals don’t accept films that are under 72 minutes in their competitions. That’s insane. One of the best films I saw all year is Mati Dop’s Dahomey, and that’s 68 minutes long. It’s perfect.”
By being more than three times the length of Dahomey, The Brutalist allows for more documentation of a building that’s being assembled brick by brick. Mesmerising and exhausting, the construction is accompanied by piano and slabs of score, while the visuals are captured by VistaVision, a period-specific technique involving 35mm cameras placed horizontally. The magic is only truly retained if the viewer can track down a projection of a print blown up to 70mm, rather than a standard DCP. As Corbet puts it: “It’s the difference between seeing a painting and a lithograph.”
While A Complete Unknown allegedly cost $70 million, The Brutalist was shot in Hungary for around $8 million. “If a person knows what they want to make, it doesn’t have to have a huge budget,” Joe Alwyn tells me over Zoom. “It ticked so many boxes of things that aren’t financed these days: the script was over 170 pages, it’s about heavy stuff, it’s shot on film. We went to Venice and it didn’t have a distributor. I see the parallel between Brady’s battle to get this film off the ground and László building his monument.”
That’s what’s tricky about this day and age: everything is so highly politicised. And yet I believe there’s supposed to be this space where we investigate ideas and shared histories. What I want is every single perspective
As Harry, Alwyn is the film’s villain, or at least one of them, and across the lengthy running time he reveals himself to be even more of a sociopath. “Brady sent me clips of Joseph Cotten in Hitchcock films, and Orson Welles,” says the 33-year-old actor. “We discussed Guy and I having a similar family-like cadence. But it wasn’t just physicality and voice. There’s what he’s wanting or lacking. Everything is a search for his dad’s approval, and what it’s like living in this strange, mega-wealthy family.”
Alwyn clarifies he wasn’t inspired directly by Donald Trump – a misconception picked up from a Guardian interview. “I just meant there’s an interesting parallel with those kind of families who have so much power. In both cases, they can behave however they want.” As for Alwyn’s stand-out scene, which will be evident to anyone who’s seen the film, he comments, “There isn’t just one colour to it. There’s fury and angry. But it also triggers the shame, confusion, or perhaps recognition that he’s experienced something similar. It was seven minutes, all in one take, like a little piece of theatre. You’re not chopping things up or fragmenting them. That’s fun as an actor.”
In recent months, The Brutalist has been deconstructed for what it may, or may not, be saying about Zionism. Feeling unsafe in the US, Zsófia, still traumatised from WWII, announces that she’s moving to Jerusalem; in a hospital bed, Erzsébet vows to join Zsófia in Israel, believing that she and László won’t survive in America. However, when Corbet accepted the NYFCC’s Best Film prize in early January, he ended his speech with a plea for a US distributor to pick up No Other Land, a documentary about Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.
Was Corbet simply expressing support for No Other Land, or was that his way of responding to theories on his politics? “There’s two specific things on this,” says Corbet. “One is that I saw No Other Land a year ago. It’s an extraordinary, extremely powerful movie, and it’s a very important perspective that should be available to the public. I am, above all, anti-censorship. I genuinely want the film to be made available.
“The thing about this film, these characters were written to their circumstance. It’s about an architect out of the Bauhaus, which was predominantly Central and Eastern European Jews that were working there. The characters come from where they come from for this reason specifically. The first part of the film, ‘The Enigma of Arrival’, takes its name from VS Naipaul’s memoir about his emigration from Trinidad to the UK. These characters could be from anywhere.
“That’s what’s tricky about this day and age: everything is so highly politicised. And yet I believe there’s supposed to be this space where we investigate ideas and shared histories. What I want is every single perspective. That is the reason I think such an important movie like No Other Land should be made available to the public as soon as possible. Beyond being the exposé that it is, it’s also an extraordinarily well-crafted piece of filmmaking.”
Corbet reasons that when a film is released to the public, audiences are allowed to do whatever they want with it, whether it’s “cherishing” or ultimately “pissing on” his movie. “We don’t want to scare artists off from saying anything,” he says. “If we’re dealing with a culture where you cannot investigate history for contemporary, political reasons, that’s very dangerous. I think we want to promote everyone contributing their perspective: Chinese, Taiwanese, the Gaza Strip, Israel. Right now, it’s a time for communicating. It’s not a time to stop listening to one another. Cinema is a great space to explore ideas.”
I note that The Brutalist doesn’t feel like someone holding back. “[The Brutalist] is a very, very radical movie,” says Corbet. “My next film is a very, very radical film, and that will upset people for different reasons. And that’s OK.”
The Brutalist is out in UK cinemas on January 24.
