Inside the Making of ‘The Brutalist,’ One of the Year’s Best Films

One of the most ambitious films of the year, Brady Corbet’s 215-minute psychodrama The Brutalist stars Adrien Brody as László Tóth (Adrien Brody), an accomplished but darkly wounded Hungarian-Jewish architect. Forcibly separated from his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), the Holocaust survivor immigrates to postwar America to find a better life and instead confronts a capitalist society—embodied by industrialist patron Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce)—that relentlessly rewards conformity even as it seemingly reveres originality. It’s a story of concrete and steel that, in the opening minutes, literally turns the Statue of Liberty on its head.

Conceived with an intermission and shot in large-format VistaVision, The Brutalist was picked up by A24 after winning the Best Director award at the Venice Film Festival in September. It’s an intimate love story as monumental epic, from the industrial coal plants of Pennsylvania to the Carrera marble quarries in Tuscany. But it’s also a brooding period piece that uses history as a divining rod for contemporary times.

“I’m very, very concerned with how we got here,” Corbet said last month at THEBlvd restaurant in Los Angeles, where Observer had a chance to talk with the filmmaker and a few of his collaborators. The Brutalist continues a thematic throughline he started with his debut, 2015’s autocrat-as-feral-youth portrait Childhood of a Leader, set in 1918 France; and continued with 2018’s Vox Lux, which uses a 1999 Staten Island school shooting as the unlikely catalyst for a future pop starlet’s uneasy relationship with fame.

“It’s really funny,” explained Corbet. “Thirteen years ago, when I was prepping Childhood of a Leader, I kept trying to explain to everybody that this is just the first entry in a body of work. At some point, this is all going to make a lot more sense—I promise!”

His films to date are not just historical fictions, but also dissections exploring how historical events impact the individual—and how that individual can then make an impact on history. “This ebb and flow of being shaped by the culture and then reshaping the culture,” is how Corbet put it. Brutalism is László’s way of processing his own suffering.

The captivating austerity of that architectural style is also discomfiting for those who don’t want to recognize the inherent pain that Brutalism can represent. “The Brutalist was written during Trump’s first term,” explained Corbet. During that time the Trump administration announced a 2020 initiative called Making Federalist Buildings Beautiful Again criticizing government buildings “influenced by brutalism and deconstructivism” and promoting Neo-classical architecture .

“There’s something really interesting about how autocrats love Neo-classical architecture,” he said. “Earlier this week, Tucker Carlson went on a sort of rant about how personally affronted he feels by Brutalist buildings. I think it’s hilarious. Donald Trump has probably never heard of Albert Speer, but little does he know that he’s apparently his hero.”

Corbet co-wrote the script with his partner, filmmaker Mona Fastvold, well aware that their film might be misconstrued as a “Great Man” story.  “We’ve had so many movies about these tortured male artists,” he said. “So we wanted to be sure, if we were going to tackle that subject, that it derails a little bit.”

“The only reason the character is male is because there were predominantly male architects in the mid-century,” he said. “The only reason the character is Jewish and Hungarian is that it was predominantly Hungarian Jews that were that were making Brutalist buildings in the mid-century. All of the characters were written to their circumstances.”

Fastvold, in a conversation a few weeks later at the A24 offices in New York, elaborated on that insight. “László is kind of a fucked-up guy in many ways,” she said. “We don’t want to idealize him. We wanted to tell a story about an immigrant, about an architect, about a survivor that did not portray him as this perfect man with a heart of gold. Even through his suffering, he can create something incredible out of his trauma.”

That calculus also factored into how they defined Erzsébet. “I’ve seen that doting-slash-disgruntled wife portrayed so many times, as the female counterpart in a relationship like this,” she said. “And we’re so uninterested in it. I don’t identify with it. I don’t think most artist couples identify with that.”

When we see Erzsébet finally arrive in America in the second half, she’s afflicted with osteoperosis—a common side effect of the suffering and starvation in the concentration camps. “It was extremely common,” explains Fastvold. “To think that you weren’t carrying that trauma on your body? That, to me, is realistic.”

And yet, despite her condition, Erzsébet is the one who shows the most strength. “She challenges his ego and pushes him forward,” Fastvold said. “She is the one who’s able to fight his battles and speak for him. I wanted to explore that—showing the complexity of this different marriage of equals, and showing also their journey reclaiming their bodies, their sexuality, their love. And their friendship.”

The script’s well-written nuances are why Brody and Jones so quickly committed to The Brutalist. “All of the characters and their psychologies were so intelligently drawn,” Jones told Observer in a recent Zoom call. “Everything felt so locked in and so true and so consistent.”

What also impressed her was how, despite her fragility, Erzsébet has such carnal urges—and that desire leads to two of the most intense, revealing scenes between the married couple. “It’s an important aspect of her character,” she said. “Physical intimacy is so vital to that relationship. That carnal instinct is how she is expressing her true self. It would be easier for them to turn away from that. But, in some ways, that’s letting the trauma win. It’s a sign of hope, really.”

“I wish I encountered more things that inspired this sense of immersion,” Brody told Observer over Zoom. “That have some social relevance, that speak to how great beauty can arise from these dark moments in history.” Brody also had a personal connection, since his mother, the photographer Sylvia Plachy, was a Hungarian immigrant whose parents fled Budapest and came to New York City during the Hungarian revolution.

The actor is best known for his Oscar-winning portrayal of another Holocaust survivor, Polish musician Władysław Szpilman, in the 2002 film The Pianist—a role that naturally resonates with the fictional László Tóth. “Although there are some similarities, this character is vastly different,” he clarified. “But the research I’d done to understand the suffering that Władysław Szpilman endured was essential to understand the backstory of László journey.”

The film’s main foil is Van Buren, who commissions Tóth to build an enormous community center after Van Buren’s son (Joe Alwyn) surprises his father by hiring Tóth to build a radically reimagined library in the family mansion. At first appalled by the work, he soon warms to it—especially when it gives him social cachet as a man of modern refinement.

Van Buren clearly admires Tóth as much as he envies and resents him. It’s a corrosive combination that Pearce embodied with the perfect mix of arrogance and insecurity. “The script is so precise at observing and portraying the little contradictions,” said Pearce during a Zoom interview. “Van Buren is grandiose, and he’ll play sort of the humble philanthropist. And he is slightly perplexed, because László has this sense of confidence about him. But he shouldn’t have this sense. How does he have this sense? Van Buren loves László and hates him at the same time. He wants to be him. He envies him. He wants to stamp him out. There’s beautiful stuff to play as an actor.”

Corbet and Fastvold also gave the two men a few scenes where they each deliver extended confessional monologues to one another—how Tóth misses the respect he used to command before the Nazis condemned his work as too Jewish; how Van Buren humiliated his grandparents, who originally abandoned him and his single mother. “They’re really flexing, the two of them,” she said. “So male, by the way.”

Adding to the tension is Erzsébet, whose presence in the second half of the film—and her devotion to her husband—threatens Van Buren’s relationship with Tóth. “There’s a huge power struggle between them,” Jones explained. “She is just disgusted by his pretensions to civility,” said Jones. “He believes he has the ultimate power because of his economic status, and she refuses to acquiesce. She has the power because she has dignity and integrity. But they need Van Buren to execute their artistic vision. So how much do they give without giving too much?”

Echoing Brutalist architecture’s reputation as a minimalist aesthetic rendered in a maximalist way, The Brutalist was a mammoth indie undertaking. Corbet and Fastvold worked on the script for seven years, and then filmed it with limited resources in 34 days on a production budget of $6 million (the film’s entire budget came in under $10 million).

Most of the film was shot on location in Hungary—ironically doubling for Pennsylvania. The local production crew, who spoke accented English throughout the shoot, helped inspire Brody’s own vocal inflections.

And production designer Judy Becker, who avoided having to construct the entire community center by using a large-scale model and partial pieces, also found existing locations in Hungary that were perfect for a few of the building’s interiors, including using local concrete grain silos as the center’s striking chapel.

Most arresting was the community center’s cistern, an enormous space with towering columns that slope at their ends. “It looks just like the Johnson Wax Building!” Becker exclaimed. “It’s the city reservoir for Budapest. I asked if we could shoot there, and they said, ‘Yes. We can drain the water, or have a foot of water, as much as you want.’ Because we found that location, Brady added a scene that shows Laszlo drawing the cisterns to show that it’s part of the building.”

The film’s cinematographer Lol Crawley, who has shot all of Brady’s films, was tasked with using the outdated but superior VistaVision format, which threads 35mm film horizontally through the camera to provide a greater frame size for capturing sharper image quality. The format, which was mostly used in the 1950s and 1960s, is not only era-appropriate for the film’s story, but also allows for rectilinear lenses that don’t distort in the same way that wide-angle 35mm lenses do. “It felt completely correct that we should have this larger format for these moments,” said Crowley. “I mean, if you’re photographing architecture, you should work with things that honor the lines of a building.”

Due to their size, VistaVision cameras are not as flexible as other options, so Crawley used a mix of different alternatives on the set. “It’s just an un-ergonomic camera,” he explained. “I knew it could be a fiddly format to work with.” He supplemented VistaVision with a 35mm ARRI camera and a 16mm rig.

In the film’s epilogue, set in 1980, when Tóth’s niece Zsófia (Ariane Labed) gives a speech honoring her uncle’s work, Crowley even used Digibeta, that magnetic tape format dominant in broadcast TV before HD became the standard. “Brady and I have always been a fan of lower-end video,” he said. “It was important that you’d have the majesty of VistaVision and celluloid—and then, in a humorous way, use video. It’s a tongue-in-cheek way to have all of this celebration of László as amazing Brutalist architect—but captured on an appalling esthetic. It is really obnoxious.”

But it also speaks to the film’s message of endurance. “You might think this is a story about this great male genius, but it is not at all,” said Brady. “It’s about what his legacy is. The movie starts with his niece and ends with his niece. When you’re left with her at the end of the film, that is his accomplishment. It is not his body of work. It is her.”