The filmmaker Brady Corbet lives in New York City, but he is not often at home. He estimates that he has been away for all but five months of the past two years; for reasons both artistic and financial, he prefers to work abroad. On an overcast Saturday afternoon in late September, though, Corbet found himself back in town. His latest movie, “The Brutalist,” had just screened at the New York Film Festival, and an after-party was under way at the Leopard at des Artistes, a restaurant near Lincoln Center. Hors d’œuvres circulated, golden arancini and small white dishes of fregola studded with zucchini and roasted tomatoes; wine was poured, red and white. Adrien Brody, who stars in the film as the eponymous László Tóth, a Jewish Hungarian architect who attempts to rebuild his life in the United States after the Holocaust, made his way through the crowd of well-wishers, holding the hand of his mother, the photographer Sylvia Plachy, who herself emigrated from Hungary following the Soviet repression of 1956.
Applause broke out as Corbet walked in, accompanied by his partner and collaborator, the filmmaker Mona Fastvold, and their ten-year-old daughter, Ada, festive in a pink party dress. The family had returned two weeks earlier from Budapest, where Fastvold had spent the summer shooting her latest feature, only to discover that they had mistaken the dates of their sublet agreement and could not actually go home. After a sleepless period spent crashing with friends—“they have toddlers,” Corbet explained darkly to the group that had gathered around him—they had finally moved back into their apartment the previous evening. Corbet wore a black sweatshirt and Prada loafers; his round face was framed by shoulder-length ringlets. “I’ve just been scrubbing toilets,” he said.
Corbet, who is thirty-six, began his career as a child actor. Early on, he realized that the work he wanted to pursue was with independent directors with passionately strong points of view. By his mid-twenties, he had appeared in films by Gregg Araki, Michael Haneke, Olivier Assayas, Mia Hansen-Løve, and Lars von Trier, but he gave up acting a decade ago to commit to a life behind the camera. Corbet’s directorial début, “The Childhood of a Leader,” premièred in 2015; in haunting, enigmatic episodes, it depicts the troubled family life of a temperamental little boy who will grow up to be a fascist strongman. His second film, “Vox Lux,” which came out in 2018, stars Natalie Portman as a self-destructive pop diva—the head of a different kind of cult of personality. These works, which, like “The Brutalist,” Corbet co-wrote with Fastvold, earned him a reputation as a budding American auteur, precise and uncompromising in his artistic vision, fiercely ambitious about the kinds of stories he wants to tell and the way in which he wants to tell them.
What they have not tended to earn is money. “Any of the movies I’ve made, people are just really concerned about them not fitting in the box financially,” Corbet told me recently. “The Childhood of a Leader” cost three million dollars to make and grossed less than two hundred and fifty thousand; “Vox Lux,” which cost eleven million dollars to produce, brought in one and a half.
Corbet’s response was to go bigger. “The Brutalist,” which deals with themes such as artistic drive, Jewish identity, postwar trauma, addiction, sexual abuse, and the promise and perils of the American Dream, is an epic of more than three and a half hours, divided by a fifteen-minute intermission. To achieve a period-appropriate feel, the film was largely shot on VistaVision, a high-resolution 35-mm. format that was created at Paramount, in 1954, and used by directors like Hitchcock and Powell and Pressburger before becoming obsolete. The last American movie released in VistaVision was “One-Eyed Jacks,” from 1961, Marlon Brando’s first—and, as it happened, final—foray into directing. “You work yourself to death,” Brando said, of being a director, and “The Brutalist” gives a similar impression of the architect’s vocation. Tóth, played by Brody with transfixing, perfervid intensity, is a visionary perfectionist who would sooner shovel coal, as he does in one early scene, than make aesthetic concessions on a project to which he has attached his name. To unwind, he dabbles in heroin.
“Cinema is frequently associated with glamour, but the reality is that it’s labor,” Corbet told me. In the case of “The Brutalist,” his work seemed to be paying off. Initial reactions had been ecstatic. At Venice, where the film premièred, in early September, viewers had applauded for somewhere between twelve minutes (according to Variety) and thirteen minutes and five seconds (according to Deadline), longer than for any other festival entry but Pedro Almodóvar’s, and Corbet won the Silver Lion for Best Director. The film, which will be released in late December, was already being discussed as a Best Picture contender, and Brody as a Best Actor front-runner. (This week, it was nominated for both awards, plus five more, by the Golden Globes.)
Corbet found the swell of advance enthusiasm gratifying, if bewildering. “Historically, if something is really radical, people initially don’t like it,” he said. “What’s very unusual about ‘The Brutalist’ is that people are connecting with it much faster than I expected them to. I’m very touched, but I’m also completely confused.” Before the start of the New York Film Festival screening, Corbet took the stage to greet the audience and thank his collaborators, among them the production company A24, which had bought “The Brutalist” at Venice for distribution. “As recently as just, you know, a few weeks ago, I had many people telling me that the film was undistributable,” he said. “They didn’t ask me to change a single frame.”
Corbet makes no secret of the fact that, in telling a story about architecture, he is also telling one about his own relationship to filmmaking. Much of “The Brutalist” is devoted to the construction of Tóth’s first American building, a community center in Doylestown, Pennsylvania,which comes to be known as the Institute: a hulking rectangular structure built from concrete, containing a chapel, a library, and a swimming pool, and punctuated by two towers. But making buildings is a costly enterprise, as well as a collective one, and Tóth is repeatedly called on to submit to the kinds of compromises that he feels undermine the integrity of his work. “Everything that is ugly, cruel, stupid—but, most importantly, ugly—is your fault,” he rages at a stolid rival brought in to keep costs in check. When he learns that the height of his towers must be lowered from fifty to forty metres for budgetary reasons, he declares that he will forgo his own fee to pay for the necessary materials.
For Corbet, too, creative control is of the utmost importance. Even though most of “The Brutalist” takes place in Pennsylvania, he shot the film in Hungary. “It was very important for me to get outside of the U.S. system,” he said. “It’s not a director’s medium; it’s an executive’s medium.” He went on, “The worst kind of film is an exquisite corpse, where you’ve got, like, the face of an elderly man and the body of a mermaid.” Corbet is known as a sensitive and enthusiastic collaborator, but he believes that the director’s ultimate responsibility is to the finished work of art. “I think it requires a truly obsessive level of devotion that is borderline unhealthy,” he said. “It’s like an affliction.”
Corbet was born in Tempe, Arizona, in 1988, the only child of a single mother who worked in the mortgage industry. His cinephilia started young. As a little kid, he told me, “I was obsessed with Turner Classic Movies.” For an early graduation—kindergarten or first grade—his grandfather gave him a VHS of “Citizen Kane.” If he admired a movie, he would seek out everything the director had made.
When Corbet was seven, he and his mother moved to Glenwood Springs, Colorado, a city between Aspen and Vail, where his grandparents and uncle lived. “It’s more blue collar, or certainly it was then,” he said. In those pre-Internet days, Glenwood Springs was one of a handful of casting hubs around the country for child actors. (Hanna Hall, the girl who screams “Run, Forrest, run!” in “Forrest Gump,” grew up nearby.) Corbet’s grandfather saw an ad for a movie audition in the newspaper and suggested that he go. The film was Alfonso Cuarón’s “Great Expectations.” He was too young for that project, but ended up with a manager and an agent.
“I was not that outgoing as a kid,” Corbet told me. He booked some commercials and small speaking roles in television, but knew that he wanted to pursue acting only if he could work in film. His mother agreed. “She had worked in advertising, in Chicago, and had seen so many kids coming in to sell Skippy peanut butter,” Corbet said. “I think that part of the reason I never fell victim to that was her level of awareness, of just being, like, ‘Look, you can do it, but try and make sure that you do it your way.’ ”
By the time he was twelve, Corbet was booking more jobs, and he and his mother moved to Los Angeles. Soon afterward, he was cast in “Thirteen,” Catherine Hardwicke’s tale of tween girls gone wild, as Mason, the older brother of the rebellious middle schooler played by Evan Rachel Wood; Corbet himself turned thirteen during the shoot. The film, which became an indie juggernaut after its release, in 2003, was produced by the British studio Working Title, whose executives then approached Corbet about “Thunderbirds,” a sci-fi action-adventure film based on an English television show from the sixties. “It was right after ‘Spy Kids’ had been an enormous success,” Corbet explained. He was cast as Alan Tracy, the fourteen-year-old protagonist, who, in the course of fighting a criminal mastermind, flies rocket-like contraptions, dangles above gnashing machinery, and says things like “Time to thunderize!” The movie was filmed in London over eight endless months; the script kept being rewritten, necessitating several reshoots. “It was my first experience of dealing with the Hollywood rigmarole of so many cooks in the kitchen,” Corbet told me. He had a similar experience a few years later, while working on a season of the show “24.” “I realized, if this is what being a performer means, I’m not willing to be this,” he said. “I felt totally out of my element.”
Back in Los Angeles, Corbet was sent a script for the director Gregg Araki’s “Mysterious Skin,” adapted from the novel by Scott Heim. The film, which came out in 2004, tells the story of two small-town teen-agers, Brian and Neil, who were molested as kids by their Little League coach. Neil, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, responds to the abuse by becoming a promiscuous hustler. Corbet played Brian, who suffers memory loss and comes to believe that he was abducted by aliens. The role required a heartbreaking innocence; Brian, prone to fainting spells and terrified of sex without knowing why, lives in a kind of suspended childhood. Corbet found that working with Araki, an audacious independent director associated with the new queer-cinema movement, clarified his creative priorities. He told me, “It suddenly made me feel like I could breathe again.”
At seventeen, Corbet moved to New York to shoot “Funny Games,” Michael Haneke’s English-language remake of his Austrian film of the same name. Corbet was cast as Peter, one of two psychopathic young men who torture a family vacationing at a lake house. If he wanted to shed his G-rated “Thunderbirds” image, “Funny Games” obliterated it. Haneke renders Corbet’s all-American charm—the hint of baby fat still in his cheeks, his blue eyes, his cleft chin—as a sinister mask for nihilistic evil; dressed in white polo shirts and golf gloves, Peter and his co-conspirator, Paul, played by Michael Pitt, act like Freddy Krueger but look like models in a J. Crew catalogue. Corbet’s performance is all the more frightening for being so subdued. Pitt’s Paul is the charismatic one; Peter, who speaks in a voice barely louder than a whisper, has the disconcerting fragility of a starstruck follower.
After “Funny Games,” Corbet said, “I felt like I’d gotten everything out of performing that I needed to.” He had already started making his own music videos; “Protect You + Me,” a short that he shot with the “Funny Games” cinematographer, Darius Khondji, got an honorable mention at Sundance. But interesting work kept coming. At one point, Corbet took a draft of “The Childhood of a Leader” to several of Lars von Trier’s producers; instead of offering to back the film, they asked whether he would appear in von Trier’s next project, the operatic science-fiction drama “Melancholia.”
Corbet, who dropped out of high school around the time he came to New York, looks back on this period of his life as one of intensive education. Von Trier and Haneke, he told me, “couldn’t be more different. One is all about control, and the other one is focussed on chaos.” Haneke famously shot his American “Funny Games” as a frame-by-frame re-creation of his earlier work, and Corbet described his direction as a kind of obsessive choreography: “Take two steps forward, two ingressive breaths, and then put your left hand on the counter.” With “Melancholia,” on the other hand, “you barely had a sense of whether the cameras were even rolling.” But Corbet loved both extremes. What he didn’t respond to was the noncommittal middle ground.
Corbet shot “The Childhood of a Leader” when he was twenty-five, leaving acting behind for good. Many directors cast themselves in their first films. Corbet wasn’t tempted. “I was never that comfortable in front of the camera,” he told me. Directing, he went on, “really requires objectivity, and, unfortunately, I just don’t think anyone is beyond vanity.”
Corbet’s experience of working with some of the world’s great filmmakers undergirds his conviction that films live and die by the degree to which directors are able to execute their vision. It’s rare to be “like, ‘Oh, I can’t wait to see the studio cut,’ ” he said, dryly. But, at the same time, “I don’t believe in this fêting-the-maestro kind of thing.” Growing up on film sets dispelled any lingering auteur mystique: “I just saw how much they all struggled, and how difficult it was for them to bring their projects to life.”
It was late in the morning, a few weeks after the party at the Leopard, and we were sitting together at Public Records, a cavernous hi-fi record bar and vegan café near Corbet’s home in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn. Corbet, who has spent years lovingly assembling his own hi-fi system from secondhand equipment, admired the quality of the speakers as he tucked into a bowl of coconut-milk yogurt. He worries about his blood pressure. Corbet is serious in his thinking and frank in his talk; he gives the impression of someone who has never quite known how to relax, although lately he has turned to yoga (the hot kind). At home, he drinks only tea, a self-imposed precaution. On set, he guzzles coffee “like it’s gasoline.” During another conversation, at a different café, I watched Corbet down three Americanos in the space of an hour, his fingers trembling as he lifted the cup.
“It’s been an intense, gruelling period,” Corbet told me. He was speaking of the present—Fastvold’s shoot in Budapest, which had taken place during the hottest summer on record; the promotional crunch around “The Brutalist,” which had him travelling constantly—but also of the past decade. Corbet shoots his films quickly; “The Childhood of a Leader” was filmed in twenty-four days, “Vox Lux” in twenty-two, and “The Brutalist,” which is more than an hour and a half longer than either, in only thirty-three. Financing these projects, by contrast, has been a drawn-out battle. “The Brutalist” took seven years to get off the ground. At a press conference in Venice, Corbet, recalling the fight to get the film made, had choked up. “We were always about to start,” he told me. It required a large ensemble, which meant coördinating numerous schedules; to secure financing, it needed a star. Finally, after years of assembling a package for financiers, Corbet and his team began to shop it—in March, 2020, the first week of the pandemic shutdown. Momentum stalled. Corbet compared the situation to a house sitting on the market: “It’s like you’re on Zillow. ‘What’s wrong with it? Is it fucking haunted?’ ”
Corbet is no stranger to precarity. When he was trying to make “The Childhood of a Leader,” he applied for dozens of grants and got none. With “Vox Lux,” a demanding investor defaulted a week before the film was supposed to begin shooting. Meanwhile, the apartment building where Corbet lived with his family in the West Village burned down; he and Fastvold had neglected to obtain renter’s insurance, and they lost everything. “You’re always faced with the possibility that this one might be your last,” Corbet said. “And I think that, if you’ve devoted your entire life to one medium, there’s nothing more devastating. Every dancer worries about getting kneecapped.”
“The Brutalist” dramatizes this agonizing situation in its central relationship, that of László Tóth and his American patron, the self-made Pennsylvania industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren. Their first meeting is inauspicious. Tóth arrives in New York in 1947 and soon goes to live with his assimilated cousin, the owner of a furniture store in Philadelphia. One day, the men are commissioned by Van Buren’s son, Harry (Joe Alwyn), to remodel the study at his father’s grand countryside estate as a birthday surprise. In the space of a week, Tóth transforms the dark, stodgy room into a modernist light-filled marvel lined with cabinets that unfurl, like the sails of a ship, to reveal Van Buren’s book collection. At its center, he places a sinuous chaise in the style of Marcel Breuer or Mies van der Rohe, elegance incarnate.
Ambushed by the changes, Van Buren reacts with fury. But, when he discovers that Tóth trained at the Bauhaus and was celebrated in Budapest before the Nazis declared his work “anti-Germanic,” he changes his tune. He commissions Tóth to design the Institute, which he believes will put Doylestown on the cultural map. The ensuing collaboration between the men gives the film a dark, electric charge. Van Buren initially hails Tóth as a genius; his support offers the architect a chance to reclaim not merely the professional identity the war stripped from him but, in exercising his artistry, the essence of his humanity. At the same time, in holding the purse strings, Van Buren holds the power, and he doesn’t let Tóth forget it. Played with devilish deviousness by Guy Pearce, he is all square-jawed charm and coiled, glinting menace—a fearsome antagonist in the guise of a benefactor.
One source of support for Tóth is his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones). At the film’s start, they have been separated by war; stuck in Europe with the couple’s niece, Erzsébet sends her husband loving letters. After she makes it to the United States, their marriage suffers from scars both visible and concealed. Malnutrition has confined Erzsébet to a wheelchair, and the couple struggle to bridge the emotional gulf that has opened between them. Before the war, Erzsébet worked as a journalist; as she tries to restart her own career, she resents the isolation, and dependency, that Van Buren’s commission imposes on them. But she stands by her husband’s vision. When he tells her of his decision to sacrifice his fee—their livelihood—for the sake of his towers, she doesn’t bat an eye.
Corbet and Fastvold were a creative team before they were a couple. When they met, Fastvold, who grew up in Norway, was married to the musician Sondre Lerche; she invited Corbet to work with her on the screenplay for her first feature, “The Sleepwalker” (2014). Corbet characterizes their transition from friendship to romance in less than romantic terms—“Basically, one day we realized, ‘We already have a life together’ ”—but their coupledom has flourished alongside their collaboration. Jesse Ozeri, an executive producer on “The Brutalist,” described the pair’s ethos to me as “Let’s never take a day off, because our lives are about our art.”
“It’s been something very powerful and binding,” Corbet told me. Fastvold directs second unit on Corbet’s films, and vice versa; they research and write their films together, a process that Fastvold called “symbiotic.” He likes to write at night. She prefers early morning. “I’ll just open up the computer and I’ll see where he left off and I’ll continue on, and he’ll do the same,” she told me. In the middle of the day, they sit side by side and compose different pieces of the story at the same time.
“I had a lot of specific ideas about Erzsébet,” Fastvold said. Both she and Corbet have architects in the family; her grandfather designed housing in Norway following the Second World War. Her grandmother, on the other hand, “was a starved intellectual” who was only able to get an education after having children. When it came to depicting Erzsébet, she went on, “I wanted to show her character as something different than what we’ve seen portrayed in so many of these kind of stories about a brilliant man and his frustrated housewife at home waiting with the cold supper, angry that he’s prioritizing only his work. I wanted to mirror, more, a relationship between two equals.”
From her mother, a novelist, Fastvold has inherited what Corbet calls “an effortless knack for story and structure,” which functions as a useful counterbalance to some of his more experimental impulses. Before they met, Corbet, stung by a rejection from a Cannes incubator program, had set aside his screenplay for “The Childhood of a Leader”; Fastvold persuaded him to pick it back up, and helped to make it work. “I think he was so focussed on every scene being perfect immediately that he got in his own way,” she said. “The rule that we follow now is that you write five pages every day. You can’t criticize them until you’re done. Then you go back and revise and revise.” A few months before the film was scheduled to begin shooting, Fastvold, pregnant with Ada, went into labor prematurely while the couple were on a train from Cannes to Paris. Doctors put her on bed rest, so that is where she and Corbet prepped the film. Six months later, the family was on set. Corbet’s teen-age cousin flew in from Colorado to babysit.
“The Childhood of a Leader” takes place in rural France during the final days of the First World War. The title character’s father (Liam Cunningham) is an American diplomat involved in drafting the Treaty of Versailles, and much of the film unfolds in the big empty house where he has installed his family as he participates in the negotiations. The story is broken into three chapters signalled by title cards, each corresponding to a tantrum thrown by the protagonist, Prescott. He pelts churchgoers with rocks; he gropes the breast of his French tutor and refuses to leave his room. His beautiful, distant mother, played by the French-Argentinean actress Bérénice Bejo, treats these outbursts as insurrections to be suppressed. As his father pursues the doomed project of bringing peace to Europe, we watch Prescott sharpen his will against that of his uncomprehending parents, the better to impose it on the world.
A period film starring a child would be a heavy lift for any director, let alone a novice. “I realized that the only way to get the movie made was to do it without a safety net,” Corbet told me. Though he had hoped to shoot in France, he eventually decided on Hungary, where his money would go further, and where child-labor regulations were not as stringent. Prescott is played by the ten-year-old Tom Sweet, a first-time actor who was spotted by casting agents while kicking around a soccer ball with his friends in London. Legally, he could be on set for only six hours a day, which meant that Corbet had to maximize every minute of the shoot.
“He was incredibly assured for a first-time filmmaker,” the cinematographer Lol Crawley, who has shot each of Corbet’s features, told me. Corbet and Fastvold’s screenplays specify what the camera is doing at every moment in relation to the performers; to save time and money, Corbet shoots minimal coverage, which leaves him without extra angles or compositions to draw on in the editing room. One climactic scene involved a violent confrontation between Prescott and his father that takes place at the end of a single, four-minute-long shot. The camera begins by following Cunningham as he enters the house and finds Bejo in suspicious conference with a family friend, played by Robert Pattinson. It then travels with him up the stairs, where Prescott has barricaded himself in his bedroom, and lingers on Cunningham’s back until he breaks down the door. “I was, like, ‘Well, listen, we have a child. It’s a lot to try to achieve. What if we get a leading shot or something in there that gives you a cut point so you actually have a chance of stitching this together without relying on one take?’ ” Crawley recalled. “Brady very elegantly took me to one side and said, ‘I only ever want to cut to another shot if it gives more information to the audience.’ ” Crawley was impressed by Corbet’s light touch: “There’s no ‘I don’t want to do that.’ I went, fine, my job’s done. His job is certainly done. And off we went.”
“The Childhood of a Leader” shares its name, and some narrative details, with a novella by Jean-Paul Sartre that describes the coming of age of an antisemitic fascist. But, whereas Sartre narrates the incident that sets his character on the path to tyranny, Corbet leaves the transformation a mystery. The film ends with a coda, set some twenty years after the main action. Hemmed in by soldiers, a crowd has assembled in the courtyard of a grand building festooned with evil-looking red banners to cheer the arrival of Prescott, now an adult. The score, composed by Scott Walker, swells as the image comes unfixed and begins to tumble and spin. To get the shot, Corbet put the camera in an aluminum crate and sent it surfing through the crowd, with crew members dressed as extras. The effect is nauseating. It is only an intimation of things to come, but it is enough.
While watching “The Brutalist,” I was struck by a similar shot at the very beginning. As the camera bumps obscurely around a dark, crowded space, we glimpse Tóth for the first time, and hear his anxious voice. Knowing that the movie concerned the Holocaust, I thought that we might be inside a cattle car, and my stomach tightened. In fact, we are in a ship; suddenly, the screen fills with light as Tóth emerges on deck and shouts for joy as the Statue of Liberty comes into view. The moment is at once rich with relief and freighted with ominousness: Lady Liberty is filmed upside down.
Corbet sees each of his films as a reaction to the one before. After the elliptical, claustrophobic “Childhood,” he told me, “I was so tired of early-twentieth-century drapery and textiles. All I wanted to do was exist in the world of pleather.”
“Vox Lux” opens in 1999. The first half of the movie introduces Celeste (Raffey Cassidy), a delicate American fourteen-year-old who survives a school shooting. When she sings at a memorial for her classmates, she makes the national news, and soon gets a record contract and an unscrupulous manager (Jude Law). The second half of the film picks up in 2017. Now in her thirties and played by Natalie Portman, Celeste has become a global sensation. She’s also a monster, petulant and egomaniacal, flagrantly abusive to the people closest to her. How did that pure, unaffected girl turn into this bedazzled, booze-chugging cliché? Corbet refuses to tell.
Reaction to “Vox Lux” was as sharply split as the film itself. In the Times, Manohla Dargis described it as “a deeply satisfying, narratively ambitious jolt of a movie” and wrote that Portman “gives the kind of aggressively big performance that teeters precariously, and at times excitingly, on the edge of vulgar indulgence.” In this magazine, Richard Brody criticized the movie’s “banal slightness of content” and Corbet’s “ponderous direction.” Corbet noticed a similar tension at early screenings: “It just completely divided the room. People were arguing about it, and I thought that was fantastic. I felt, O.K., there’s something really transgressive here.”
“Vox Lux” came out the same year as Bradley Cooper’s “A Star Is Born,” but Corbet’s presentation of pop stardom is far more jaded than Cooper’s Cinderella story. Celeste isn’t particularly talented; in fact, her sister is the better singer. Corbet was fascinated by the ways that an average person, trapped by sudden celebrity, might both buckle under pressure from the public and come to depend on it. He intended the two parts of the film to serve as a stylistic provocation: minimalism versus maximalism, good taste versus bad. “I felt that the only way to appreciate how disturbing that transformation, or transfiguration, truly is was to see the brutality of it,” he said. The crudity was the point.
Corbet is frank about what he considers to be the “toothlessness” of most contemporary films. “I think you really have to dare to suck to transcend,” he told me. “Everyone is so concerned with sanding down the edges to make everything more palatable and create something that doesn’t ruffle any feathers.” Both “Vox Lux” and “The Brutalist” serve, in part, as an indictment of the profit-hungry capitalist world’s neutering impact on art, but Corbet can be just as critical of indie movies as he is of studio-backed ones. “Art-house cinema and big tentpole releases are equally algorithmic,” he said. “I’ve seen ‘4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days’ remade forty-five times. I know why; it’s an extraordinary film.” Still, he went on, “There’s this kind of faux subtlety, and an allegiance to good taste, that I find really frustrating. It’s the same recipe, regurgitated over and over.”
“American indies have been conditioned to think small,” Dennis Lim, the artistic director of the New York Film Festival, told me. With “The Brutalist,” Corbet has gone full maximalist. The film, which takes place over a span of thirteen years and ends with a coda set two decades later still, promises, from its first moments, to be a capital-“E” Event. To the sounds of orchestral rumbling, a title card announces the “overture.” (Scott Walker, who scored Corbet’s previous movies, died in 2019; the music for “The Brutalist” was composed by Daniel Blumberg.) A few moments later, as Tóth scrambles above deck, the score reaches such a visceral crescendo that I was surprised to discover that, though the film was less than five minutes old, I had a lump in my throat.
“The style of this movie is very unapologetic,” Corbet told me. At press conferences and in interviews, he has tended to shut down questions about its length by asking whether anyone would criticize a book for being seven hundred pages long rather than one hundred. (Well, yes, a weary literary critic might reply.) But its run time is only one of the ways that “The Brutalist” announces its grand ambitions. To imbue the movie with a mid-century feel, Corbet told me, “there’s a certain bluntness that’s required, also in the style of performance.” This is particularly apparent in Pearce’s Harrison Lee Van Buren, who, with his tawny skin and bristly mustache, resembles nothing so much as a lion ready to pounce. Pearce gets the film’s best laugh lines, making a meal of the phrase “intellectually stimulating” not once but twice. “He never evolves,” Corbet said. “There’s a lack of nuance which is very, very intentional”—not least in the character’s name, stacked as it is with American Presidents and one notable traitor.
Corbet is adamant that his attempt to channel fifties cinematic style is intended neither as homage nor as pastiche, but as “a jumping-off point.” And yet, he confessed, “we were slavish to how you would have to operate a camera at that time.” VistaVision cameras are big machines, and so noisy that in their heyday they had to be “blimped”: enclosed within custom-made cases to dampen their rattle, the lens just poking through. “It’s a cumbersome piece of kit,” Lol Crawley explained—not merely for the operators but for the actors, too, who had to get used to performing intimate scenes with the camera humming three feet away. Because the film is loaded horizontally rather than vertically, the amount of information that can be recorded in a given frame is more than doubled. The magnificence of the technology is on full display in a bravura sequence in which Tóth and Van Buren travel to the marble quarries of Carrara, Italy, to select a piece of stone for the altarpiece that will sit in the Institute’s chapel. Accompanied by foreboding drumbeats, the camera revels in the dazzling expanse of jagged white stone, the earth cracked open for centuries in pursuit of capital, or beauty, or both.
Whatever the final consensus on “The Brutalist,” it will serve as an object lesson in the creativity required to turn less—in this case, a budget of ten million dollars—into more. “You have to think very economically, and almost in a minimal way,” Judy Becker, the film’s production designer, told me. Becker’s responsibilities on “The Brutalist” included designing the Institute, which, for all its looming presence onscreen, was filmed, in exterior shots, as a scale model. To imagine László’s aesthetic sensibility, she had consulted the work of Marcel Breuer, another Hungarian modernist immigrant of Jewish extraction, and, more darkly, immersed herself in the architecture of concentration camps, a built environment with which Tóth would have been intimately familiar. At a panel following the New York Film Festival screening, Becker got into a lively back-and-forth with Adrien Brody, each of them declaring, “I am László Tóth!”
Corbet looked on, laughing. “People are attracted to characters that are innocent,” he told me later, when I pressed him on what he thought explained the film’s appeal. But Tóth isn’t innocent, really. He is prickly, pigheaded, fallible, frequently exasperating. He is also the first Corbet character you want to root for.
On a Monday afternoon in early November, Corbet went to Three Lives & Company, a bookstore in the West Village, to pick out something to read on a plane. He was leaving the next day for a two-week trip, first taking his mother for some sightseeing in Lisbon, where “The Brutalist” was screening at a festival, and then going on alone to London and Los Angeles. Lately, he had been submerged in “The Decline of the West” (1922), the German reactionary Oswald Spengler’s abstruse two-volume opus predicting civilizational collapse. “It’s fantastic, but some of it is very, very dry,” he said. “When I’m on an airplane, I just want to, you know, read a story.”
Corbet browsed the display tables, keeping an eye out for the new Anne Carson. “I just finished this,” he murmured, pointing to “Herscht 07769,” a recent novel by the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, which is more than four hundred pages long and consists of a single sentence.
I observed that Corbet’s Hungarian connection remained strong.
“Well, in the ten years that I spent in Hungary, he’s definitely the most significant cultural figure there,” he replied. Krasznahorkai has frequently collaborated on screenplays with the director Béla Tarr, known for using long, lingering takes in his films—“a shot for a sentence,” Corbet said.
Books are important to Corbet’s filmmaking, too. His movies are full of literary allusions and references; their chapter structure and special typefaces—even the dense, angular layout of their production credits—give them a consciously novelistic feel. (The first section of “The Brutalist” is called “The Enigma of Arrival,” after V. S. Naipaul’s account of emigrating from Trinidad to the United Kingdom.) When he was growing up in Colorado, Corbet worked at a bookstore and was paid in merchandise, amassing a hefty collection of first editions. In his teens, he discovered W. G. Sebald, who became his favorite writer. Sebald opened for him the possibilities of “virtual history”—a fiction that feels like a genuine account of the past. If Corbet’s movies can be said to belong to a single category, that is it. Even “Vox Lux,” his most contemporary effort, pointedly ends the year before its release, the better to frame it as a historical consideration of the start of the American twenty-first century.
“I think my bigger life project is exactly that: to really augment our traditional or classical relationship with history and storytelling,” Corbet said. The past feels alive to him. Watching the opening ceremony for the Paris Olympics, Corbet had been horrified to see the macabre display of severed Marie Antoinette heads by the Seine. “I was, like, this woman suffered!”
What he hopes to do is bring history to life for other people. When Corbet decided to make a film about an architect, he consulted the architecture historian Jean-Louis Cohen. Could he think of a single European architect who got trapped by the war and was later able to build a new life in America? Cohen couldn’t. That answer chilled Corbet. “The Brutalist” hardly shows anything from before the war; nor do we see the Holocaust’s horrors. The clearest glimpse that we get of the past is in the form of a still photograph, projected onscreen during the film’s intermission, of László and Erzsébet’s wedding. The couple is surrounded by smiling family: ghosts. Think of all the people who trained at the Bauhaus and never made it out of Europe—the work they never made, the buildings that never got built. “The Brutalist” is dedicated to them.
Survival alone hardly guarantees success. Until its final moments, “The Brutalist” leaves viewers in suspense as to the fate of the Institute, and of Tóth. “The film is about immigration, full stop,” Corbet told me, as we left the bookstore and set off for Union Square, where he had a clandestine appointment with some hi-fi guys. As progress on Tóth’s building stalls, and he finds himself on the verge of being pushed to the social and professional periphery, he grows embittered toward the Van Buren family as well as the nation they so comfortably represent. “We tolerate you,” Harry Van Buren tells him, in the tone of someone who does not.
The next day was November 5th, the election. Corbet had spent the better part of a decade thinking about the nineteen-fifties, the same era hailed as a beacon by the once and future President. It had not escaped his attention that, in December, 2020, with a month left in office, Trump had signed an executive order to promote “beautiful” federal architecture: in other words, classical buildings that harked back to antiquity and the Renaissance. Among the structures identified as “unpopular” and “unappealing” were the Hubert H. Humphrey Department of Health and Human Services Building and the Robert C. Weaver Department of Housing and Urban Development Building, both designed by Breuer. For Corbet, the immigrant and artistic experiences are intimately linked. “They don’t want us here,” Tóth seethes to Erzsébet. “They” felt the same way about provocative buildings, paintings, sculptures, films. Some still do.
Corbet’s mind was moving toward the future. “I think that my immediate response to the reception of this movie is, like, ‘Well, now you have an opportunity to make something that really pisses everyone off,’ ” he said, laughing. He already had a draft of a new screenplay. “At the end of ‘Vox Lux,’ ” Lol Crawley told me, “we literally wrapped in a parking lot at night, and he swung around with a copy of a book on brutalist architecture and said, ‘This is the next one.’ ”
The new project, which is set in the nineteen-seventies and early eighties, will also deal with immigration, this time of the Chinese to California. Its style will be looser; genre-wise, it will draw on horror and Westerns. On Halloween, Corbet and Fastvold had a group of friends over to watch “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” Ada was included, until it became clear that a slasher flick about cannibals might not be the best choice for a ten-year-old. The film had been Corbet’s choice; Fastvold had never seen it before. “She was, like, ‘You’re insane that you thought that this was O.K.,’ ” Corbet said. “But I also was, like, ‘The filmmaking is so great!’ ” He had thought that Ada, having spent her life on movie sets, would be able to distinguish the fake from the real, but the level of craftsmanship was so excellent that it got to even the most jaded viewers among them. This had given him ideas. “It seems like a good time to really shake viewers,” he said. “I think they can handle it.” ♦
