When critics and audiences alike are raving about a film, it’s usually a cause for celebration. But Brady Corbet, director of Oscar-favourite The Brutalist, was worried when the film he co-wrote with his wife, Mona Fastvold, began drawing comparisons with classics by Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Paul Thomas Anderson.
Running to almost four hours, including a beautifully designed and placed interval, The Brutalist begins as an immigration story. The film joins fictional Hungarian-Jewish architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Holocaust survivor trained at the Bauhaus as he arrives in the US to rebuild his life.
It is a towering achievement. But Corbet was not expecting plaudits.
“This film was really not designed with this sort of reception in mind,” he says, when we meet in London just minutes after the film’s nine Bafta Award nominations were announced. “Frankly, initially, I was concerned. I thought we’d made something rather divisive. It’s a very, very radical movie.”
One of its stars, Joe Alwyn, describes it as “ticking every box of the kind of film that people don’t want to finance these days: shot on film, over three hours long, it’s not got a car chase”.
This is a big film, with big themes and a long running time. But it was made with a comparatively minuscule budget and shot in just 33 days.
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“It’s been long and arduous. The future of the film was very uncertain as recently as last August – so there’s some degree of whiplash,” says Corbet. “The last six months has been one thing, but the seven years of uncertainty and sleepless nights prior to that I’m still recovering from.”
Brody is as good as he’s ever been depicting Tóth’s struggle to find work, to belong, to create, to numb his pain, and to reunite with wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) – before the patronage of industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren – “a wolf in wolf’s clothing”, brilliantly played by Guy Pearce – offers the chance to build a modernist masterpiece.
“This film is about the tug-of-war between art and commerce,” continues Corbet, refusing to give in to his jetlag. “And it’s about otherness.
“Adrien Brody’s story and cultural heritage made him a no-brainer for the role. I was just so happy he wanted to do it. But he also has this grace and sensitivity and warmth that he imbues the character with, which is something I couldn’t have planned for. It’s just who he is. When I’m working with a performer, I try not to get in the way. I’m not telling them how to play their instrument. I’m just adjusting the volume.”
The film’s inception and production mirrors some of the central character’s struggles to stay true to his art when big money comes on the scene. He is commissioned, at great expense, to create a towering brutalist community centre to memorialise his patron’s late mother.
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The Brutalist director Brady Corbet. Image: Kirsty Wigglesworth / Associated Press / Alamy
Corbet makes his feelings brutally clear in the second half about how things generally go when art is in dispute with commerce. “I have been in so many situations where someone is offering to throw a little money at me – which would solve a lot of my family’s hardships, yet it would be very much at the expense of the film. It’s always conditional and it’s very unsettling.
“In the US system, the filmmaker is constantly harassed and it’s not a conducive way to create something when you have something very specific and very tricky you are trying to capture.”
In the film Alwyn plays Harry Lee Van Buren, son of Pearce’s character and therefore a second-generation super-rich American. In his best screen performance to date, Alwyn shows Van Buren Jr as possessing all the entitlement displayed by his father, with none of the outward charm or talent.
Little wonder Fastvold called Alwyn’s performance “Trumpian” – and this is one of the rare occasions that might be received as a compliment.
“Harry is ‘the son of’, searching for his own identity within this big, powerful, wealthy structure and family. All his nastiness comes from a place of insecurity. He’s got real daddy issues and feels displaced by Laszlo, so he lashes out,” says 33-year-old Londoner Alwyn.
“There is something about a collection of people with such power that they can treat others how they want. I didn’t think of Trump as an inspiration for the character, but there are echoes of those big, mega-wealthy families who are able to dispose of people when they want and who are unanswerable.
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“The film makes me think of Trump’s promise to deport all these immigrants and how crazy that seems – the black and whiteness of inside or outside, or us and them. Welcoming people in and embracing them and what they can bring, artistically, culturally, is the most beautiful, amazing thing.”
The film is landing at a big political moment, with Trump’s return to the White House striking fear into communities across the US. And The Brutalist foregrounds an already uneasy element to the immigrant experience – that however talented or assimilated you might be, you are never fully treated as equal, your presence always conditional, outside. It could not be more timely.
“There was a different immigration crisis happening in 2017 when this was written,” Corbet reminds us. “This will, unfortunately, never not be relevant.
“But that’s exactly right. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been chatting with a taxi driver in New York City about how they were a surgeon back at home. The idea that people feel so right-eous about circumstances they were born into is so strange. You’re born into a free-ish country – so I find the idea that you feel so entitled to it to be a strange madness, especially in the US. Because the US is fucking huge. There’s plenty of space for everyone. Have you been to Montana?”
