Earlier this year, as word began to spread about The Brutalist, much of the discussion revolved around a startling set of numbers. For his third film as a director, it took Brady Corbet seven years to finance and independently produce a period epic of three and a half hours—based on an original screenplay—for only $10 million. His achievement looked even more singular in light of its decidedly uncommercial story, which follows a postwar Hungarian architect (Adrien Brody) as he deals with a demanding American patron (Guy Pearce) and navigates his own complicated relationship with his equally remarkable wife (Felicity Jones).
Although the subject matter might feel daunting, the film itself, which has emerged as a serious awards contender in advance of its release by A24 on Friday, is both emotionally compelling and surprisingly accessible. As an actor, the 36-year-old Corbet has worked with visionary directors on some of the most challenging projects imaginable—from Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen to Lars von Trier’s Melancholia—and he stands on the verge of an artistic breakthrough that rivals their greatest accomplishments. More than any movie in a long time, The Brutalist seems to expand the possibilities of independent cinema. I spoke to Corbet about how he willed it into existence. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Slate: If I were an aspiring director, The Brutalist would be the most exciting indie movie I’d seen in years. What advice do you have for young filmmakers?
Brady Corbet: Something that’s very important to me is building a company which is a safe haven for really individual voices. It has never been more difficult than it is right now to make radical films that don’t subscribe to the algorithm. I think the most important thing is to produce one’s own films. I know many young filmmakers that are under the impression that the producers should handle production and that they should just focus on making the movie. But the reality is that you cannot do your job unless you are the one moving sand around in the box. You don’t have to compromise on the what, but you have to be willing to compromise on the how.
In horse trading with a line producer, trying to keep everything on budget, I’ll give up two or three days of shooting to be able to shoot on the format of my choice. [The Brutalist was filmed on VistaVision, which hadn’t been used for an entire American movie in over six decades.] I really encourage young people to do their own digging on how much things cost. Because it’s so helpful to know the price per foot of film stock this year. How much does it cost to rent a crane? What’s the daily rate? What’s the weekly rate? I’ve gotten to a point where if someone says, “We can’t afford that,” I’m able to respond, “Yes, we can. We have to give up this and this, but we can afford to carry a Technocrane with us for the run of show.”
At the very beginning, the world seems so big when you’re on your knees. But what they really need to be teaching kids in film school is building a budget and raising money for your project. And there are a few ways to do that. If you’re fortunate enough to have an international passport, whether the U.K. or France or anywhere in Europe, many programs are in place for raising soft money. I’m American, so unfortunately—because we have no cultural minister and don’t really have any meaningful support for the arts—I have to do it the Hollywood way. Which is interesting, because these films really have one foot in the Hollywood tradition and one foot very much outside of it.
I realized that to make films for even over $1 million, I needed to go through the process of having the project sent to various performers. The screenplays were turned down by many performers and their reps for sometimes years. But then eventually one person says yes. And the best way to raise money is to build a package. I’m not saying that someone needs to attach Tom Cruise. Maybe there’s a young performer that had a big year and financiers might be more inclined to invest in a project that they’re attached to. You just build the project brick by brick, and you have to anticipate a lot of rejection. You’re asking strangers to commit two to four months of their lives. That’s a huge investment of time. And it’s much easier to say no than it is to say yes. If you feel confident about your material and you’re not just selling yourself on the delusion, then things tend to work out. But it requires a lot of patience.
I’ve been working on film sets since I was 7, and I’ve been working tirelessly the last 15 years on setting up my own projects. There were certain things that I got a head start on, because there were heads of department that I could reach out to at a young age. But 95 percent of the people that I’ve ended up working with—they didn’t know who I was. I might as well have just been their neighbor. I think folks would be surprised by how many people are very touched to hear from a young person. It’s always clear to me, when I meet someone young, if they’re going to do it or not. It requires a certain self-possession that I immediately recognize.
The Brutalist isn’t the most commercial subject, but when you were writing it, were you thinking in terms of having multiple lead parts that would attract big-name actors?
You want to write material that attracts everybody. You want the costume designers to be attracted to it. You want production designers to be attracted to it. That’s basically your first audience—everyone that you send the material to for the first time.
But for me, so much of this is very intuitive. I’m not that strategic. I don’t write something or make something as a means to an end. Ever. It never occurred to me that the project wasn’t commercial. Because in Hollywood, nothing is ever commercially viable enough. You speak to sales reps that have watched so many projects fall apart that it has made them quite cynical. And no matter who you have attached, they’ll always say, “Oh, you know, a drama starring so-and-so, we can probably only raise maximum $2 million for that.” Of course, somehow a bunch of stuff gets made. And it doesn’t all star Brad Pitt.
I find it really obnoxious when someone says, “Oh, it’s a difficult market.” When [The Brutalist] was finished, it’s the exact same film that has now been seen and received how the film has been received. [That is, very positively.] Even then, most executives didn’t know what to do with the movie. Once you’ve finished it, you would think that they would be able to form their own opinion. But the truth is that Hollywood just usually waits for everyone else to tell them what to think. It was only when the film started getting a reaction—not just critical, but also from the public, which is easier now because of the various platforms where users weigh in with reviews—that it was perceived as being potentially commercially viable.
When you’re writing, do you keep budgetary constraints in mind?
No, but my back-of-the-cocktail-napkin math has gotten pretty good. My depth perception in terms of how long things will take and how much they will cost has become pretty accurate. Because it’s usually pretty consistent. In the beginning, when people would ask, “Well, how much time do you need to rehearse?” I’d be like, “I don’t really know.” And I now know, depending on the length of the scene, I need X amount of hours to set up. I need X amount of hours to shoot.
The reception of the film has been really moving, but it’s also real whiplash for my partner [co-writer Mona Fastvold] and I, because we had certain folks along the way telling us that we might never make another movie again. So it’s important to tune out all that noise. People tend to—in both positive and negative ways—communicate in a hyperbolic fashion, and you have to remain very steady, neutral, and pragmatic when the storm gets hairy.
Was there a particular time when you had to be clever in the face of constraints and ended up with something that surprised you?
We wanted to shoot the beginning of the movie on a real ship, but we were shooting in Hungary, and Hungary is landlocked, other than riverboats, which were not quite what we required. I told everyone, “Don’t stress about it—we’ll just shoot it in a parking garage.” At first everyone thought I was totally insane, except for my designer [Judy Becker], who knew exactly what I meant. But I was like, “Listen, it’s in the dark. We’ll construct a couple of portholes along the way that we’ll flood some light through. If you’re ascending the stairwell of a parking garage, it’s very, very similar to that of a ship and all of the metal bridgeways and stuff. And then we can arrive at that big piece of sky and it’ll all make sense.” Luckily, we didn’t have to do it that way, but I’m 100 percent sure that it would have worked just fine.
Sometimes these very low-rent solutions are the best. It’s how people were making movies in the Pre-Code era or the silent-film era. Every time I’m preparing a movie, I’m usually watching many films from the ’20s because everybody had very modest means at the time. It just wasn’t an industry yet. And it’s amazing how incredibly inventive these films could be. Even the pornography that’s featured in [The Brutalist] from the late 1920s, it’s so visually inventive and editorially so extraordinary. When this executive’s got his feet up on a desk and his secretary comes in, her clothes sort of just fade off of her body. It’s so beautiful.
As someone who’s been building a high-fidelity system in their house for the last two years, I think that analog is worth it for a variety of reasons. Obviously, MP3s and stuff, sonically, they’re just not very dynamic. The same can be said of celluloid vs. digital. The highs are so much higher and the lows are so much lower, and that dynamic range, visually or sonically—that’s what we respond to. These are the best tools. For me, the future of cinema is the past. We have no better technology than large format to make people get off their couch and go see a film in IMAX. And this film is being released in IMAX, which is kind of extraordinary, because it is absolutely on its face an art-house film.
But clearly there is an appetite for real cinema out there. And the pressure is on the filmmaking community to start delivering more ambitious and well-crafted films, and not just trying to ape the style of Nancy Meyers, poorly, over and over again for a streamer. So much of this stuff feels like it’s just churned right out of a factory.
The Brutalist has been called a seven-year project. But the actual shooting schedule was something like 34 days?
It was 33 days.
That’s amazing. There’s another number that’s been bandied about, after it came out in Deadline, saying that your budget was $6 million. Is that accurate?
It was not $6 million. It was $10 million. I don’t really know where that came from, but we can only assume that it has something to do with how much the movie sold for. You’d have to be a real magician to do this at $6 million. It was hard enough to do at $10 million.
You’ve said that you wouldn’t have wanted tens of millions of dollars more but that another $1 million or $2 million would have been nice. Where would that have gone?
Mostly to fees for people to make a living wage. We would have added a week or so to the mix, instead of working 24-hour days. My mixer and I, on the last day, we came in at 8 in the morning and we left at 5 in the morning. Obviously, those hours are untenable and I can’t expect people to work that way. So it would have gone to adding a few days. It just lets a little air out of the tire. It allows everyone to not go into overtime so frequently, and it would have just made the entire process a little bit more relaxed.
And making a movie is such a marathon from nose to tail. And frankly, I don’t think that I have it in me physically to go through what I went through on my last three movies again. I’ve been working seven days a week and through holidays for the last three years, and I’m really exhausted. On the next one, I need to be able to occasionally sleep in. I need to be able to occasionally have a weekend.
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