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The Brutalist, 2025
The Brutalist, 2025(Film still)

The Brutalist: How Brady Corbet Made 2025’s Most Epic Film

Uncompromising in vision, The Brutalist is an American epic of stunning allegorical intent. Here, Brady Corbet talks about algorithms and the future of filmmaking

Lead ImageThe Brutalist, 2025(Film still)

The concrete dreams that crawled from the wreckage of postwar Europe is the subject of Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, an American epic of stunning allegorical intent. At its heart is the rivalry between two men – László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor relocated to rural Pennsylvania, and Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), a businessman who becomes his patron. This uneasy alliance of art and commerce helps bring Toth’s wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), and niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) to America, where they’re invited to live with the Van Burens. It also leads to mounting conflict as Tóth, a student of the Bauhaus school with a spiralling drug habit, tries to wrestle his vision for a new community centre into being.

Corbet’s film signals its ambitions from the start, turning an image from The Godfather Part II upside-down in its opening moments and reaching its peak some three hours later, with a scene in the belly of a mountain that recalls Daniel Day-Lewis’s milkshake moment in There Will Be Blood. Shot over 33 days for a mind-boggling sum of $10m, it’s an epic feat of American mythmaking – 15-minute intermission and all – produced for a fraction of the cost of the films it evokes. (It’s also up for ten awards at this year’s Oscars.)

Below, Brady Corbet reckons with the difficulties he had getting The Brutalist made, and how a film about American postwar society becomes, through Tóth’s unshakable vision, a story about our own relationship with the future.

Alex Denney: The war brought suffering on a huge scale, to the point where it made people question what it meant to be human. And yet you had people like Tóth, in The Brutalist, who were still dreaming of the future.

Brady Corbet: We speak about the lives lost in the Second World War, but we don’t speak so frequently about the livelihoods lost. Of course, nothing is equivalent to a human life, but that is also an extraordinary loss. When we were researching the film we visited the Bauhaus archives, and what really struck me was how many of these ideas would remain unrealised. We really let that influence the design for the buildings [in the film]. It was [this] idea of creating a monument to the artists and designers who were never able to realise their projects. Because, in reality, it was only a select few that were able to escape Europe in the 1930s.

AD: Do you feel as a culture we’ve stopped believing in the future?

BC: I have the sense all the time that everything feels like Urban Outfitters Presents now, that there’s no new fashion. And sometimes I feel frightened that there is nothing new left. But we also live in a moment when new technology and TikTok is telling us otherwise. That’s something that Harmony Korine, for example, is devoting a lot of his new work to. I do think there is something new on the way, but I don’t know what that is yet, and I think we have to encourage filmmakers to experiment. Otherwise we’re just giving into the algorithm, and the algorithm is not going to give us a new David Lynch.

AD: You mentioned recently how you had voices in your ear after Vox Lux saying you were never going to make a film again. Is it vindication for you to have this film finally out in the world?

BC: Absolutely. For so many years I was carrying my frustration at having to defend this project like a sack. But I’m sure I’ll have to fight all over again. The fight never ends! If you’re trying to push the medium further [you have to fight]. I’m just trying to learn how to be zen in a world where there’s a lot of noise and discouragement. Because a three-hour, 40-minute movie about a mid-century designer was not the most popular elevator pitch, believe it or not. I had to figure out a way to do the movie for a number that many people felt was impossible to make it for. And I had a lot of folks telling me this was never going to work.

AD: There has to be some degree of obsession to try and see a story like this through to completion, hasn’t there?

BC: This is the thing I’m always wrestling with. So you know, it’s a Monday morning, and you’ve wasted four years of your life on a project that everyone is telling you is never going to get made. And your daughter wants piano lessons, and that same day you’re offered some stupid gig that will solve all of your financial problems. But it will chew up a year of your life, maybe two. I think that a career is a body of work, and it’s not great to think about projects as [separate]. It’s one big project. I wouldn’t be able to make my next film ­– which is a very radical, daring movie, and very different to The Brutalist – if I’d not made The Brutalist. My feeling is that work doesn’t beget work, good work begets good work. But it’s not always the easiest decision to make when you are trying to do right by your family. And I think [those issues] are reflected to some degree in the film.

AD: Why did you choose architecture in particular?

BC: It’s funny, when we think about artists we tend to think about van Gogh painting in a field, but so much of my life as an artist is [about management]. It’s the same thing with architecture. There’s a managerial aspect of the job that is very unromantic, but it’s also very definitive of the job. Let’s say you’re working with 300 people on a movie. There might be 50 to 60 of them you’ve worked with before, and the rest are total strangers. There’s a lot of ways a day can go wrong. We really tried to include some of those details in the movie, even though it’s not a neo-realist film, it’s a 1950s melodrama with a 1950s-style. But there are details in there that are hopefully very true to life.

AD: It makes me think of a quote from David Fincher, You don’t know what directing is until you’re looking at 60 people, asking you what colour this bucket should be.

BC: If I was standing before a room of young filmmakers, I would tell them this is a very, very difficult job to recommend. I love it and I can’t imagine doing anything else. But mostly I do it out of out of some weird compulsion. For the last two years, after working 14 or 15 hours in post[-production] I would still go home and write for two or three hours on my new project. It’s like a sickness; I can’t ever give myself a rest.

AD: The Childhood of a Leader [Corbet’s first film] was released on the eve of the first Trump presidency and was interpreted by a lot of people in light of that. Is it weird that this film comes out at the start of his second presidency, especially with all the talk of migration and forced deportations?

BC: Yeah. He actually had a mandate in his first term that was called Make Federal Buildings Beautiful Again, which was specifically about destroying brutalist landmarks around Washington, DC. But I think that every great historical piece is a reflection of the present. I’m always trying to make the past something that’s tangible for viewers. In the same way Vox Lux was about, you know, Real Housewives of New Jersey glossing over the trauma of a post-Columbine, post-9/11 America, this film was about brutalism as a reaction to the era of I Love Lucy, of all those 1950s sitcoms that were glossing over what had just happened in the 1940s.

The Brutalist is out in UK cinemas now.

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