By Kirsten Coachman
Every so often, a film comes along firing on all creative cylinders. “The Brutalist,” the award-winning 215-minute epic from writer/director Brady Corbet (“Vox/Lux”), is one such film.
Corbet won the Silver Lion at last year’s Venice Film Festival for Best Director. The film picked up Best Picture—Drama, Best Director, and Best Actor—Drama (Adrien Brody) at this year’s Golden Globes. The film has eight nominations at the upcoming Critics Choice Awards, including Best Picture. Brody was also recognized with an acting nomination at the upcoming Screen Actors Guild Awards.
The film follows a fictional architect, László Tóth (Oscar winner Brody, “The Pianist”), who flees post-war Europe in hopes of capturing a small piece of the “American dream” while being separated from his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones, “The Theory of Everything”). Settling in Pennsylvania, László is tasked with creating a library for a notable industrialist, Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr. (Emmy Award winner Guy Pearce, “Mildred Pierce”), which eventually leads to a more ambitious project and an ongoing creative power struggle which co-writer Mona Fastvold (“The World to Come”) notes was part of the impetus for “The Brutalist.”
“I would say it really started thematically with that, with someone who wants to possess something that cannot be possessed. Not just a collector who is collecting art but also wants to collect the artist. And that’s really why we ended up shooting that end sequence in Carrara; Carrara is a beautiful visual example of us trying to possess part of nature that we cannot possess. Like the big chunks and bites that are taken out of the mountain and the mountain just crumbling down, the rock slides are happening there, and how this material soon will be gone, and there won’t be anything left of it because we need to use it to beautify the bathrooms and the kitchens, you know?” Fastvold told Art U News this past December, highlighting the irony.
The visuals
To better capture the look and feel of the post-war era, Corbet opted to shoot “The Brutalist” in VistaVision. This higher resolution format for 35mm widescreen was created in 1954 by engineers at Paramount Pictures. However, shooting in this particular format came with its own unique set of technical challenges.
“There aren’t that many of [the cameras] around, so we had one camera, so if a camera goes down, then you’re not just renting the camera, you are renting the backup that you normally get from a rental house, and things like that, so it’s a little tricky in that regard,” explained Crawley. “But we had wonderful technicians with us in Budapest who were familiar with it.”
Crawley mentioned that Corbet had the idea early on to put the camera on Steadicam, which the cinematographer notes was “quite ambitious.”
“And we achieved it, most notably through the sequence where László is sort of hungover and he finds this cat in the street and he walks through. That was a notable steadicam VistaVision moment,” said Crawley. “It’s not terribly ergonomic, but the images you can capture on it, because it’s twice the neg area of a standard 35mm picture camera, far outweigh the technical challenges of working with it.”
Crawley has worked with Corbet on each of the director’s films—“The Childhood of a Leader,” “Vox/Lux,” and now “The Brutalist,” and explained that there’s a dialogue between the two about how certain scenes are going to be shot. As an example, Crawley spoke about a scene toward the end of “The Brutalist,” where a damning accusation has been made toward Van Buren and Corbet had specific intentions on how he wanted to shoot it.
“[Corbet] said, ‘I want this to be a Steadicam shot that turns into a handheld shot that then turns into Steadicam again.’ And I was like, “Hmm. Well, I’ve never heard of such a thing,” recalled Crawley. “Obviously, he didn’t want to cut ‘cause that would be a way of doing it, of course. It’s all one shot that barely fits on a magazine of film.”
The solution was the film’s Steadicam operator in Budapest, Attila Pfeffer, who Crawley noted, essentially shot the entire scene Steadicam. “Our operator literally was handholding the Steadicam and then putting it upright as a Steadicam is,” said Crawley about the shooting of the sequence.
The score
When it came to creating the score for “The Brutalist,” musician and composer Daniel Blumberg shared that the process began early on, from the script.
“I went into pre-production before they started shooting to sort of map out where we thought score would be,” said Blumberg. “[Corbet and I have] had a dialogue creatively for years, so it came out of that, really.”
As they started working on the film, the piano became the initial focus of the score. Blumberg discussed how interfering with the instrument’s strings could result in a uniquely different kind of sound—in this case, almost industrial-like.
“The prepared piano was like, where you’re literally putting screws in the strings of the piano,” explained the composer. “‘Cause the piano has huge strings, and if you interfere with ‘em—John Cage used to do it and make percussive sounds. It felt connected to the building element, the construction, but also when we were thinking of László’s character and that sort of lyrical, melodic, and intimate sort of piano sounds, it could kind of cover a lot of ground.”
Blumberg shared that Corbet wanted to shoot the film’s sound music during a sequence when László is on the boat to America, explaining, “It was an incremental process of developing what the sounds would be. So everyone on the boat at the start of the film, everyone was kind of responding to the music. Lol was shooting to the music, Adrien was moving to the music, so it was quite integrated from the start.”
Getting to the edit, Blumberg said they (he and Corbet) had “quite a picture” of what they wanted to achieve through the music. From that point, it was about being specific in the musicians that he wanted to work with on the film, including 88-year-old pianist John Tilbury.
“He’s one of my favorite artists,” said Blumberg. “I know his work with prepared piano where he’s kind of messing around with the strings, but also the more lyrical where he is playing the key bed and lots of space and lots of feeling. And he did that for László’s cues.”
The production design
The library commission from Harry Lee Van Buren (Joe Alwyn, “The Favourite”) is the first real insight into László’s inner workings and his bold and forward-thinking aesthetic as an architect. Though production designer Judy Becker (“American Hustle”) aimed to channel the character throughout the filming process, she shared that the vision for the library was “driven by the location, in a sense, through the script.”
“[László] does a transformation to this library that is old fashioned and dark and unappealing,” explained Becker. “And the location we ended up finding was a glass winter garden. It has a little round area at the back and then glass walls. And the only wall that wasn’t glass was this big entrance that leads into the rest of the house.”
The space was scouted in November of 2022 for filming, and Becker said that it “seemed perfect” except for the glass walls, as the script called for adding shelves to the space. And then a lightbulb moment hit.
“I had an inspiration on the spot that we would build these cabinets that would go from floor to ceiling and would go in a forced perspective toward the back,” said Becker. “So it would change the shape of the room pointing toward this circular back. And it would be floor-to-ceiling cabinets that would open and close.
“And it just came to me in a flash like that in front of people, which never happens, you know, ‘cause usually they’re looking at you saying, ‘So how would you transform this space?’ And I’m like, ‘I need to think about it for a while.’ And then they start offering ideas, and you’re like, ‘Ugh.’ But in this instance, I was like, ‘I know what we should do with this space.’ And I had a lot of time to think about the movie because we pushed a bit.”
When she got to Hungary for filming in 2023, Becker had her assistants construct a paper model of László’s library. It included the single lounge chair as seen in the film, and she shared that Corbet turned the flashlight on his phone through the ceiling of the model to light it.
“And then we had the cabinets opening, which is driven by the script that the shelves László designs opens up like a flower,” she said, adding that the script really allowed for the design process for the library to come together in an organic way. “The concepts that were in the movie, the sort of organic flow of the whole story. I think that when you immerse yourself in that, and when you have a script like that, and a director like Brady and writers like Mona and Brady—really collaborators, everybody was a collaborator. I think that it does flow organically and I think you become part of this team and part of this process, and everybody is channeling the same thing.”
“The Brutalist” is now playing in theaters.