Brady Cor­bet has cast his ambi­tious next film The Brutalist

Brady Cor­bet uses mod­est bud­gets to make films of gar­gan­tu­an, epochal scale. His direc­to­r­i­al debut The Child­hood of a Leader prof­fered an ori­gin sto­ry for fas­cism in the 20^th cen­tu­ry through a trou­bling char­ac­ter piece about a young sociopath, and his flashy fol­low-up Vox Lux tack­led the new mil­len­ni­um, its first half book­end­ed by a fac­sim­i­le of the Columbine mas­sacre and the ter­ror­ist attacks of ⁹⁄₁₁.

He seems to regard movies the same way many of the great nov­el­ists regard­ed lit­er­a­ture: as a way to chart, make sense of, and iden­ti­fy the haz­ards in the course of humanity.

These his­tor­i­cal ambi­tions will con­tin­ue with Corbet’s next fea­ture, as Dead­line reports. His ges­tat­ing film The Bru­tal­ist has tak­en on a cast replete with stars, includ­ing Joel Edger­ton, Vanes­sa Kir­by, Sebas­t­ian Stan, Mar­i­on Cotil­lard, and Mark Rylance. They’ll be joined by Vox Lux stars Raf­fey Cas­sidy and Sta­cy Mar­tin, as well as the Ivo­rian-French great Isaach de Bankolé.

The script (coau­thored with his wife and fel­low cineaste Mona Fastvold) assumes an epic scope, cov­er­ing three decades as cel­e­brat­ed archi­tect Lás­zló Toth (Edger­ton, hope­ful­ly doing his best on a thick East­ern Euro­pean accent) sifts through the after­math of war. Both Holo­caust sur­vivors, he and his wife (Cotil­lard) flee the dev­as­ta­tion of World War Two to start anew in the States, where moder­ni­ty as we know it first starts to crys­tal­lize. But ​“their lives are changed for­ev­er,” a phrase that could fore­tell any­thing from an inde­cent pro­pos­al to a cat­fish­ing, by an enig­mat­ic new client (Rylance).

In case this much wasn’t evi­dent from the sweep­ing syn­op­sis, the Dead­line item iden­ti­fies this pro­duc­tion as ​“an epic saga and an uncon­ven­tion­al love sto­ry,” script­ed and per­formed in a mix of Eng­lish, Yid­dish, Hun­gar­i­an, and Ital­ian. I, for one, look for­ward to the prospect of Cotil­lard kvetch­ing about all this verkak­te indus­tri­al­iza­tion and cor­po­ra­ti­za­tion and oth­er soci­etal mishegoss of the expand­ing mid­cen­tu­ry America.

As Fastvold’s newest solo film The World to Come pre­pares to run at the Venice Film Fes­ti­val this week, dis­tri­b­u­tion rights for The Bru­tal­ist will be up for sale at the Toron­to Inter­na­tion­al Film Festival’s buy­er mar­ket. The ten­ta­tive pro­duc­tion plan places the start date for shoot­ing in Jan­u­ary of next year, posi­tion­ing it for a pos­si­ble run in the 2021 fall fes­ti­val season.

Venice gave Vox Lux a lov­ing home in Com­pe­ti­tion back in 2018; in the brighter, safer world of the future, per­haps we fes­ti­val-starved press will be able to see it on the banks of the Lido.