Brady Corbet: ‘It’s a fucking film’ | Little White Lies

Interviews

Brady Cor­bet: It’s a fuck­ing film’

22 Jan 2025

Words by Hannah Strong

Man in red coat sitting on bench against abstract blue background.
Man in red coat sitting on bench against abstract blue background.
The mav­er­ick writer/​director espous­es the need to stick behind your aes­thet­ic and cre­ative ideals at all costs.

Over six years in the mak­ing, three and a half hours long shot on 70mm with a 15-minute inter­mis­sion and focused on a Hun­gar­i­an archi­tect escap­ing the ter­ror of 20th cen­tu­ry fas­cism for a new life in Amer­i­ca – The Bru­tal­ist ticks a lot of art­house epic box­es. It sounds like the sort of film that social media blowhards joke about film bros lov­ing, and yet Brady Corbet’s third fea­ture, co-writ­ten with his wife Mona Fastvold, is an ele­gant, search­ing, brac­ing­ly human expe­ri­ence, anchored by Adrien Brody’s mag­nif­i­cent turn as Lázs­ló Tóth and Corbet’s sin­gu­lar vision. But, as Cor­bet explains, mount­ing a film as tru­ly ambi­tious as The Bru­tal­ist was an archi­tec­tur­al feat in itself.

Brady Cor­bet: This is the longest film that I’ve ever made, and I’ve had to watch it from start to fin­ish many, many more times than I have any oth­er film. I’m super­vis­ing the cre­ation of all of the 35 and 70 mil­lime­ter prints, and then because it’s an organ­ic process. No one except maybe my edi­tor, knows the film quite as obses­sive­ly as I do, and so things hap­pen: there’s a dropped frame, there’s some oth­er issue. Then you have to start over and make a new reel. It’s a lot of work – and I real­ized that I couldn’t real­ly get a sense of the rhythm and flow of the entire movie unless I start­ed at the begin­ning, which was so, so annoy­ing. I am tru­ly sick of it. [laughs] I think that you spend so many years dwelling on these themes, on this process, and I just can’t wait to have a lit­tle bit of men­tal space free up.

Also I just need a rest. My wife and I wrote a musi­cal that she was direct­ing this sum­mer, and I direct­ed all the sec­ond unit for it, and Daniel, our com­pos­er, he wrote all the songs – it’s about the Shak­ers, about Anne Lee emi­grat­ing from Man­ches­ter to the Unit­ed States in the 18th cen­tu­ry – and it was a real­ly gru­el­ing job as well. Nor­mal­ly, we don’t have this lev­el of over­lap with projects, and because I was still in full-on post-pro­duc­tion, I was mix­ing and grad­ing and doing the net­work grade and super­vis­ing the print at the same time that I was shoot­ing for her and pro­duc­ing her movie with her…it was real­ly a lot, and then I expect­ed this film to be released six to nine months after we pre­miered, because, it didn’t seem like the type of movie that any­body would be in a real rush to put out, but then all of a sud­den it became very clear that the best time real­ly was now.

And I’m very grate­ful that peo­ple are cov­er­ing The Bru­tal­ist, because I gen­uine­ly believe that if the film does even just okay, com­mer­cial­ly speak­ing, that it’s a huge win. The movie was not made for very much mon­ey, so for it to sort of jus­ti­fy itself, and erase our debt, we don’t have to do crazy num­bers. Then maybe peo­ple will think, Oppen­heimer at three hours long was not a fluke.

Two men in coats and hats embrace in front of a vintage green train carriage.

At the start of the sum­mer, before any­one had seen it, they heard the movie was three and a half hours long and it was like a bul­let to the head. But Oppen­heimer, regard­less of how peo­ple felt about it, it was an extreme­ly good thing for the movie indus­try. And I think it would be real­ly great to recog­nise there’s still an audi­ence for movies about adults, for adults – movies that real­ly have some­thing on their mind. I real­ly strug­gle with how many of the folks that have the pow­er to green light a project oper­ate from a place of fear, because the issue is that, as a result of few­er peo­ple going to the cin­e­mas, every­one has become espe­cial­ly risk averse. It becomes a very vicious cycle where peo­ple also stop show­ing up for things because there’s noth­ing orig­i­nal for them to show up for.

And as a par­ent with no sav­ings account, I can say that even for us, going to see a film in the the­ater is a choice. By the time we pay for a taxi, pay for child care, get din­ner, con­ces­sions, what­ev­er – it’s expen­sive. So I real­ly feel like it needs to be an event, like it needs to be some­thing that demands to be seen on the big screen. I would just want to do every­thing I pos­si­bly can to help that expe­ri­ence along, because, as a fel­low cinephile, I think that it’s quite fright­en­ing. And also what we expe­ri­enced dur­ing COVID, the idea that we could lose so many of these insti­tu­tions, was real­ly upsetting.

I spent so many years gen­uine­ly con­cerned that Kodak would go out of busi­ness, because when it comes to cel­lu­loid, there are cer­tain fixed costs with man­u­fac­tur­ing the stock in par­tic­u­lar, that they just can’t do it for less. Kodak is so great about work­ing with film­mak­ers to try and make it work. And the thing that’s so psy­chot­ic is that film on this movie account­ed for maybe 1.5% or so of our film’s total gross bud­get. So I think it’s kind of insane that you have to defend this line item all the time, which is the film. I find it so weird. Why would we pri­or­i­tize any­thing before the film itself? It’s a fuck­ing film. It goes to film fes­ti­vals, you know, it’s the Motion Pic­ture Acad­e­my of Film.

So many peo­ple in Hol­ly­wood have very lib­er­al pol­i­tics, and yet they have a very con­ser­v­a­tive response to any­thing cul­tur­al. And for me, these things are not sep­a­rate. For me, it’s equiv­a­lent to canned veg­eta­bles being served in schools all over Amer­i­ca, where I’m like, of course these kids don’t like their veg­eta­bles, because they’ve nev­er had a fresh veg­etable. They don’t know what it is. I find it insane that so few peo­ple seem to see the direct link between what hap­pens to the cul­ture when you are poi­son­ing them all the time. I thought lib­er­als were sup­posed to be lib­er­al, and right now, in every way, it feels like lib­er­als are more con­ser­v­a­tive than they’ve ever been historically.

But to say some­thing that’s a lit­tle bit less cyn­i­cal, I love that the medi­um of film brings me togeth­er with peo­ple of all dif­fer­ent back­grounds, all dif­fer­ent ages. I have real rela­tion­ships and I’m able to work fre­quent­ly with peo­ple that are in their 70s or 80s, on every aspect of the movie, whether it’s the cam­era team or we’re mak­ing the score with. That is the one aspect of it which I find rather life affirm­ing because it’s easy to dwell on all of the obstruc­tion­ists that make it very, very dif­fi­cult to make a movie. But that actu­al­ly is the excep­tion to the rule. Almost every movie has an antag­o­nist – some­times there’s mul­ti­ple antag­o­nists – but I think that over­all, out of the 300 peo­ple that are con­tribut­ing their time to these projects, most have their heart in the right place, and are all work­ing towards a com­mon goal, which is some­thing you dreamt up in your bed­room. That is pret­ty mov­ing and nev­er lost on me and I don’t take it for granted.”

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