Brady Cor­bet: ​‘It’s a fuck­ing film’

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 20^th 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 18^th 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.

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.”