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Taking Everything to Extremes: A Conversation Between Michael Almereyda, Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold on The Brutalist
Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce in The Brutalist “Architecture is a language. When you are very good, you can be a poet.” So wrote the spectacularly good Brutalist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. It’s a fair guess Brady Corbet and his longtime co-screenwriter Mona Fastvold have encountered this quote, and that they recognize the affinities between architecture and movies. Being good in either medium requires a sure knowledge of your materials, an ability to translate imagined designs into physical reality, to assemble and guide teams of inspired collaborators and to know or intuit more than a little about visual textures, space and light and how to move people through them. Another essential requirement: an aptitude for gathering immodest sums of money.
As if to prove how uncomfortably obvious this comparison can be, there aren’t all that many great or even good movies featuring architects as central protagonists, and they almost never leap, as Mies would have it, into poetry. (Notable exceptions include two feverish American movies starring Gary Cooper: Henry Hathaway’s Peter Ibbetson [1935] and King Vidor’s The Fountainhead [1949].) And so The Brutalist stands apart. A passionately inventive epic, bristling with ambition, historical references and allusions to cinematic predecessors, the film showcases larger-than-life performances within a story that both adheres to and challenges timeworn ideas about genius and suffering, art and commerce, personal and collective truth. Yes, Adrien Brody’s dispossessed visionary architect gets blindsided by the contradictions of capitalism after being uplifted and betrayed by a demonic patron (Guy Pearce), but Corbet and Fastvold also want us to track the tenderness and strength of their primary female characters (played by Felicity Jones and Raffey Cassidy), to bring forth a bitter and possibly ironic apprehension of the film’s thematic frame: the Holocaust’s long shadow experienced within the haze of the American Dream.
I made my way through the Brutalistic poured-concrete lobby walls of A24’s New York offices to interview Corbet and Fastvold on December 9th, 2024. We could have talked about their film for a few hours, I felt, and they, on that day, certainly did, as our Q&A was wedged within a tightly crowded press junket. The following is distilled from my allotted twenty-five minutes; the conversation was rounded out later, briefly and over the phone, with Brady alone.
Almereyda: I’d like to start with a blunt, personal question: How did you meet? How did you start working together?
Fastvold: We were introduced by a mutual friend, Chris Abbott, when I first came to New York around 2003, 2004. We became friends right away. I was in the process of trying to make my first film, so Brady and I started working on the script together, then I convinced him to act in it, because he was still doing that at the time. Begrudgingly! You didn’t really want to, but I made you. Chris and Brady both acted in that. Brady and I were editing it together as well and worked on the film the way that we’ve continued working on our films. It’s a very clear director on each, but still we were very much involved with each film from beginning to end. Later on we became a couple, but we made that film first.
Corbet: I think part of the reason we’re still able to work together is because that’s how we met. I think it might have been more difficult if we were a couple and then tried to work together. But it’s sort of the only way that we know how to relate to each other. We’ve always done it that way.
Almereyda: The first time I saw The Brutalist, I was so dazzled by the shot of László (Adrien Brody) emerging into the open light and seeing the Statue of Liberty that I wasn’t really conscious of the voiceover, and I didn’t remember how the movie is framed by shots of the intensely distressed niece: two shots—one dissolves into the next—and then she comes back at the end. Can you talk about why that became important? I assume it was in the script.
Corbet: It was. The screenplay always opened that way, with this brief moment with Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy). I think it’s because we were concerned about contributing to the canon of films about male genius and legacy. These characters were very much written to their circumstances: the character is a middle-aged man because, in the 1950s, of course he would have been a middle-aged man. The characters are Jewish, because it was predominantly Jewish Architects that were at the Bauhaus before it was eventually shut down by the National Socialists. We felt that it was extremely important that the film seems to be about his legacy as it relates to his body of work, when in fact it is about his legacy in the path that he’s forged for his niece having inadvertently given a voice to the voiceless. We wanted to draw everyone’s attention to this character that otherwise would have seemed quite peripheral.
Fastvold: Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) enters into the film right at the beginning through the letters, so we wanted her presence to be strong from the very beginning. She is a female character that we’re not so used to seeing in these types of films about brilliant men. It was important to us to show this relationship that we recognize so much more—other artists that we know, couples with two intellectuals who respect one another—instead of this cliche of the sad housewife at home who’s angry that he’s fulfilling his dreams and she’s not. That’s not Erzsébet at all; she says, “You should go and make whatever the hell you want to make and I’m going to support you. I understand what you’re making and why you’re making it, but stop being such an asshole about it.” What she’s saying is, “Don’t lose yourself in it.” She has perspective that he doesn’t. We can both play that role with one another, to say, “Don’t lose perspective. Come back down to earth. Ground yourself. See this from a pragmatic point of view.” And I thought that her character being portrayed that way versus this other cliche—
Corbet: This doting housewife—
Fastvold: Yeah, or frustrated, where she’s like “I don’t understand why you’re not thinking about money and food on the table.” She says, “I’ll take care of it. I’ll figure out that. Just don’t lose yourself in this toxic relationship.” Because she’s not fooled by him at all. She sees who Van Buren is from the get-go.
Corbet: It’s something that’s usually celebrated after the fact, but as you well know, making something requires a level of obsession that always borders on the unhealthy. You are, in fact, putting all of your relationships second. It’s the only way that these things tend to get off the ground. I mean, now more than ever, when there’s not a real appetite for very transgressive or radical or ambitious movies anymore, or films that have a poetic logic.
Almereyda: That’s a great way to put it.
Corbet: That is just something that’s not widely embraced at the moment. You have to just kick the tires over and over again. Films tend to get made as long as you don’t stop making them. It took seven years, but it could have easily been another 10 to 15. Look at what Jon [Jonathan Glazer] went through bringing Under the Skin to life. How many iterations were there? Or Coppola this year with Megalopolis. It can be an even longer journey. So, I can’t really complain too much about the fact that it took as long as it did, especially given that COVID was smack dab in the middle of all of it.
Almereyda: You landed in exactly the right spot. I read about your initial cast, and it seems like you’ve transcended it. You wound up with exactly the right people.
Corbet: Yeah, these projects are pretty self-selecting. The people that you should be working with are usually the people that you do end up working with, because [the parts are] very difficult. On the page, I think that most actors know right away whether or not they can pull it off, and they’re really big asks. The Hungarian accent alone can easily drift into Bela Lugosi territory if you’re not really careful. Everyone that worked on the movie had a really strong sense of what to do with it. I don’t feel that we teased these performances out of the cast. Everyone came really prepared. We’re fortunate that as we’ve gotten older and have a body of work that gives context to who we are and what we do, normally now the people that show up to work with us know what they’re making. Which is really helpful, because when we first started out, it was different. People didn’t know what to make of it. They thought “OK, I like it enough maybe to be involved,” but they didn’t know exactly what they were making. But with this film, everybody was excited to be making this movie with us, and I feel like that was the first time we’d ever really experienced that.
Almereyda: I know Ethan Hawke is a big fan of the movie, and we made a biopic about a tormented genius that was also made for very little money—much less than yours—and one of my regrets, especially in relation to your film, is that I didn’t allow the character to stop sulking in disappointment, fuming about being thwarted and cheated. Adrien Brody’s performance has so many wild mood swings. So many displays of joy—exaltation and triumph countering every episode of disappointment. The pendulum swings are part of the great energy of the movie. How much were you conscious of giving him these highs and lows?
Corbet: On the page, the character was a lot colder, and there is a natural warmth that Adrien imbued the role with. Even in the sequence that establishes his impotence at the brothel in the beginning of the movie, there’s still something sweet about him. That’s something that’s hard to plan for. One of my good friends saw the film, who also read the screenplay, and was like “I was really surprised by the fact that there’s so much warmth and joy in the movie.” I think that as a filmmaker it’s so important that if somebody has a better idea, don’t shut it down. I’ve really learned that the sort of myopia of conceiving of a project—that’s one thing and that’s one part of the process. But if you don’t share it with everyone—if that warmth was something that I had tried to stifle in Adrien’s performance, I just don’t think it would be the same film. If there’s a new texture or a new color, I always try to remind myself that just because it’s a surprise doesn’t mean that it’s wrong.
Fastvold: And Alessandro Nivola and Adrien had just immediate chemistry. They played off each other so well. There’s that playfulness that Alessandro brought out of Adrien’s character. That was a history that he chose for the characters that’s just hinted at in the script, but they really played into it.
Almereyda: That makes the betrayal more hurtful.
Fastvold: Yes! And I think it was a great choice of Alessandro’s to bring that into the relationship. There’s this little moment when they finished the library and they’re doing this little tap dance moment that they just improvised. Or did you tell them to?
Corbet: No, they totally improvised it. What I loved about it too is that those guys are both so clever—it feels very of the period. Normally, as you know, when you’re making a period piece, you don’t invite a lot of improv because people start saying things like “like,” “um,” “awesome.” But their point of reference for all of this was so strong. Alessandro’s grandfather, for example, is Constantino Nivola, a sculptor that had sculptures in many of Breuer’s lobbies, so he really understood what the film was about. Everyone was really connected to it. And Felicity, who doesn’t have a family history in common with the character, it was just subject matter that she was really passionate about and interested in. 85% of the people that might have been right for the roles physically, they just didn’t get it. That’s what I mean when I say the project was self-selecting, because it ruled a lot of folks out.
Fastvold: Felicity also infuses her with so much warmth and strength, which I thought was crucial for the character. Same with Adrien. It could have been played much darker. Obviously, the successes and failures of the character, they’re scripted. But the specificity of his enjoyment of it all is something that I really love in good performers.
Almereyda: It gives you a full human being.
Corbet: Yeah, Adrien, like, eating an apple! He just keeps on doing it. As I cut, he’s like “I’m not quite done yet.”
Almereyda: I want to get back to what you’ve called the poetic logic of the film. It’s a film of great oppositions, thematically, that get translated into images and dramatic conflicts. But one of the things that’s amazing to me is how history is active within the film. This is shared with The Childhood of a Leader, the feeling that history is like an underlayer, like canvas showing through a painting, but it’s also a shadow pressing down on the characters. One of the ways that you key the audience into this is with archival footage and music, rooted in history. How much of that is done in advance? How thorough and deep does the research go before you start?
Corbet: Some of the archival sequences, for example, were scripted, and some were found along the way while we were pulling stuff for those sequences. That extraordinary footage we found on the history of the Christian tradition and industrialization in Pennsylvania, when we
found that we were like, “Oh, well, we’ve got to open the movie this way. I mean, this is so fantastic.” I often speak about W.G. Sebald, Robert Musil, Ingeborg Bachman, V.S. Naipaul and Paul Celan—a handful of writers who have this feeling for history that is in the text that transcends the linear nature of the way that we’ve been taught history, where it’s just basically dates and events, cause and effect.
Fastvold: “This is a fact. This is what happened.”
Corbet: It’s not fungible!
Fastvold: Who knows? I mean there’s of course facts, but when you start writing history, it all becomes slightly fiction as well. There are always details and parts of it that are—
Corbet: —invented by the storyteller. I just feel a more honest relationship with history from Sebald than I do from even great historical writers like David McCullough, because they found a way to this concussed feeling of the trauma and burden of history. And the fact that this is something that we carry with us all the time—
Fastvold: —connecting events that are not obviously connected. I think it’s what Sebald does a lot. He speaks about something that happens in one part of the globe, and then another, completely unaware of each other, but somehow these events speak to him.
Corbet: A butterfly flaps its wings. But it’s one thing to say it, it’s another thing to feel it. And I think it’s the reason that I’m constantly doing these historical projects. I’m using the same actor to play a character and then that character’s child or family member. It’s because it’s one thing to say that history repeats itself, it’s another thing to feel it as a viewer. There’s something about it that’s quite disturbing. It really challenges the system of belief that you have built over the course of the entire film.
Fastvold: It’s a little Brechtian in that way where you’re saying like “Wake up and let’s talk. Let’s look at the ideas and the things that we’re talking, not just be lulled and seduced.”
Corbet: It’s an architecture which reveals its nuts and bolts.
Fastvold: Similar to Brutalism.
Almereyda: Absolutely. There’s a quote from Goethe read in voiceover early on, in Erzsébet’s letter: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” That’s obviously important to you. Did you have that going into the film?
Fastvold: I don’t know when it came to me in writing that letter. I just don’t remember when I stumbled upon it or how. But it somehow felt right. I wanted us to know that the person writing was a person who had knowledge of history and literature. The way she’s writing to László has almost a sense of humor, albeit a very very dark one, but still saying, “It’s as bad as you thought it would be, not worse.” And all these things establish the way that the two of them spoke to one another. It’s important.
Corbet: I also think that there’s never been a period of my life where I wasn’t reading Goethe.
Fastvold: That’s true. (Laughs)
Corbet: There’s only a handful of writers that are just always there. It’s so rich and it just feels like the foundation for almost all great literature. It’s sort of like, okay, well you had Homer, then you had Goethe.
Almereyda: 300 years later, he’s still going strong. But that opposition between freedom and imprisonment is one of the many polarities in the film. It’s very dramatic and very clear. Two words that get thrown around, or woven into the film, are “beautiful” and “ugly.” How conscious or careful were you in how those words come up? Because they felt very intentional and strong.
Fastvold: They are, but they are also funny. I mean, “beautiful” and “ugly” is completely subjective, right? So, it’s funny László is using it as an insult—twice! Most of all “ugly,” to me, is childish, almost because it’s so subjective to say.
Corbet: But artists are sort of juvenile. One has to hold on themselves across so many decades; there is a part of every artist I’ve ever met that has just never changed. I remember working with Michael Haneke many years ago and Michael had quite a juvenile sense of humor—in the loveliest way, because it was very disarming, especially when you’re expecting the maestro. I always found him surprisingly delightful. In my experience, serious work is not necessarily made by serious people, so there is something in this portrait of an artist that we wanted to explore. We didn’t want to rehash the tortured genius in a way that that one might fall victim to.
Fastvold: It’s not about “This is so brilliant, this construct of all my brilliant ideas creates this marvelous thing.” He’s like, “This is beautiful and interesting, and what you’re doing is ugly and stupid.”
Corbet: At least he’s in pursuit of a progressive idea. Whether the building is beautiful or not, I don’t even really know.
Almereyda: One of the other elements of humor comes from Guy Pearce’s performance—nailing Van Buren’s pretension and self-deception. In any case, I think the film carries a lot of traditions on its back, a legacy of references and ambitions, but the way sex works in the story is unusual, unexpectedly bold. How much did you calibrate the explicitness of it?
Fastvold: I love writing sex scenes and love scenes in films, because I think it’s so important. It’s such a wonderful tool to show a relationship, to understand a relationship, without spelling it out, without talking about it. It’s a wordless way that we can communicate through images the subtleties of that dynamic. Of course, there were parts of the story that explore sexual violence, but that is not about sex, that is about power. The love scenes to me were really a way of showing how Erzsébet is stronger in many ways than László, and how she can hold their trauma—not just hers but his as well. They’re reclaiming their bodies, which have been taken from them.
Corbet: That’s exactly why, in the first five minutes, it was so important to be confronted with his impotence—here he is, completely unable to perform after what he’s been through—and then to see the journey of becoming a human being again. Finally, there’s also something kind of funny about the upside of drug abuse, which allows these two characters that couldn’t really connect prior to that night. There’s one last thing, which is a technical thing, but it’s something that I feel like you might really appreciate. The sex scenes were all shot by putting a 435 into service mode. So essentially what it does, because the aperture never closes, is it streams the highlights and gives the images this extraordinary quality where it’s like an Aura-cam. You can see both of them and the glow of their skin. [An “aura cam” is a toylike camera employed by psychics to track a person’s aura, naturally, as displayed in a range of soft gassy colors.]
Almereyda: I was wondering about that. And how did you discover it?
Corbet: Lol Crawley and I love this film, Love is the Devil, about Francis Bacon from the early 90s. John Mathieson shot it and there was something very interesting, which was that they couldn’t access Bacon’s paintings. And because of that effect, without the cardinals and stuff, of the streaming highlights that come from all of the Bacon paintings, they figured out how to evoke those paintings. Lol and I had never seen it before and we don’t think we’ve seen it since, so it was really this insane process of trial and error. Because the first time that we shot with it, nothing ended up on the negative. It was an extremely expensive process because it’s like ceramics; you’re not paying for the bowl, you’re paying for the bowls that broke. It was a bit like that. And you know, the third time was the charm. And Mona shot the sex scene while we were busy shooting something else. Mona shot a lot of the most beautiful stuff in the movie. We kept stumbling when we were trying to do it, because you have to put tape on the camera, so you can’t see anything. Once you put it in service mode, you can’t look through the eyepiece anymore.
Almereyda: The tension between aesthetics and politics is underlined when the story shifts to Italy and a captivating new character shows up, Orazio the stonecutter, who has left the mountains just once, “to beat the corpse of Mussolini with my bare hands.” He says he’s an anarchist, having fought in the Resistance, trapping fascists in caves and dropping stones on them. Is Orazio’s backstory as important as I think it is? How did you decide to present this rhapsodic interlude just ahead of a scene where Van Buren reveals himself to be an absolute villain?
Corbet: The film is sort of a 1950s melodrama. Everything is taken to operatic extremes, and Guy’s character is very much like an antagonist you would have in a film from mid-century a la James Mason. And I felt that this transgression in Carrera had to happen there—it wouldn’t mean the same thing elsewhere. The marble quarries felt like the appropriate visual allegory because the film is very much about this agent who wants to possess that which cannot or should not be possessed. The quarry is a very beautiful place, but a very violent place. We take a bite out of Mother Nature and she gets pretty pissed off about it. There are constant rock slides, it’s quite dangerous, and ultimately it’s one thing for it to be the source of Michelangelo’s Pietà, but now it’s primarily a material that’s used to surface people’s bathrooms and kitchens.
We had this rule that every single character in the film has a backstory and a different relationship with the Second World War. Isaach De Bankolé’s character as well as Guy’s character as well as Joe Alwyn’s character—there are no absolutely peripheral characters. Everyone has a link to the central theme of the movie, which is about this post-traumatic generation processing what happened with the Second World War—with both World Wars really, back to back. I looked at a lot of different guys for Orazio. Salvatore Sansone is predominantly a painter and a writer, and he looks so incredibly iconic, and has this beautiful voice, so I asked if he would do it. He gives it this kind of mystical quality, like the old man in the mountain.
Almereyda: He has a timelessness. It’s rare in a movie for a character to drop in and drop out and have so much impact.
Corbet: He’s a poet. I knew that he would bring this heft to it that other folks wouldn’t, given the short amount of screen time.
Almereyda: It seems that Orazio’s political virtue is fused with his belief in beauty, and then Harrison sort of challenges that idea, with his preening admiration for beauty. Can you talk a little about this moral imbalance?
Corbet: You have two characters, László and Orazio, interfacing with their oppressor. The oppressor has a new face, a new nationality. László and Orazio have a mutual respect, and a respect for the place, whereas for Guy’s character, he’s almost aroused by the impossibility of this two- or three-ton stone that’s been channeled from the earth being pillaged. It really turns him on. When I sent it to Guy, I said “It’s really fetishistic, when he puts his face against the stone.” What’s funny is I watched buyers doing exactly that, putting their cheeks against the marble, when we went to scout. There’s something mystical about it, but it’s also inherently absurd, because it is just a big piece of stone.
Almereyda: Was Orazio’s disembodied dialogue planned to play this way, before you shot the scene, or did you arrive at it in the editing?
Corbet: It absolutely wasn’t conceived that way. The reason we decided to basically lose sync, and trail off in these overlapping voiceovers, was because the fog was impossible for us to control, so we had major continuity issues. I was like, “We’ve already established this language earlier in the film, with the night where Alessandro, Emma and Adrien are dancing to Dinah Shore, when the reality becomes a little like liquid, with flash-forwards and flashbacks to earlier in the evening.” The whole idea was to represent how one might recall that evening, so that when he gets kicked out and Atilla accuses him of making this pass at her, there’s at least a part of you that wonders “Well, I don’t know. Did he? Did I miss that?” So the language had been established that allowed us to do that with Orazio.
Almereyda: When Orazio pours the water over the marble, is that a conventional thing to do?
Corbet: It is a conventional thing to do. It’s essentially the same ingredient that’s in toothpaste, I forget what it’s called, but they cover the stones in it to preserve the stone. Basically whenever a buyer arrives, they pour water on the stone so that you can see veining and assess the quality of the veining.
Almereyda: The whole scene shimmers.
