The Brutalist
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“Another Guy, Another Wig,” Alessandro Nivola Returns to Talk about Almodóvar, The Brutalist, and The Rhino: Back To One, Episode 322
Alessandro Nivola returns to the podcast (Ep. 37 and Ep.170) to discuss three performances he gives in three different films out at the same time this week—Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door, The Brutalist, and Kraven The Hunter. He gifts us with a detailed peek into what it took to build each of these characters. He talks about the interesting way he received a “green light” from Almodóvar in terms of his approach to the role of an Upstate New York policeman, the challenge of balancing adherence to period authenticity with a modern accessibly as Attila in Brady Corbet’s epic, […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Dec 18, 2024 -
“Apple Changed the Whole Landscape of How You Market a Product”: Sebastian Pardo on Crafting Graphic Design for The Brutalist
In late October, A24 dropped a teaser for their highly anticipated The Brutalist, where glimpses of Brady Corbet’s epic flash by as credits and review pullquotes horizontally crawl across the screen like the VistaVision-format celluloid that ran through the camera to capture the picture. It’s a sharp piece of trailer design that formally evokes the experience of the film as much as it serves as a piece of marketing. The design of the scroll also summons the Bauhaus stylings that inspire the architecture of The Brutalist’s subject, László Tóth (Adrien Brody), highlighting the words on screen around evocations of the […]
by Alex Lei on Dec 17, 2024 -
History Made Concrete: Production Designer Judy Becker on The Brutalist
In constructing The Brutalist, his epic of assimilation and survival, Brady Corbet sought a sense of scale large enough to reflect the ambitious vision of László Tóth, a fictional Hungarian-Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor who flees to America with hopes of building a better future. As Tóth works to reclaim his life, legacy and marriage to wife Erzsébet after being forcibly separated from all three, this decades-spanning immigrant saga—which Corbet directed and produced from a screenplay he co-wrote with Mona Fastvold—settles in Philadelphia, where Tóth is offered the commission of a lifetime, albeit at a steep psychological cost. For production […]
by Isaac Feldberg on Dec 16, 2024 -
Careless People: Mark Asch on Gamification, Impunity and 2024 in Film
Juror #2, which I saw the night before the presidential election, concerns a man who looks at his phone while driving, hits and kills a fellow citizen, and keeps going. A year later, summoned to serve on a jury at the trial of the man wrongly accused of the crime, the driver scrambles to escape responsibility for his actions while still telling himself that he’s a good person. Clint Eastwood’s film, a Southern courtroom thriller in the John Grisham mode, has been called a throwback. For one thing, the juror’s car is a midsize SUV from Grisham’s mid-1990s heyday, not […]
by Mark Asch on Dec 16, 2024 -
NYFF 2024: The Brutalist
Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist took seven years to realize, a process he understandably seems to have found traumatic—both the film and interviews he’s given about it are about how financiers are monsters. Per Corbet, The Brutalist “was made for under $10 million. But I still need millions of dollars. That’s very complicated because it means I often have to interface with people with whom I don’t share the same ethics and morals.” Process is text: Anyone who’s ever worked for an equally oblivious and imperious rich person, one whose underlings can only work out how their near-impossible plan of action […]
by Vadim Rizov on Sep 27, 2024 -
Venice Film Festival 2024: Before the Revolution
I was trying to make sense of my notes on Happyend when I noticed him. Arms akimbo, left hand drumming his gun holster, the cop was patrolling the press room looking equal parts annoyed, bored, and baleful. I glanced away; when I looked up again, another colleague had joined him in inspecting the crowd of journalists typing at their laptops like exam invigilators. For a festival as militarized as Venice, the sight might not be front-page news: Ever since my first trip in 2014, the security corps deployed across the Lido have grown almost exponentially, reaching near-Orwellian levels in 2020, […]
by Leonardo Goi on Sep 19, 2024
