The Venice Film Festival is abuzz with excitement over director Brady Corbet's monumental historical drama The Brutaliststarring Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones and Guy Pearce. The film doesn't officially debut until Sunday night, but the thunderous applause and rapturous enthusiasm that has followed the film since its initial press screenings on the Lido have many festival-goers speculating that it is the film to beat for this year's Golden Lion.
At 3.5 hours long, with a ten-minute intermission at the halfway point, the film has all the thematic scope and intellectual rigor befitting its subject: the historical trauma and artistic vision that gave rise to the great works of mid-century American Brutalist architecture.
The Brutalist chronicles the journey of Hungarian-born Jewish architect László Tóth (Brody), who emigrates to the United States in 1947 to live the “American Dream.” Initially forced to work hard in poverty, he soon wins a contract with a mysterious and wealthy client, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Pearce), that will change the course of the next 30 years of his life. Jones co-stars as Tóth's wife, Erzsébet, while Joe Alwyn plays the wealthy industrialist's mercurial son. Corbet and his wife, Norwegian director and actress Mona Fastvold, co-wrote the film.
Although widely studied, The Brutalist is a work of fiction. Corbet said he tried to find an example of one of the great Bauhaus architects who had been “mired in the quagmire of war” but had managed to rebuild his life in America, consulting with French architect and architectural historian Jean-Louis Cohen, who died in August 2023.
“[He said] no, there are no examples, which I found really disturbing, because there were so many Bauhaus architects who were so talented, and we never got to see what they were planning to build for the future,” Corbet said. “This film, unfortunately, is a fantasy film. So virtual history. This is the only way for me, to access the past.”
Corbet said the film is dedicated to those artists who “failed to realize their visions.”
An auteur work through and through and a triumph of directorial determination, the film was more than seven years in the making, with various false starts and financial difficulties, and was shot on 70mm film in the mid-century VistaVision format. The beautiful retro format would have required the filmmakers to transport 26 reels of film, weighing approximately 300 pounds, to Italy for the film's world premiere.
Corbet said he was deliberately referencing films of the past. “We were looking at a lot of choreography from films like [Hitchcock’s] Rope and a lot of the movies were shot in VistaVision, because the camera back then was even bigger than it is now, and it kind of affected the mise-en-scène,” the director said. “So we tried to limit ourselves, even though we can put a camera on a Steadicam and we have technology that we didn't have before, we did our best to try to evoke a bygone cinematic style.”
Guy Pearce has said that he found shooting with an old film camera that was “so loud” in fact “kind of invigorating and exciting. For those of us who have sort of come through the era of working on film and now work in the digital realm, it's really nice to work with machines that you know actually work and have some kind of time limit, you know, a canister of film that only lasts 10 minutes, or something like that, and they have to control the gates. There's a kind of organic process that belongs to it, and you feel part of it.
Corbet became emotional at several points in the press conference when discussing the difficulties in making The Brutalist and staying true to his artistic vision for the film.
“This was an incredibly difficult film to make. I'm very emotional today, because we've been working on this for seven years, and it's felt urgent every day for the better part of a decade,” the director said. “And I'm so grateful to everyone who spent three and a half hours with this film last night and will spend another three and a half hours later today.”
Commenting on the film's structure and length, Corbet noted that “this film does everything we've been told we're not allowed to do,” but said he found it “pretty silly” to speak negatively about the film's length.
“It's like criticizing a book because it's 700 pages long instead of 100,” he said. “I've read great short novels. I've read great masterpieces, you know, in multiple volumes. And you know, for me, it's just a question of how much story there is to tell. Maybe the next thing we do will be 45 minutes.”
He noted that “there are a lot of stories that can't be told in Hollywood,” noting that the film's main story “is about a character who flees fascism only to encounter capitalism.”
The BrutalistThe Venice premiere marks Corbet's return to familiar territory. The actor-turned-author shot his first film there, The Childhood of a Leaderwinning the prestigious event's award for best debut film. He returned with the film starring Natalie Portman and Jude Law Vox Luxpremiered in the festival's main competition.
Corbet began his press conference by thanking the Venice Film Festival for supporting his films “when no one else was [it] It really made my films possible.”
He concluded the press conference with words of thanks to his wife and co-writer Fastvold, “who wrote this movie with me and made it with me, and stood by me when I wasn't the easiest person to deal with.”