Indie filmmaker Brady Corbet may have had a shockingly small budget for “The Brutalist,” but the writer/director is explaining why more funding would have been even more brutal.
Period piece “The Brutalist” stars Adrien Brody as László Tóth, a fictional Hungarian Jewish Holocaust survivor and architect who arrives in America to build a massive modern community center. Guy Pearce plays László’s employer, with Felicity Jones, Joe Alwyn, Alessandro Nivola, Raffey Cassidy, and Stacy Martin co-starring. The film spans 30 years in the life of Brody’s László.
“The Brutalist” was filmed in Budapest and Tuscany in Spring 2023 after COVID delays on a budget of less than $10 million. The feature debuted at the Venice Film Festival, with North American distributor A24 positioning the drama as an Oscar contender. Focus Features has the international distribution rights.
Corbet told Variety that he spent seven years developing “The Brutalist,” which became a 215-minute sprawling drama that has a 15-minute intermission.
“We cut every corner we could to make sure that every single cent was on-screen,” Corbet said. “It was a Herculean effort, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, because it was just years and years of essentially working for free.”
Yet Corbet preferred to be working for free and on his own terms with the indie, as opposed to accepting financing from a larger studio.
“I never thought, ‘I wish I had $30 million more,’” the “Vox Lux” directed said. “There’s a lot of strings that come with that kind of money. It invites lots of opinions. You have all these executives who don’t trust the director and bury them in notes. What you get is something antiseptic that lacks a signature.”
He added, “It’s the difference between a bowl from Crate & Barrel and a wabisabi ceramic.”
Prior to making his directorial debut with “The Childhood of a Leader” in 2015, Corbet starred in indies like “Melancholia,” “Mysterious Skin,” and “Thirteen.”
IndieWire critic David Ehrlich wrote in the review that Corbet’s acting background emphasizes his own status as a “deadly serious and fetishistically Euro-centric young auteur who’s fascinated by the cyclical relationship between trauma and culture.”
Ehrlich wrote, “Corbet delights in the violent cause-and-effect of the 20th century, which shook the Earth off its axis in a way that invited people to reimagine it in their own image. […] Brody is raw, sincere, and commanding in a role that evokes ‘The Pianist’ in too many ways to count, his skinny body and sloping face slowly drooping into a portrait of disillusionment that Corbet will exaggerate in all sorts of awful directions across the back half of this story (which is neatly divided into three parts, along with a cute 15-minute intermission that comes with its own timer).”
“The Brutalist” will premiere in select theaters December 20.