Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic What compels a Catholic-school-educated millennial ex-actor born in Scottsdale, Arizona, to devote seven years to a film about the tribulations of a postwar Hungarian-Jewish émigré architect? This is the question foremost in my mind when I meet Brady Corbet, 36, on a concrete-grey day in a hotel suite in central London. He greets me warmly and talks expansively, but his dark glasses and beanie stay on, giving the impression of someone both approachable and faintly guarded — an open book just out of reach.Certainly, Corbet’s CV suggests an enigma. Following early appearances as a cherubic child actor in TV sitcoms and serials, his 2007-14 film acting credits read like a who’s who of uncompromising European auteurs: Lars von Trier, Michael Haneke, Ruben Östlund, Bertrand Bonello. This echt art-house exposure clearly rubbed off on the young thesp. He began writing, made a short film and in 2015 delivered his first feature as director.A light, whimsical American indie of the Sundance kind? Not for Corbet. Instead, The Childhood of a Leader was a glowering account of a fictitious proto-fascist’s formative years in interwar Europe. It dripped with “grandeur both classical, or mock-classical, and ferocious”, as the FT’s Nigel Andrews put it. Europe’s most august cinematic institutions took notice. The Venice Film Festival awarded him the Lion of the Future award and invited him back in 2018 to present Vox Lux, which potently mixed Natalie Portman as a Gaga-esque pop diva, a beachside terrorist attack and a school shooting.Corbet’s Oscar-tipped new film The Brutalist is strong meat too, its title not just an allusion to the architectural style purveyed by its protagonist but a double entendre. Everything about the film is hefty, from its three-and-a-half-hour run-time and maximalist VistaVision format to its decades-spanning timeline and bitter interrogation of the American dream. Yet its budget was an extremely modest $9.6mn and it was shot without studio backing in just 34 days. It has drawn comparisons to There Will Be Blood and Citizen Kane and, earlier this month, its status as an Academy Awards frontrunner was cemented with three major wins at the Golden Globes. A lot of postwar and Holocaust dramas are inadvertently dehumanising in portraying victims of extreme trauma as if they’re angels’ I begin by asking Corbet: why architecture? “Because of how similar the process of making a movie is to building a building,” he says. “It requires the same amount of personnel, roughly it’s about 250 people to make a movie and 250 people to build a building of scale. My uncle is an architect, and whenever we chat, we have a lot of the same gripes and experiences . . . so this was a way of my wife [Norwegian filmmaker Mona Fastvold] and I writing something that we were extremely familiar with.”Adrien Brody stars as László Tóth, a Holocaust survivor who flees war-scarred Hungary for the US in 1947, settling initially in Philadelphia. His story shares biographical details with real-life luminaries such as Marcel Breuer and László Moholy-Nagy, but Tóth is a fictional figure. As with Corbet’s previous films, The Brutalist is an imagined history.“I find it to be a slightly more honest contract with the viewer,” he explains. “I struggle with biopics because when you have two characters talking in bed, you know that no one was present for that conversation. Once you start writing, it all becomes fiction. So it’s a way of evoking real stories, people and happenings, but it’s not mired in: is this accurate?”Watching Brody embody an artistically gifted Holocaust survivor, it is impossible not to be transported back to Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, for which Brody won the Best Actor Oscar in 2003. Corbet insists that this was not a factor in casting Brody, though it did help inform his performance. “Adrien says he spent so much time with [Holocaust] survivors when he was preparing for The Pianist that it was easy for him to draw from that experience.”Brody’s connection to the material ran deep. His Budapest-born mother Sylvia Plachy, a well-regarded photographer, fled the Hungarian revolution of 1956 as a teenager. “Adrien especially was able to bring so many mannerisms of his grandfather,” Corbet says. “And a sort of central European stubbornness — things that he was able to tap into with good humour and affection.” Both men were determined not to make this just another portrait of saintly immigrant suffering. “László Tóth was written to be something of a bastard,” Corbet says. “I thought it was important to not be patronising when dealing with the immigrant experience. A lot of postwar and Holocaust dramas are inadvertently dehumanising in portraying victims of extreme trauma as if they’re angels . . . László is stubborn. He loves his wife but he’s also a bit of a philanderer. All of these things make him much more human. For me, it’s a more dignified portrayal of an immigrant.” For Brody and Felicity Jones, who plays László’s physically compromised but unshrinking wife Erzsébet, the film presented a considerable linguistic challenge as well as an acting one. Both speak in thick accents and deliver long tracts in Hungarian, a notoriously difficult language to master. Even Guy Pearce, playing patrician industrialist Harrison Van Buren, who becomes Tóth’s exacting patron, did not get off lightly. “Yeah, Guy’s monologue at the Christmas party is 11 pages or something,” notes Corbet with some relish.Does he enjoy torturing his actors? “Definitely not,” the director chuckles. “But you know what I do love? When you start out the day and it feels like there’s no way that we can possibly land on our feet. And then, when you do, it’s such a rewarding experience.”He cites a climactic scene in which Erzsébet confronts the wider Van Buren clan at dinner. “That took an entire magazine of film. We would shoot from the very nose to the tail every time we did a take. There was so much dialogue and a stunt in the middle of the shot. There are 1,001 things that can go wrong and did go wrong, frequently. But when suddenly all of the dominoes get knocked down, it’s a really rewarding feeling for everyone.”I’m concerned for America, for western Europe, for the world. I did not anticipate seeing such blatant neo-fascist rhetoric becoming so normalised’Such moments of triumph were needed during an unusually demanding shoot in Hungary and Italy using cumbersome 1950s VistaVision cameras. For Corbet, who spent seven years developing and making the movie, it was clearly a labour of love. But why? Why was an American so compelled to tell this difficult tale of European striving? “I’ve spent about as much of my life in Europe as I have in the US,” he says. “My wife is Norwegian, we had our daughter in Oslo. I’ve lived in France, Norway, Hungary, Belgium — all over the place. And I moved around so much as a kid that I don’t really feel that I belong to anywhere.”Does he have any Jewish background? “Very distant Ashkenazi. But I grew up going to a Catholic school in Colorado. My mother’s side is a mix of eastern European and Irish Catholic. My father’s, I don’t know. I don’t have a relationship with him. So that’s the other thing in terms of not feeling like I’m from somewhere.”The closest place to home is New York: “I’ve at least had a foot there since I was 17.” He, Fastvold and their 10-year-old daughter now live in Brooklyn. Still, national pride is “not something I relate to at all”. National pride may be even harder to muster of late for someone sensitive to the plight of immigrants, given the incoming US administration’s promise of “the largest deportation operation in American history”. How does he feel about a second Trump term?“I wish I could say that I was at all surprised about the results of the [US presidential] election,” he says. “But I was also in France this summer when the [far-right] Rassemblement National was leading in the polls and made a lot of headway. They lost the battle but probably not the war. So I’m concerned for America, I’m concerned for western Europe, I’m concerned for the world. I did not anticipate seeing such blatant neo-fascist rhetoric becoming normalised to the degree that it’s become.”But he adds that leftwing Americans “have some real soul-searching to do”. And here he includes himself as a filmmaker. “We have a problem with representation that no one’s really talking about . . . I can’t think of a single portrayal of a character that’s a far-right voter/thinker that’s in any way a dignified portrayal, and that’s quite disturbing.”Can he see himself making a film about a sympathetic rightwinger? “I absolutely can. I think it’d be very difficult, but it’s really on my mind.” One step in that direction might be Ann Lee, a film about conservative Christians that he and Fastvold have written for her to direct. “It’s about the origin of the Shakers, emigrating from Manchester to upstate New York in the 18th century,” he says. The twist? It’s a musical. “People think of the Shakers as being like the Amish, but what’s so fascinating is that they worship through ecstatic dancing and song . . . So we were like: it has to be a musical.”He is also embarking on his next directorial project, “about the history of the industrial wine complex in California.” It seems safe to assume that it will not be a fruity romp through the vineyards of Napa Valley. I wonder if he ever dreams about making small, unambitious indie movies. “No, not really,” he shrugs. “Because it’s so painful and difficult to make any movie, even a bad one. So you might as well at least strive to make a good one.”‘The Brutalist’ is in UK cinemas from January 24 and in US cinemas nowFind out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
