Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold devoted the better part of seven years of their lives to the epic immigrant drama The Brutalist. Nadine Whitney attended a group interview with Brady, who meditated on the function of art, the difficulties of art within capitalism, and the American Myth. Nadine asked the first question, and was involved in several other questions.
Nadine Whitney: Brady, congratulations on your seven-year slog to get The Brutalist made. It is an extraordinary film. I was reading your piece with Sean Baker, and something that I picked up on, which I think is important, is that you spoke of never really thinking about things in terms of box office return-only quality. Have you found now that with the critical acclaim of both The Brutalist and Childhood of a Leader, studios and the like are more willing to assist you and Mona Fastvold in realizing your vision?
Brady Corbet: We have slowly assembled a really excellent team over the last decade. We work with many of the same crew and several of the same producers across many projects. It takes a little while to build that infrastructure. It’s always getting somewhat easier, but incrementally. Much, much, much more slowly, I suppose, than many would think.
Now we have this extraordinary core group, and we even have sort of a core group of investors that we’re working with. As long as we are able to keep making films, I would say under 20 or even 15 million dollars, then we should be able to have the autonomy that we really require.
How did you come to the story of The Brutalist and the themes of displacement after World War II for immigrants, especially Jewish immigrants?
Brady Corbet: I was raised by a single mother, and I’m an only child. I grew up going to a Catholic school because my grandmother is Irish Catholic. On my grandfather’s side, his family emigrated from a former Hungarian territory. I believe it’s now Serbia, if I’m not mistaken.
I do have familial links to Hungary, and my heritage is very, very distantly Jewish. However, my exposure to Judaism mostly came from my godmother, with who I spent many of my summers when I was growing up because my mother had a very demanding job. My godmother would frequently take me to New Jersey, and I’d spend a lot of my time in the summers on the East Coast, so I’ve been to many services.
As an adult, I am neither Catholic nor Jewish. I am an atheist. These characters were essentially written according to their circumstance. It was predominantly Central and Eastern Europe, with European Jews at the Bauhaus. And so, for us, these characters were, of course, always Jewish. The film’s concerns are historical concerns. The composer, Daniel Blumberg, who is about 30 years old, grew up in North London and attended synagogue. He was instructing the Minyan when we were performing it on set. He was conducting it also because it can be a bit messy and improvisational at a real service. We needed everyone to be in the same key for it to naturally segue into the score that Daniel had written for the piece.
My production designer, Judy Becker, is Jewish and grew up in New York. I was as sure as I could be when I was making anything about anyone that it was as accurate as possible.
What do you think characterizes the idea of ‘The American Dream’ and how it is inaccessible to many?
Brady Corbet: That’s just in the statistics, right? The way in which this country is divided by class and economy is, of course, disproportionate, and so for me, it is impossible to make a film about the American myth that doesn’t also simultaneously dismantle it. There are aspects of it that it is also recognizing and even celebrating because my wife is Norwegian, and we wrote the film together. We live in a capitalist country in our place in New York, but we also spent many years living in a Democratic Socialist country in Norway.
I often say to folks that it’s easier to imagine life after death than it is for me to imagine life after capitalism. And even when you look at a country like Norway, which is a celebrated utopian experiment, oil is the number one export, so it’s very much at the expense of the rest of the world.
What I mean to say is that whenever you look under the hood of the hood of the car, you always find capitalism, and even the most successful social experiments rely on it. I think what is very complicated for many viewers about my films is that they are frequently two things at once because I’m not interested in propaganda. I’m also not interested in encoded messaging or virtue signaling. I’m only interested in the messiness of history. I’m interested in films that express a feeling for history, not teaching a course on it.
What would you consider to be the building blocks in your approach to cinema?
Brady Corbet: I became a filmmaker because I loved cinema so much from such a young age. I don’t remember a moment in my life when it wasn’t very present for me, but I also grew up working in a bookstore, and I loved to read when I was a child.
Because I make films, it’s very difficult for me to unwind watching a movie or even something on television because it activates something in me. I can’t help but start assessing it or analyzing it. So, I usually prefer to read at night because it’s a way that I can really escape from my day job. That’s the funny thing about becoming a filmmaker; you love something so much that you that you sort of kill yourself for it.
I rarely get to have the experience of watching a film now that I had when I was growing up because I really do know how sausage is made. I developed a fascination with and a sort of historical obsession from a lot of the literature that I grew up reading. The are many, many authors that qualify. But the two that I’ve been citing the most frequently are W. G. Sebald and V. S. Naipaul. Also, Ingeborg Bachmann, Paul Celan, and Robert Musil.
I’m not entirely sure what captured my philosophical curiosity and my imagination, but something very early on did, and every film, even short film, that I was making when I was a teenager was about the cyclical nature of trauma and inherited trauma.
My sister-in-law is a social anthropologist in Norway who is working on several big themes. One of them is major traumatic events in small communities. For example, in working-class towns where a factory burned down, and a whole generation of women in that village lost their husbands.
It’s something I find endlessly fascinating. I also think that there are subjects that will not be relevant. If it takes a decade to make a movie, you know, or even if it takes two decades to make a movie with those themes and ideas, there’s a very good chance that you’re still going to be interested in it once you’ve actually executed the damn thing.
How does creative endeavor function within contemporary society?
Brady Corbet: I honestly think that whether you’re writing or you’re a musician or painting, it’s always in reaction to the time you live in. I think that it is often a reaction to the state of the culture. I’m not an authority on very many things, but I’m something of an authority on the history of cinema. At the very least, the last twenty years have been not so great, and they have lacked boldness.
There are, of course, some extraordinary exceptions, but they are very few and far between. There are extremely well-made films that are actually very common all the time. Films that are really built to have a lasting cultural impact or films that have a lot on their mind are less common. And it’s not because people are not interested in making them. It’s because the film industry has not been supporting them. It’s a very complicated situation.
Everyone is constantly trying to analyze and assess how we got here. But for me, it’s quite simple. In the same way that Spotify had a negative impact on the music industry, streaming completely changed our metric at the box office. Hollywood executives have responded by making it safer by supporting theatrical releases.
Then it becomes this kind of ouroboros of bullshit because you have people not going to the cinemas. Therefore, interesting, challenging projects are not getting backed. And yet, it’s only the projects that are very radical that are actually getting people off their couches to go to the cinema. Jonathan Glazer’s film The Zone of Interest made over $50 million at the global box office last year. It’s a very radical movie. Also, Oppenheimer. Whether people like these films or not, their cultural impact is undeniable. Oppenheimer made a billion dollars, and so clearly, there is an appetite for films that promise something intensely cinematic, and their central themes are really about something.
But we live in a moment where if you make anything about anything, or if you really say something meaningful in public, people are very quick to attack. I think it’s very important that if you’re going to make a film investing a lot of energy, time, and effort, it might as well be about something. I think that we need to collectively try to foster a culture of debate and disagreement that’s a safe space for people to express ideas.
Especially in a work of art, that should be the safest of all spaces. Public art is something that can be debated and pissed on and painted on, and adored. And I think that all those responses, in a way, are kind of valid.
What I don’t think is valid is having monuments torn down. I think that The Brutalist is predominantly for me about an immigrant who is fighting for immigrants. It’s not just Lazlo but also Gordon and Attila. Many others in the film are fighting for their right to exist. Lazlo is also fighting for the existence of his project.
For me, these struggles are linked. The Brutalist is about many things, but that’s the film’s core allegory.