Every time Brady Corbet makes a movie, he’s thinking, “This could be the last one”. He doesn’t want it to be the last one, but when you’re filming, say, a 3½-hour drama about the artistic struggles of a fictional architect, you never know.
“There’s a high likelihood”, Corbet says, smiling.
The Brutalist, nominated for 10 Oscars including best picture, directing, the original screenplay Corbet wrote with his partner, Mona Fastvold, and for actors Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones and Guy Pearce, will not be Corbet’s last movie. The film has become an event, a must-see for movie lovers. It’s both epic and intimate, a portrait of an immigrant architect, László Tóth, that examines the relationship between patron (Pearce) and artist (Brody), and considers the purpose and lasting value of art.
Much remains unspoken in The Brutalist, allowing us to use our imaginations to fill in the gaps.
“That’s what makes the film so grown-up”, Jones says. “The audience becomes active participants”.
But that doesn’t mean we’re not interested in exploring the movie’s themes and mysteries. Corbet, Brody, Jones and Pearce, calling in from various corners of the world, were more than happy to provide some answers.
Why does Van Buren, the wealthy industrialist who becomes László’s benefactor, use the line, “I found our conversation persuasive and intellectually stimulating” — twice — in their first meetings? Pearce: Let’s call it the ridiculousness of the man. I know it gets a bigger laugh the second time, but the first time he says it in the cafe, there was nothing intellectually stimulating about that conversation. Adrien was just sitting there, like a teenager being told off in a principal’s office.
Might Van Buren have feelings for László that go beyond the intellect? Brody: There are a lot of emotions at stake. I don’t disagree, but it’s more complex than that. Pearce: There are indicators of his attraction, some even within the dynamic of the three of them [László, his wife, Erzsébet, played by Jones, and Van Buren]. It is a bit of a love triangle, isn’t it? When she finally turns up, I’m going, “This person has come to take my man”.
Is that why Van Buren was so keen on getting her a job in New York almost immediately? “You’ll only be gone… five days a week”. Pearce: Yes! “Keep away from my find!” Jones: Erzsébet’s experiences with trauma have made her so aware of how terrible human beings can be. From the moment she meets Van Buren, she knows who he is and that he’s a problem. Brody: László possesses qualities that Van Buren doesn’t. With all his power and ability, he doesn’t have the same creative spirit. There’s something when you encounter someone who is so uniquely creative. You appreciate it. It’s something to marvel at. Pearce: When I press my face to the marble [at the quarry, when László takes Van Buren to look at marble for the center he’s building], Brady was quite specific about wanting me to look at [László]. That in itself is one of the little tells about my attraction to him — on all sorts of levels. There’s something deliberately coy and seductive that I bring him into my experience I’m having with this marble. Brody: It’s a love- and hate-filled dynamic. There’s antagonistic superiority and disdain amid love and appreciation and adoration for his creative spirit. There’s a very convoluted thing going on.
The eight-minute conversation at the Christmas party between László and Van Buren, the one that’s been called the “skeleton key” to understanding the movie, has Van Buren telling a long, cruel story about stiffing his grandparents, ending it by saying, “That is how much I love my mother”. Pearce: That’s such a spiderweb, isn’t it?
Just how much does Van Buren love his mother? Pearce: Someone said to me the other day, “We get to see what a mummy’s boy he was”. Corbet: I thought of the mother as Rebecca at Manderley, this specter that haunts the house. It seems to be a rather unhealthy obsession. And it feeds the concept for the whole project. He has this scene where he describes to László how he knows how to read the tea leaves and the fact that the two of them came together on the eve of his mother’s death, which is what leads him to do something that’s equally mad. Pearce: There’s this performative façade of strength to Van Buren, but on some level, he feels powerless. And he feels that the only way to actually get over that is to present himself as powerful. And in that conversation with László, you see he recognizes László’s artistry, but that’s tangled up with his own insecurities about not possessing those qualities himself. Corbet: He’s not satisfied just to own the artist’s work. He wants to possess the artist as well.
Which we see, quite literally, later in the movie when Van Buren rapes László. Some critics have found the scene rather abrupt and tonally jarring. Why did it seem necessary? Pearce: The main question I had for Brady was the justification and the understanding of what happens. Corbet: For me, you should see it coming from miles away. After two hours and 45 minutes, there’s a lot of threads there. Brody: I think it’s intended to be a big surprise to the audience. But when I read it, I did see it coming. Jones: That scene is so pivotal. It’s so necessary. What’s so striking about the film is that it is full of hope, but the hope comes from trauma. You can’t have one without the other. Pearce: I think Brady brilliantly keeps open about how much this has happened before, whether [Van Buren] is a repressed homosexual. But what jumped out at me is when we see Joe Alwyn [playing Van Buren’s son, Harry] running up and down those stairs [after Erzsébet confronts him about the rape], going, “Father! Father!” I looked at that and went, “Ah. Wow. I reckon I have abused him”. Corbet: The way Joe Alwyn responds to Felicity’s accusation, especially after we’ve seen him take Zsófia [László’s orphaned teenage niece] into the woods. You see this cycle of violence in the family. Brody: It’s not as simple as a metaphor for being literally screwed over by your benefactor. It pertains to a deeper hatred. We shot it in multiple ways, in a much more graphic way as well. It speaks to a kind of oppressive brutality of dominance, what makes individuals so cruel and insensitive and behave so despicably at times. Corbet: The film was made in the style of a 1950s melodrama. The way that I was thinking about it was: What would Nicholas Ray do if he could get away with it today in 2025? It’s not a neorealist picture. I was thinking about Powell and Pressburger. There’s a largess and there’s a directness in the films, allegory and visual allegory. There’s interplay between graceful moments and more direct, operatic moments. That’s what gives the film, and all my films, a very specific, very jagged architecture that’s unlike a lot of other films. To be honest, I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. But it is an intentional thing.
What happens to Van Buren when he disappears after Erzsébet confronts him? Jones: Guy always says: “Therapy”. Pearce: I’ve gone back and forth. The power of him just being reduced to nothing, being gone, nonexistent… that enabled me to go, “Great. I don’t have to think about this anymore”. Which is pretty lazy of me. Corbet: My partner, Mona, says that once this character has been dismantled, he is just irrelevant. So it doesn’t matter if he went on a long walk, or if he hung himself, or if he drowned himself, or froze to death out in the forest. Brody: What happens to Van Buren? I don’t think it’s very good. I think most people come to the same conclusion. The shame, it’s pretty great to be confronted with it. It’s a deeply disruptive moment. They can’t find him, so I interpret it as something terribly final. Jones: He’s like a sprite. He disappears into thin air. Pearce: I mean, the obvious thing is some sort of suicide, because this is gonna be just too big for him to bear. But I wouldn’t solidify that. The beauty is that he’s just gone.
Twenty-two years pass and then we see László being feted at the First Architecture Biennale. How do you imagine his life in those intervening decades? Corbet: I wanted the character to look, visibly, like he’d recently had a stroke and that he’d aged a lot. I was looking at a lot of images of Chet Baker who, at like 57, looked like he was 110. Brody: It’s interesting witnessing someone you’ve spent all this time with, seeing him much later in life, quite frail, reflecting on his own journey and what he has left behind and the toll it’s taken. For László, there’s a lot of loss. He’s constantly forced to endure. It’s not an easy thing for people to overcome hardship, let alone what he experienced in the concentration camps. Corbet: There’s a suggestion that some of his projects were realized. There’s a reason we decided to go predominantly with drawings. Even the world’s greatest architects tend to not be particularly prolific. My favorite architect is Peter Zumthor, and he’s been working on the new LACMA for so many years. Brody: There are opportunities of creative fulfillment, and that is such a deep part of any artistic person’s yearnings. So there is fulfillment in that immersion. But I think as far as a fulfilling personal life that’s brought a great deal of happiness and closure to everything? I don’t know if that has ever come. Corbet: It is a film about legacy, absolutely. But what you’re left with at the end of the film is that László’s legacy is not necessarily the body of work he left behind. His legacy is family and his niece. Through his accomplishments, he has paved the way for her to have some kind of life she might not have had otherwise.
Did he ever build that bowling alley he talked about when he first met Van Buren? Brody: [Laughs] I don’t think he does. A Brutalist bowling alley. The ball is actually a cube.
Is anyone going to build The Brutalist popcorn bucket that I saw mocked up? Corbet: I think [Brutalist co-star] Alessandro Nivola sent that to us. Alessandro wins the internet every day. Brody: I could help design it. It could be made of paper, like an origami cube. You make it and blow into it, and then it pops open into a sphere, and then you just fold it in and fill it with popcorn. If I wasn’t so busy with my day job, I’d get to it.
Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is among the leading pack of this year’s Oscar nominees with 10 nods, including best director, screenplay, and picture, for which it is probably the current favorite. A real sign of the film’s strength, however, can be found elsewhere in the best supporting actress nomination for Felicity Jones.
There had been some grumbling that awards voters were struggling with the film’s 3-hour and 35-minute run and were missing the movie’s second act, which is also its strongest, when Erzsébet Tóth, played by Felicity Jones, is introduced. Clearly that was wrong.
Jones’ Erzsébet is the wife of László (Adrien Brody), a famed Hungarian architect who has fled Europe for America after the Nazis cease power. Erzsébet was left behind but when she finally arrives in the U.S. her presence complicates a new relationship László has struck with a wealthy benefactor, played by Guy Pearce.
“It’s all completely unexpected”, Jones tells us of the film’s reception. “Over the last couple of years, it’s been cool to work on stories that are distinctive and feel like they are going to make a real impact. It’s quite reassuring that, in some ways, it’s all paying off”.
The film debuted in Venice where Corbet won best director. Festival acclaim successfully rolled into awards buzz, with the film landing three Golden Globes and a further nine BAFTA nominations, including another Best Supporting Actress nod for Jones.
Jones was last on the awards trail in 2015 with James Marsh’s Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything. Below, the Birmingham native speaks about how Corbet — a relatively new director — sold her on The Brutalist, this year’s tough awards season, and the pushback against Corbet’s use of AI on the film.
Felicity, congrats on the Oscar nom. How are you feeling about it and the film’s general reception?
It was really only when we showed the film in Venice that we realized the reception was much greater than we expected. When you’re trying to make stories that are original, complex, and nuanced, you naturally know that it’s not going to be an easy course with the way of the world. The film doesn’t resort to any cliche or sentimentality. The opportunity to put something like this in the world is pretty rare. There’s no template, so people don’t know they want something like this. And then when it’s there, people realize how cool it is.
The film does take some big swings. Why did you trust that Brady could pull it off? He’s only made two films as a director.
Firstly, it was the script. It was like reading a Russian novel. It was so intelligent. That’s what hooked me initially and then with Brady, it was seeing his previous work. I’d known him a little when we were in our 20s. He’s always worked with incredible auteurs throughout his life as an actor. Looking back, he was utilizing that as his film school. I mean, what a good idea. Why not learn from from the best? So it felt like all the ingredients were there to make something very singular, and at that time, that’s really what I was looking for. Something that was incredibly distinctive. But alongside that, so much of it is trust. You don’t really know. It’s a leap of faith, which doesn’t always pay off. In this respect, it did. But there is something about Brady. Maybe because he acted as a child you can feel his confidence. He spent many hours on sets and that does give him a real ease and imbues you with a certain confidence on set.
You say you were looking for distinctive work. Do you think that has been missing from your career so far?
I think I was looking for a challenge, perhaps in a new direction, particularly with the intricacy and intimacy of the relationship between Erzsébet and László that, in some ways, was very new territory for me. I felt like I wanted to push the boundaries in some way I hadn’t before.
Your performance is very physical. Your character is suffering from a physical disability. But there is also an indescribable weight to her, a sort of palpable intelligence, which is actually what makes Guy Pearce’s character feel so threatened and changes the direction of the film.
Yes, because she’d suffered from malnutrition, there’s an element of dissociation from her physical self. The trauma that she has gone through in the camps meant that to a certain extent, she’s had to disconnect from her physical self to survive. Part of that survival has been her connection with Laszlo, but it also gives her this incredible power, because there is nothing anyone can do that will surprise her. She’s been to the ends of the earth in some ways, emotionally and we would presume, physically. So when she meets Van Buren, there’s something quite intimidating about that for him.
I remember hearing Christine Vachon, who is an EP on The Brutalist, speaking recently about how difficult it was to raise money for this. Did you as a performer feel how tight things were?
We were quite insulated from the pragmatic struggles of getting it made. In some ways, it’s a much harder experience when there’s no trust. When you struggle but have trust in each other like what we had with The Brutalist, then it’s quite an enjoyable experience. Anyone who turns up to do that film is there for the right reasons, so it creates a very harmonious atmosphere. Brady’s main thing was to come to set knowing what you’re doing. I’d been aboard the film for a couple of years before we shot, so I felt very emboldened when we were making it. I’d never seen such a collection of prepared actors.
Brady put out a statement about why and how he used AI during the film’s post-production after some criticism. Did you know he had used AI to enhance performances? And what did you think about the wider discussion?
It’s obviously an element of post-production, and that’s very much the director’s prerogative. As an actor, you just have to do everything in your power to prepare and work tirelessly. Adrien and I both worked with a brilliant dialect coach, Tanera Marshall, and so much of the focus is finding the voice of the character. Guy [Pearce] has talked about this as well. What is the cadence? How do I make that person feel as believable as possible? That’s what’s in your control as an actor.
Is AI something you’re worried about as an actor?
There are so many facets. I often use the analogy that making a film is a bit like putting a football on a pitch, and you put it into the world, and it’ll get kicked around in many different directions. To a certain extent, that’s part of the the pleasure of making something, seeing what the world makes of it and it’s fascinating when a film throws up so many different and nuanced discussions.
It’s been a particularly rough year for Oscar campaigning. We’ve had the Emilia Perez revelations over the weekend. What have you thought about it all?
You know, I’ve been watching all the films coming out and it’s been an amazing year of cinema. These stories are just exquisite. I was watching Sing Sing the other night and thought it was fantastic. You want people to see these films because these are special cultural items being put into the world. That’s why people don’t mind going out and talking about theirs films because it feels like it’s something important. And it puts more bums on seats, the more you talk about it. So if I believe in what I’ve made, I’m happy to do it.
You’ve got a production company, Piecrust Pictures. What are you interested in doing behind the camera?
The thing that intrigued me was being involved in the script from a much more embryonic stage and being able to influence the characters rather than coming in right at the end as an actor. That has always naturally appealed to me and has been one of the most exciting aspects of chatting directly with writers.
Your company is producing a Formula One series. What’s the story behind that? Are you an F1 fan?
Well, actually, I grew up in the Midlands and my father would take us to the city center of Birmingham, and they would turn it into a Superprix. So I have these formative memories of racing. It felt like a natural project to explore. I’m also intrigued by these things that touch many people and racing, probably thanks to Drive To Survive, is really striking a chord across the world. It’s been pretty amazing getting inside the world of Formula One.
What stage is that at currently? Pre-production?
Yes, we are developing the script as we speak.
What have you got up next?
I have another film coming out at the end of the year called Oh. What. Fun., which is a Christmas ensemble comedy with Michelle Pfeiffer and a wonderful group of actors. We shot that last summer. It’s very different from The Brutalist, but still distinctive and hopefully original in some way.
With the new Rogue One trailer dropping Thursday night, Entertainment Weekly has been posting a week of new stories about the upcoming stand-alone Star Wars film. Here’s part five.
It was a meeting at dawn in hushed restaurant when Felicity Jones found herself recruited for a covert mission.
Director Gareth Edwards (previously best known for Godzilla) had recently signed on to make Rogue One, the first Star Wars stand-alone film about the Rebel soldiers who steal the original Death Star blueprints, and he was considering her as the big sister to lead this band of brothers.
“We were both working at the time and we met at something like 5:30 a.m. in a hotel restaurant,” Jones recalls. “Most of the meeting was conducted in whispers as he explained the story and the character. My first introduction was definitely one shrouded in secrecy and being very careful no one overheard what we were talking about.”
With the movie opening Dec. 16, she’s finally at the stage when she can talk about it. But The Theory of Everything Oscar-nominee has a lot more to discuss, too. She’s in three other movies opening this year: the action-thriller Collide (Aug. 19), the bittersweet supernatural tale A Monster Calls (Oct. 21), and the third Da Vinci Code film Inferno (Oct. 28.)
With all the hysteria over Episode VIII, you may have forgotten that there is actually another Star Wars film coming this year. We’re here to give you the lowdown on just what to expect from Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, with dates, spoilers (sorry) and quotes a-plenty.
Where does Rogue One come in relation to the Star Wars canon?
Rogue One is the first Star Wars feature film to take place outside the original canon created by George Lucas, and tells the story of a group of Rebel fighters attempting to steal the plans for the iconic Death Star. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the film “takes place just before A New Hope and leads up to the 10 minutes before that classic film begins.”
Producer Kathleen Kennedy also made it clear that Rogue One is meant to be kept separate from the main canon, saying “There is no attempt being made to carry characters (from the stand-alone films) in and out of the saga episodes.”
Who’s directing Rogue One?
Star Wars fans can sleep safe in the knowledge that the special effects are in good hands, with Gareth Edwards, director of the recent Godzilla movie and creator of independent classic Monsters taking the helm for Rogue One. Edwards’ background is largely in digital effects, but he has received much praise for his directorial exploits, and has proved already that he can handle a large franchise with the impressive Godzilla.
Speaking to Flicks And The City in 2005, Edwards warned fans to “expect the unexpected, because it’s not gonna be like the saga movie.” More recently, however, it was announced that Disney had ordered weeks of reshoots on the film, sparking rumours that Lucasfilm were unhappy with the direction that Edwards had taken the franchise.
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