The first time I met Brady Corbet was in November, at a screening of his latest film The Brutalist. Dressed in his trademark baseball cap and a black overcoat, he stood shyly to meet members of London’s high society at Soho’s Picturehouse cinema. The director, known previously in art house circles, suddenly found himself at the centre of attention thanks to the noise around The Brutalist, his three-and-a-half-hour epic starring Adrien Brody as a Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor who embarks on a new life in the United States. It had just made a splash at the Venice Film Festival, earning a 12-minute standing ovation. At our screening, Corbet immediately introduced himself as a film purist, requesting that we all applaud the projectionist. “You’re in for something special,” he said. “This is the 70mm version—how it was intended to be watched.”
The following day, with the film fresh in my memory, I spent some time with Corbet. First, during a visit to the Isokon building in north London, where he was photographed in the modernist block of flats, and then at a nearby gastropub with our mutual friend, and his fellow director, Fridtjof Ryder. That evening, Corbet was good company: witty and intellectual, well-read and opinionated. Frequent topics of digression include his favourite writer, the German WG Sebald (“I wanted to make a film like Sebald writes,” he notes) or the state of American politics post-presidential election (“This is like the first time in history where liberals are so conservative. It drives me insane.”)
We were on our third pint when the waitress finally asked: “Is he famous?” She did, after all, hear him say something about Adrien Brody while collecting empty glasses, and everyone knows Adrien Brody. “He’s a director. He’s going to be nominated for an Oscar,” I replied. “That’s nice,” she said, with an air of detachment. And then: “You know, I’m a musician myself.”
The remark made the 38-year-old director smile. After a long period of fighting to get his films financed, Corbet still relates to struggling artists. “That’s great,” he says, underplaying himself as he often does, “you need to believe in yourself.”
When we meet again in late January for this interview, on a video call, Corbet’s name is well and truly up in lights. He won a Golden Globe for best director and has been nominated for the same award at the Oscars. The Brutalist has also become the favourite to take Best Picture. “I was in my hotel room with my composer Daniel Blumberg when I first got the news,” he says, beaming. “We were cheering everyone on like a football match.”
To say The Brutalist surpassed even Corbet’s expectations is an understatement. The film was made for under USD10 million—peanuts in Hollywood—and the script was written with his partner and collaborator, Mona Fastvold. It took seven years to finance, shoot, and release; a process that was interrupted by the pandemic and casting changes. He agrees that the making of The Brutalist mirrors the film’s key theme: an obsessive artist drawn to completing his masterpiece, even if it damages him and those near to him. “This project,” he says, “is personal in that it’s about how many obstacles have been put in my path, in my wife’s path…”
Corbet was born to a single mother in Scottsdale, Arizona. When he was seven, they moved to Colorado and he appeared on his first film set as a child actor. “By 11, I was actively working a lot,” he tells me. “I didn’t have a before and after. I only had an after: a life in cinema.”
He pursued a career as a television actor before landing a role in Catherine Hardwicke’s big-screen teen drama Thirteen. Over the next decade, he went on to become a favourite of auteurs, appearing in works by Gregg Araki, Michael Haneke (for an especially show-stealing performance in Funny Games), Lars von Trier, Olivier Assayas, Mia Hansen-Løve, Ruben Östlund, and Fastvold, who directed him in her 2014 debut Sleepwalker. These experiences convinced him that he could become a filmmaker, too.
“I can’t remember what I consciously took from these directors,” he tells me. “But what I really remember were directors that I admired who had bad days. Days where they came up short, for being under the weather or losing a battle with production. This demystified the [filmmaking] process for me.” His directorial debut, historical drama The Childhood of a Leader, followed in 2015.
Corbet had another formative experience at 12, when he worked at a small bookshop in Aspen known for progressive literature and “their insane first editions”. As a child, he would read voraciously, feeding his curiosity to understand different subjects, whether on architecture or German literature. He was paid in books (some of which were first editions). Sadly, much of his collection was lost in an apartment fire in New York, where he and Fastvold live with their daughter. Around that time, after struggling to get the green light, his second feature film Vox Lux—a go-for-broke melodrama about a popstar played by Natalie Portman—also finally got its financing. “Destruction and regeneration,” Corbet says, referring to Sebald again, “are the things that are definitive of the lived experience”.
Those words are obviously relevant to The Brutalist. Ditto his current career trajectory. And, after spending some time with Corbet, I believe it is also the way he views filmmaking.
The Brutalist is a film about many things, among them taking risks. It follows Brody’s fictional immigrant László Tóth (based on real architects and artists, including László Moholy-Nagy and Marcel Breuer) and his obsession with building a Brutalist community centre in small-town Pennsylvania under the patronage of Harrison van Buren (Guy Pearce), while battling against financiers, personal traumas, and prejudice. Corbet admits that he sees himself in László, but every film he has made previously has been deeply personal, though wildly different in style. “You’ve got to keep pushing the bar,” he says. “My favourite filmmakers never rested on their laurels.”
Unlike his first two movies, The Brutalist has won over both art house and (relatively) mainstream audiences, thanks to its starry cast, brilliant marketing by cult distributor A24, and a plot that currently resonates politically. This postwar immigrant’s story is big, bold American moviemaking, reminiscent of The Godfather: Part 2 or Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America. While The Brutalist is being hailed for its depth and technical mastery, in an era dominated by CGI-bloated superhero blockbusters and biopics, it has had its fair share of criticisms. Most recently, there was controversy over the use of AI to enhance the Hungarian dialogue, though Corbet has clarified this, explaining in a statement that Innovative Respeecher technology was used in post-production to “refine certain vowels for accuracy”. For Corbet, the conversation has been an extraordinary boost of attention for the movie.
“I’m grateful anyone could believe in me,” he continues. “The box office results are way above anything we anticipated and that has to do with the prizes and nominations we’ve gotten.”
Despite the film’s success, he is still dedicated to his indie roots, he tells me. Going full Michael Bay isn’t Corbet’s style; his outlook is more old-fashioned and romantic. “Thanks to The Brutalist, I’ll have more access and support, but I’m not interested in changing my approach,” he says. “I know that I’m only going to retain the creative control I personally require if I still make movies for a reasonable amount of money.”
Corbet’s next movie, which he remains vague about, is a 1970s-set horror-western. “I’m sure it’s going to piss everyone off,” he says, laughing, “but that’s a good thing.” He is also the co-writer on Fastvold’s upcoming musical Ann Lee and is starting up a production company that will mentor filmmakers. It is very clear that Corbet enjoys that side of the industry. “We really want to produce for other people. The reality is, I’ll be lucky if I make 12 movies,” Corbet tells me. “This is a way of me giving back to a community that’s supported me.”
When we say goodbye, I wish Corbet the best for the Oscars, which took place in March. (The film took home the Oscars for Best Actor, Best Cinematography, Best Film Score; Anora clinched Best Picture.) “I appreciate it,” he says, with a broad smile, “but you know what? We have already won.”
The Brutalist is out now in theatres
