Interview with 'The Brutalist' Filmmakers Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold

  • Susan Kouguell
  • .January 14, 2025

Fresh off their win for Best Picture Drama at the Golden Globes, I spoke with Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold about their award-winning film The Brutalist. We delved into their writing collaboration, the sacrifices and support within creative partnerships, their personal connections to architecture, and the challenges of funding films.

The Brutalist centers on László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian-Jewish visionary architect. After surviving the Holocaust, he emigrates to the U.S. to begin a new life while awaiting the arrival of his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), trapped in Eastern Europe with their niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) following the war. This epic film took seven years to make with a 10 million dollar budget.

The Brutalist (2024)

Courtesy of A24

Kouguell: Prior to The Brutalist you co-wrote The Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux. Tell me about your writing collaboration. Do you write together or do each of you write separate scenes and come together?

Corbet: It depends. It’s project by project. Sometimes we sit down and physically write together or share drafts. I work at night and Mona works in the morning. We’ve been doing this for so many years, it’s pretty ego-less. From the onset, we know who’s directing so we write for one another.

Mona’s most recent film is a musical of the origin of the Shakers immigrating in the 18th century to America from Manchester. We knew Mona would always helm this. When I brought her The Brutalist we knew we write in service of the director’s vision of the project.

Fastvold: I was raised to write by hand. My mother is a writer of novels and always wrote by hand every day. She taught me and all my sisters to become diary writers and it’s a habit I have. I never go anywhere without a notebook in my bag.

We started writing together on The Sleepwalker my first film, 13 years ago. We also write for other directors so it’s very easy for us to write for one another or for another director. I think also because we both were actors; it's this idea that you're lending yourself to someone else's vision.

Kouguell: Mona, you’re from Norway, so I imagine your view of the American dream and the American myth, which are themes in The Brutalist, are informed from a unique perspective.

Fastvold: I came here when I was young, I always wanted to explore the world and I spoke English from a young age. Of course, there’s an identity with being a parent, how you grew up, and also that early stage of understanding the language after you have lived and loved and grieved. There’s a disadvantage to always operating in your second language. I could identify with both Laszlo and Erzsébet, two intellectuals that were treated almost like a child, and their misuse of words, and those little things and the humiliations of that for these characters.

It's easy for me to think of those grammatical mistakes that one makes when you're sort of translating from another language in your mind.

Related: Interview with 'The Seed of the Sacred Fig' Award-Winning Writer and Director Mohammad Rasoulof

Kouguell: I understand that you both have architects in your family?

Corbet: Mona’s grandfather was a mid-century designer and my uncle is an architect and attended an architectural school in Arizona while I was living there with my mother. I've always had a curiosity and an interest in architecture, especially as it relates to making a movie. 

They are very similar processes in many ways. There are forms of artistic expression that require an extraordinary amount of participation from other people, collaboration and lots of money. Because even though this is an inexpensive film, and it’s very well publicized that the film was made for ten million, it was so difficult just to raise that amount of money. The first budget was somewhere around $28 million so we had to figure out how to make it work with a lot of smoke and mirrors, essentially. That's also how many of my favorite films were made. Movies like Metropolis didn't have a huge amount of resources either, and those movies feel absolutely enormous.

Brutalism, for me, felt like the correct visual allegory for exploring post-war trauma because it is a style of post-war architecture that came about in the 1950s and feels very much in dialogue with the previous period of the two World Wars.

The Brutalist (2024)

Courtesy of A24

Fastvold: Obviously brutalism is also incredibly cinematic. The idea that you are constantly working with light, using minimalism and maximalism in a way, to sort of guide your eye to something quite specific. And how immersive the experiences of being in a room that’s so naked and bare, like emerging from the darkness and into the light.

Kouguell: László’s attempt to re-establish himself in America and being separated from his wife for a decade are at the core of this film, and specifically his identity and masculinity. Let’s talk about this more.

Fastvold: This was very important to us. I feel like you can tell a lot through sexuality in film, because it's a way that you can show something without so much talking; you can show something that's rather complex, which is exciting when you're using a visual medium.

László and Erzsébet are trying to reclaim their bodies after all that has been taken from them. The way that we wanted to explore that, it was important to see his impotence early on and his relationship to sexuality. With this couple, it was a very painful way of processing trauma, and in a way that brings them closer.

Corbet: The whole film is about reclamation. Reclaiming one’s physical body and one’s career after everything has fallen apart. Reclaiming their trauma and the building being this expression, of the physical manifestation of what they harbor deep within themselves.

Being literally and figuratively violated over and over again, that’s the reason we take this subject to operatic heights. How would a 1950s melodrama handle this subject matter? It was very important to me that we always have one foot in the past and one in the present stylistically and otherwise. 

We wanted to use the Douglas Sirk melodrama to explore issues that Sirk wasn’t allowed to explore. Michael Powell is also a great example; when he did something radical with Peeping Tom, he was chastised for it and it was the end of his career. We're always thinking about how, in terms of the tradition of cinematic history, how can you carry that torch just a few steps forward, because that's pretty much all you can do in one's lifetime.

Related: Creative on Her Own Terms: How 'The Last Showgirl' Screenwriter Kate Gersten Finds Discipline Through Dance

Kouguell: Let’s talk about the character of the art patron Harrison Lee Van Buren Sr., who represents the layered if not complicated relationship between the artist and the patron and raises the question: Who is beholden to whom?

Fastvold: It can be a challenging relationship. We, as filmmakers, have experienced this in various degrees, and it was the seed of this idea that we explored. This is something we see a lot and experienced a lot on other projects. Filmmakers and artists are frequently exploited. They are doing jobs to pay the bills, willing to sacrifice almost anything. It was important to show this in the husband and wife relationship in the film; we see his obsession and how supportive she is of his work. Often there’s a cliche of the wife or partner who is so angry and upset that someone's prioritizing their art or their passion over their relationship. This relationship can also be between the investor and the artist, and it can be very complicated. 


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