‘The Brutalist’ First Look: Brady Corbet’s 215-Minute, 70mm Epic Stars Adrien Brody in a ‘Fountainhead’ Homage

Filmmaker Brady Corbet has premiered features twice before at Venice, but never at this scale.

“The Brutalist” is the director’s first feature since 2018’s “Vox Lux,” which starred Natalie Portman as a pop star haunted by a school shooting. Before that, Corbet also premiered “The Childhood of a Leader” (2015) at Venice, announcing a singular cinematic voice after years of acting in indies like “Melancholia,” “Simon Killer,” “Mysterious Skin,” and “Thirteen.”

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As Venice Film Festival artistic director Alberto Barbera revealed during the July 23 press conference announcing the lineup, “The Brutalist” will premiere in competition. It’s also a whopping 215 minutes long, which includes a 15-minute intermission. The film was shot on Vista Vision by Lol Crawley, director of photography on the celluloid-made “Vox Lux” and “The Childhood of a Leader” as well as Noah Baumbach’s “White Noise” more recently. Barbera confirmed that the Italian film festival will screen “The Brutalist” in 70mm, with Corbet’s vision marking a recent trend of directors from Christopher Nolan to Paul Thomas Anderson presenting their films in 70mm. (Though shot with IMAX cameras, fellow Venice competition entry “Joker: Folie à Deux” will at some point also screen stateside in 70mm, though no word yet if Venice will present Todd Phillips’ musical sequel that way.)

Barbera had said “The Brutalist” was shot on 70mm, though IndieWire confirmed the Vista Vision lensing — a higher resolution of 35mm — with one of the film’s producers.

The cast in the fictional “The Brutalist” is led by Adrien Brody as László Tóth, a Hungarian Jew who survived Auschwitz before emigrating to America. On U.S. soil after years of poverty, he’s entrusted by a patron, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce) with a gigantic architectural project. Barbera said the main thematic reference for the film is King Vidor’s 1949 “The Fountainhead,” starring Gary Cooper as a modernist architect refusing to compromise his vision. That film was itself based on Ayn Rand’s controversial 1943 novel “The Fountainhead.” Rand took issue with Vidor’s film, which was maligned then but has since been reappraised. “The Brutalist,” though, is an original screenplay.

Brady Corbet co-wrote “The Brutalist” script with his partner Mona Fastvold, whose last feature, the period lesbian romance “The World to Come,” premiered at Venice in 2020.

“The Brutalist” ensemble also includes Felicity Jones (as Brody’s wife, Erzsébet); “Vox Lux” stars Raffey Cassidy and Stacy Martin, plus Joe Alwyn, and Alessandro Nivola. Corbet’s debut “The Childhood of a Leader” won best debut feature and best director for Corbet out of the Horizons section at Venice in 2015, with “Vox Lux” competing for the Golden Lion in 2018. “The Brutalist” finds Corbet back in a competition lineup at Venice, which this year also includes new films from Luca Guadagnino, Pablo Larraín, and Pedro Almodóvar. And if we’re talking Venice running times here, Guadagnino’s “Queer” clocks in at 2 hours and 31 minutes. Barbera assured press conference attendees they will need to keep an eye on film lengths to make their schedules work.

The first look at “The Brutalist” is at the top of this story. Trevor Matthews and Nick Gordon are producing for Brookstreet UK alongside Brian Young and Kaplan Morrison’s Andrew Morrison. Also producing are Andrew Lauren for Andrew Lauren Productions and D.J. Gugenheim. Co-producing is Joshua Horsfield’s Intake Films out of the UK while Viktoria Petrányi’s Proton Cinema provided production services in Hungary. Brookstreet UK and Kaplan Morrison are financing with Lip Sync Productions, Richmond Pictures, Meyohas Studio, Carte Blanche, Pierce Capital Entertainment, and senior lender Cofiloisirs.

Focus Features has international distribution rights, but a North American distributor for “The Brutalist” awaits. Filming dates were punted around by the pandemic until “The Brutalist” finally shot in Budapest and Tuscany throughout spring 2023.

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