New York Film Festival: ‘The Brutalist’ director Brady Corbet thinks the idea of a singular directing ‘maestro’ is BS

“I think that brutalism’s commitment to minimalism and maximalism is something that we really identify with in terms of our ambitions for our films,” said “The Brutalist” writer-director Brady Corbet about his epic during a Q&A at the New York Film Festival. Above, watch the entire discussion with Corbet along with co-writer Mona Fastvold, composer Daniel Blumberg, production designer Judy Becker, and actors Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Alessandro Nivola, Isaach de Bankolé, Emma Laird, and Stacy Martin.

Corbet continued, “We really like extreme quiet and extreme cacophony in equal measure, and I love anything where your feelings as a spectator remain unresolved in perpetuity. I think that there are too many films and there’s too much architecture which sort of arrives at a foregone conclusion and it doesn’t continue to evolve in your mental space, and so I love that brutalist architecture is something that is quite confrontational in a way but there’s so much grace and elegance and room for interpretation.”

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The filmmaker has been climbing Gold Derby’s odds for Best Director ever since “The Brutalist” had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. He currently ranks second in that race behind Sean Baker (“Anora“), but Corbet is the first to admit he didn’t get here on his own. “I know better than anyone that there is no such thing as a maestro. It’s just bullshit. It’s a collaborative medium. It requires thousands of sleepless nights for hundreds of people to come together to make something like this possible,” he explained. “This is not something you can do by yourself in your bedroom. It’s not painting a painting. It’s not writing a song and recording it.”

So it makes sense that Corbet and Fastvold “were talking a lot about the parallels between architecture and making a movie. It requires the same amount of support and infrastructure to build a building as it does to make a film.” “The Brutalist,” about a Hungarian Jewish architect building a new life in the US after surviving the Holocaust, is thus a labor of love about a labor of love.

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