How ‘The Brutalist’ Director Brady Corbet Made a Modern-Day Epic For Just $10 Million

The Brutalist is a film that announces itself. Even before entering the theater, the three-and-a-half hour runtime—with intermission—is a statement. Its dizzying opening images unfold fast, Daniel Blumberg’s musical score blares, and when the camera at last settles on the Statue of Liberty, framed upside down and then sideways, there can be little doubt about director Brady Corbet’s intentions. This is epic cinema of an old tradition, placing itself squarely in a long lineage of novelistic American portraiture onscreen. Greed, Gone With the Wind, East of Eden, The Godfather, Reds, Once Upon a Time in America, Malcolm X, and There Will Be Blood all come to mind. And when the end credits at last unspool, you’ll be forgiven for thinking its production was as grand and lavish as the film itself. And then you’ll learn it was made for only $10 million.

“I definitely knew that the movie was not possible to make for less than $8 million,” says Corbet, who directed the film and co-wrote it with his partner, Mona Fastvold. For such a lengthy period movie, shot on film, spanning decades and vast expanses of geography, to even think it could be brought in for a sum so low almost sounds fanciful. In 2018, when Corbet was first trying to get The Brutalist off the ground, the budget tabulations were around $28 million. “The line producer was like, ‘I’m being conservative, you know?’” Corbet recalls. “I was just like, ‘That's bullshit. I mean, that's such fucking bullshit. We don't need to make this thing look like Sweeney Todd.’”

The Brutalist hardly screams “low-budget indie.” Adrien Brody plays László Tóth, a Jewish Hungarian architect who escapes Europe after World War II and emigrates to America. After attempting to establish himself in Philadelphia, he is taken in by a patron, a wealth industrialist played by Guy Pearce, who commissions him to design and oversee the building of a great monument, a giant community center on a hill overlooking Doylestown, Pennsylvania over a decade of fits and starts. The film is huge in scope and style, and it represents a leap for the filmmaker, but not a massive one. His first two films—The Childhood of a Leader, which recreated Europe during the Treaty of Versailles negotiations at the end of the First World War, and Vox Lux, a more contemporary-set film that nonetheless stages a whole pop concert in its final act—each feel similarly lofty despite being made with similarly tight resources.

Corbet and Fastvold, with five features under their belts between them, knew well what they could achieve with a low budget, but others took convincing. “Most people just couldn't wrap their head around the ambition of the project,” Corbet says. “And I kept telling everybody, like, ‘Listen, we shot Vox Lux in 22 days. We're pretty accustomed to operating without a safety net.” Their experience also meant they didn’t hold back in crafting the screenplay. “We did our very best not to edit ourselves too much. It became clear pretty early on that it was going to be a long script and a big story, and Mona and I just sort of said to ourselves, you know, We'll figure it out.”

Courtesy of A24

Figuring it out started with setting out some key parameters—“pillars,” as Corbet calls them—one of which being the director’s insistence on shooting his work on celluloid. On The Brutalist, he took that a step further, shooting on VistaVision cameras, a format that emerged in the ‘50s, which produces a sharper, more detailed image by running the 35mm film horizontally through the gate rather than vertically, effectively doubling the area of film negative used. Double the negative means double the cost. All that meant, though, was creativity and compromise, no different from any other project. “I always kind of know that we'll do a schedule, and then a line producer will be like, ‘You know, we can't shoot this movie on film.’ And then I'll say, ‘Okay, well, I'll do it in 33 days, instead of 36,’ and then we meet somewhere in the middle,” Corbet explains.

It helped to shoot in Hungary, where not only are labor and materials cheaper, but the tax credits are great. “I know that what we accomplished we could not accomplish in America,” says production designer Judy Becker. When production was originally about to start in early 2020, the plan was to shoot in Poland. Between COVID shutting the film down, and the war in Ukraine sending European into turmoil, the Polish tax credits seemed less stable, and banks were less excited about fronting the cash. Hungary’s tax credits though, were stable, and Corbet and Fastvold had filmed there before. “I have so many people that I know and love to work with in Hungary. It's such an extraordinary place for cinema,” Corbet says fondly. The familiarity made it easier to scout locations remotely during the pandemic. Hungary also offered another advantage: there are multiple film labs in Budapest. This meant there was no need to ship large quantities of unprocessed negative overseas, and it also meant being able to take competitive bids on processing, scanning dailies, and more, making the decision to shoot on VistaVision that much more economically feasible.

In a sense, it all comes down to careful planning. As Becker put it, “The poverty of the budget, it didn't express itself so much in limiting shots so much as in planning shots.” Corbet had to be specific about what he wanted in the film, and what he could do without. “In most scenes, if you were to move the camera a little bit to the left or right, there was nothing there. We were only designing exactly what we would be seeing so that there wasn't a wasted cent on something that didn't end up in the movie,” he says. “And there's no scenes that ended up on the cutting room floor. There's nothing superfluous.”

Halfway through the film, with the audience having just returned to their seats from the intermission, Felicity Jones makes her entrance as László’s wife, Erzsébet, who he has been trying desperately for years to bring over to America. It’s a big scene, emotionally and structurally, and Corbet knew it needed to appear that way onscreen, so like many filmmakers before him, he set the arrival at a train station. “Production came to me at one point and said, ‘You know, I think we have to kill the train station. What if she just pulls up in a car to the estate?’” Corbet recalls. “I was like, ‘No fucking way. It's impossible. It's the beginning of Part Two. It needs to open with a sense of scope, scale, breadth.’” His producers were concerned not because of the location, but the implication that the station would need to be filled with hundreds of extras. But Corbet pointed out that it was just a day train from New York to Philadelphia. “There could be 45 people on the train,” he says. “It’s not Hogwarts.”

That approach is what had attracted Becker, a newcomer in Corbet’s world, to working with him in the first place. She had seen The Childhood of a Leader, which she knew was made on a small budget, recalling that it was “one of the best looking period films I'd ever seen.” Becker, who has worked as production designer on films like Brokeback Mountain, I’m Not There, and Carol, and earned an Oscar nomination for American Hustle, was careful to add, “And I've done a lot of period films.” For The Brutalist, much of Becker’s focus was on bringing to life the film’s three central locations: the furniture store owned by László’s cousin Attila, played by Alessandro Nivola, where László first goes to live and work after arriving at Ellis Island; the mansion estate owned by Pearce’s industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren, which László later moves to; and the hilltop construction site where The Van Buren Institute is being built.

Courtesy of A24

“We didn't do a lot of building. We didn't build anything on a stage,” Becker says. For both the shop and the mansion, the crew found locations where they could make use of both interiors and exteriors. Not having to move locations is a great benefit, and not just for the obvious logistical reasons. The location around the shop, for example, also served well as a homeless shelter, László’s arrival at a bus station, and a number of other miscellaneous shots. Part of the mansion estate was also used to shoot a brothel scene. The main trick, according to Becker, is avoiding similar architectural details that would give away the single shooting location.

Lol Crawley, the cinematographer who has shot all of Corbet’s films, agrees avoiding repetition is key in making the most economical use of a location. “You gravitate towards the hero frames very early on. And then you fall in love with them,” he says. “And then you have to try and resist not overusing them.” As an example, he points to the library set within the mansion, which László is hired to renovate early in the film. The set had to be fully production designed twice, for the pre- and post-renovation scenes. Crawley shook up the shooting style to match, going for wider shots in certain scenes, and tighter shots or different angles for others. In one scene, László meets with Harrison in the library, and simply by shooting from a different angle, with some of the furniture rearranged, almost feels like an entirely different room.

In terms of shooting style, Crawley and Corbet opt to keep things simple. “I do light the scenes, but there's a certain naturalism,” Crawley says, reducing the need for elaborate, time-consuming lighting setups. They don’t do much in the way of storyboarding, nor do they produce extensively detailed shot lists. Coverage is kept to a minimum. “That concentrates our time to between one and four setups for the scenes,” Crawley says. Four might even be too many for Corbet, who says his preferred “maximum” is two. That saves time, and it saves film. What it comes down to, Crawley says, is “nobody wants to spend any money or do anything that is not going to be on screen. Certainly for a budget like this.”

The centrepiece of the film is, of course, the Institute, the film’s showcase for the highly divisive, concrete, brutalist-style architecture that gives the movie its title. Becker designed the building, an imposing structure almost resembling a factory more than a community center or chapel, which László is forced to include in his plans. “But then obviously we can't build the whole institute,” Becker says. She and Corbet settled on several techniques for bringing it to life. On-location, parts of the structure were built to show the progress of construction within the film, with fake concrete blocks largely made from painted, plaster-covered foam, which the Hungarian crews were skilled with. Becker also had a large-scale model of the Institute made in order to shoot parts of the building’s interior and exterior. “A lot was done in-camera,” she says. “But then there was augmentation and erasure and help with visual effects.” Late in the film, a time-lapse shot showing the construction of the Institute was achieved through a combination of model and visual effects work.

While the visual effects may have been kept to a minimum, they were often key in helping the film achieve its epic scope. “It’s very clear, even when you're writing a screenplay, at what point things have been intimate long enough that it's time for things to become panoramic for a little while,” Corbet says. “You know, once every eight to 10 minutes, you really got to open things up in a big way.”

Courtesy of A24

One such scene, later in the film, involves a train derailment. It’s a scene consisting of, in essence, two shots: a point-of-view shot barrelling down the tracks with no train visible, and then a single, very wide aerial view of the train derailing. Here, the austere style Corbet set out for the film had a clear budgetary advantage. “That shot, it lasts for about 85 seconds, but the movie's grammar allows us to shoot just one shot,” he explains. “The way that it would be in a Michael Bay movie, there'd be like 400 shots of every single detail. Now, that's interesting as well. Sometimes that can be really, really great. I love car chases where there's 400 cuts inside of about four-and-a-half seconds. But people would feel the absence of those 399 shots if he treated just that one moment differently than everything else in the film.” In The Brutalist, Corbet says, “The movie already has established this rhythm, and everyone's bought into that logic at that point.”

Establishing that rhythm also took some thinking and planning, using the film’s opening credits, featuring shots of a bus on its way to Philadelphia, to set the visual template. “It was important to me to establish this vantage point from the front of the bus in the beginning of the movie so that when we cut to the train tracks in the middle of the movie, you're not going to be yearning to see that train,” Corbet says. “Because they're becoming very expensive, doing these 3D models of the train and all, and it's very detailed and very ornamental.”

It’s a philosophy that worked equally well for realizing The Van Buren Institute. “Part of what allowed us to create this building is that brutalist architecture is not ornamental at all. It’s defined by its lack of ornamentation,” Corbet says. “This is sort of practical and visual effects 101. It is just geometry in space. And if the film, for example, had been about building Venice, then we never would have been able to make it for this amount of money. It would have required 100 VFX artists working seven days a week for at least six months to get that right.”

Courtesy of A24

Jettisoning the ornamental, or unnecessary, is just as applicable behind the scenes. It even contributed to Corbet’s decision to shoot overseas. “Shooting in America, it's become pretty out of the question for me,” he says. “I made Vox Lux in the US, and after that experience, I was like, ‘I’m fucking done.’” Never mind the higher cost of labor in the US— the industry can also be incredibly inefficient. “I’ve just had enough of it. I want to work in places where there is a lot less red tape, where there's just more common sense as opposed to these ridiculous rules in the States.” One such rule is that a director is not allowed to talk to a background performer. That job is reserved for the first assistant director, who must act as an intermediary. “Actually that can be quite humiliating for a performer,” Corbet says, “as if the director doesn't even want to talk to them. It’s treating them like riff raff which is absolutely not the case. It's simply that the rules state that I'm not allowed to speak to that performer. That's the kind of thing that you waste money on in the US.”

Becker says she too welcomed the efficiency of shooting in Hungary, and was happy to contribute to the belt-tightening. “Money often gets spent in ways that are not important,” she says. “For example, I shared a small office with probably ten other people in my department. We each had a little space at a big table. It was very communal.” The project itself inspired that attitude toward avoiding needless expenses, and for some key people, even taking a personal financial hit. “You don't care about buying your own lunch and craft service and all of those kinds of silly things that are just not that important and feel like a waste of money when you're trying to make a work of art,” Becker says. At a recent Q&A following a screening of The Brutalist in Toronto, Corbet said there was one way a bigger budget would have helped. “Having a little bit more money would have meant that for myself and about fifteen other people that made zero dollars making the film,” he said, “that they just would have been able to make a living wage.”

Courtesy of A24

In truth, as impressive as Corbet and his crew’s achievement is on the budget they had, it’s nothing new for filmmakers. “I think that every film, and every filmmaker is always thinking about, how can we maximize the effect with minimal impact to the film's budgetary constraints?” By that metric, The Brutalist is an unqualified success. Not only is every cent on the screen, by sight alone, it gives the impression that far more was spent than its $10 million dollar budget. It’s a testament, and an example to other filmmakers, producers, and especially the studios—the kind of movie Cord Jefferson was talking about when he accepted the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for his own $10 million film, American Fiction. “I understand that this is a risk-averse industry,” Jefferson said onstage at the Dolby Theatre. “I get it. But $200 million movies are also a risk, you know. And it doesn't always work out, but you take the risk anyway. And instead of making one $200 million movie, try making twenty $10 million movies or fifty.“

At the Q&A in Toronto, Corbet pointed to the success of The Zone of Interest, a severe, art house Holocaust drama about the commandant of Auschwitz, which won Best International Feature at this year’s Oscars and earned over $58 million globally. “That’s game-changing,” Corbet said, indicating that its success helped pave the road for his own film, and that he hopes his film will be a similarly path-breaking success. “If it actually performs,” he said, “the next time that somebody wants to shoot something on film or shoot it on large format film, and a line producer tells them that they can't, they'll say, ‘Well, we can, because we know we can, because what about last year? What about three months ago?’”

Its box office success is yet to be seen, but thanks to The Brutalist’s critical success and awards season attention, it’s likely Corbet will at least have to fight a bit less hard to work with a few more resources, or perhaps even a lot more. Still, it’s unlikely that his budget-conscious style will change given his style and the kinds of films he likes to make. Definitely don’t expect a movie about the building of Venice any time soon. “I promise, no more movies about building anything,” Corbet jokes, “not for a long, long time.”