Adrien Brody, Guy Pearce, Felicity Jones and Brady Corbet answer all your 'Brutalist' questions
The cast and director explore the movie's themes and mysteries. And they wonder, what happened to that bowling alley?
Every time Brady Corbet makes a movie, heâs thinking, âThis could be the last one.â He doesnât want it to be the last one, but when youâre filming, say, a 3Âœ-hour drama about the artistic struggles of a fictional architect, you never know.
âThereâs a high likelihood,â Corbet says, smiling.
âThe Brutalist,â nominated for 10 Oscars including best picture, directing, the original screenplay Corbet wrote with his partner, Mona Fastvold, and for actors Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones and Guy Pearce, will not be Corbetâs last movie. The film has become an event, a must-see for movie lovers. Itâs both epic and intimate, a portrait of an immigrant architect, LĂĄszlĂł TĂłth, that examines the relationship between patron (Pearce) and artist (Brody), and considers the purpose and lasting value of art.
Much remains unspoken in âThe Brutalist,â allowing us to use our imaginations to fill in the gaps.
âThatâs what makes the film so grown-up,â Jones says. âThe audience becomes active participants.â
But that doesnât mean weâre not interested in exploring the movieâs themes and mysteries. Corbet, Brody, Jones and Pearce, calling in from various corners of the world, were more than happy to provide some answers.
Brady Corbett
(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)
Why does Van Buren, the wealthy industrialist who becomes LĂĄszlĂłâs benefactor, use the line, âI found our conversation persuasive and intellectually stimulatingâ â twice â in their first meetings?
Pearce: Letâs call it the ridiculousness of the man. I know it gets a bigger laugh the second time, but the first time he says it in the cafe, there was nothing intellectually stimulating about that conversation. Adrien was just sitting there, like a teenager being told off in a principalâs office.
Might Van Buren have feelings for LĂĄszlĂł that go beyond the intellect?
Brody: There are a lot of emotions at stake. I donât disagree, but itâs more complex than that.
Pearce: There are indicators of his attraction, some even within the dynamic of the three of them [LĂĄszlĂł, his wife, ErzsĂ©bet, played by Jones, and Van Buren]. It is a bit of a love triangle, isnât it? When she finally turns up, Iâm going, âThis person has come to take my man.â
Is that why Van Buren was so keen on getting her a job in New York almost immediately? âYouâll only be gone ... five days a week.â
Pearce: Yes! âKeep away from my find!â
Felicity Jones
(Jennifer McCord)
Jones: ErzsĂ©betâs experiences with trauma have made her so aware of how terrible human beings can be. From the moment she meets Van Buren, she knows who he is and that heâs a problem.
Brody: LĂĄszlĂł possesses qualities that Van Buren doesnât. With all his power and ability, he doesnât have the same creative spirit. Thereâs something when you encounter someone who is so uniquely creative. You appreciate it. Itâs something to marvel at.
Pearce: When I press my face to the marble [at the quarry, when LĂĄszlĂł takes Van Buren to look at marble for the center heâs building], Brady was quite specific about wanting me to look at [LĂĄszlĂł]. That in itself is one of the little tells about my attraction to him â on all sorts of levels. Thereâs something deliberately coy and seductive that I bring him into my experience Iâm having with this marble.
Brody: Itâs a love- and hate-filled dynamic. Thereâs antagonistic superiority and disdain amid love and appreciation and adoration for his creative spirit. Thereâs a very convoluted thing going on.
Guy Pearce
(Victoria Will/For The Times)
The eight-minute conversation at the Christmas party between LĂĄszlĂł and Van Buren, the one thatâs been called the âskeleton keyâ to understanding the movie, has Van Buren telling a long, cruel story about stiffing his grandparents, ending it by saying, âThat is how much I love my mother.â
Pearce: Thatâs such a spiderweb, isnât it?
Just how much does Van Buren love his mother?
Pearce: Someone said to me the other day, âWe get to see what a mummyâs boy he was.â
Corbet: I thought of the mother as Rebecca at Manderley, this specter that haunts the house. It seems to be a rather unhealthy obsession. And it feeds the concept for the whole project. He has this scene where he describes to LĂĄszlĂł how he knows how to read the tea leaves and the fact that the two of them came together on the eve of his motherâs death, which is what leads him to do something thatâs equally mad.
Pearce: Thereâs this performative façade of strength to Van Buren, but on some level, he feels powerless. And he feels that the only way to actually get over that is to present himself as powerful. And in that conversation with LĂĄszlĂł, you see he recognizes LĂĄszlĂłâs artistry, but thatâs tangled up with his own insecurities about not possessing those qualities himself.
Corbet: Heâs not satisfied just to own the artistâs work. He wants to possess the artist as well.
Adrien Brody
(Victoria Will/For The Times)
Which we see, quite literally, later in the movie when Van Buren rapes LĂĄszlĂł. Some critics have found the scene rather abrupt and tonally jarring. Why did it seem necessary?
Pearce: The main question I had for Brady was the justification and the understanding of what happens.
Corbet: For me, you should see it coming from miles away. After two hours and 45 minutes, thereâs a lot of threads there.
Brody: I think itâs intended to be a big surprise to the audience. But when I read it, I did see it coming.
Jones: That scene is so pivotal. Itâs so necessary. Whatâs so striking about the film is that it is full of hope, but the hope comes from trauma. You canât have one without the other.
Pearce: I think Brady brilliantly keeps open about how much this has happened before, whether [Van Buren] is a repressed homosexual. But what jumped out at me is when we see Joe Alwyn [playing Van Burenâs son, Harry] running up and down those stairs [after ErzsĂ©bet confronts him about the rape], going, âFather! Father!â I looked at that and went, âAh. Wow. I reckon I have abused him.â
Corbet: The way Joe Alwyn responds to Felicityâs accusation, especially after weâve seen him take ZsĂłfia [LĂĄszlĂłâs orphaned teenage niece] into the woods. You see this cycle of violence in the family.
Brody: Itâs not as simple as a metaphor for being literally screwed over by your benefactor. It pertains to a deeper hatred. We shot it in multiple ways, in a much more graphic way as well. It speaks to a kind of oppressive brutality of dominance, what makes individuals so cruel and insensitive and behave so despicably at times.
Corbet: The film was made in the style of a 1950s melodrama. The way that I was thinking about it was: What would Nicholas Ray do if he could get away with it today in 2025? Itâs not a neorealist picture. I was thinking about Powell and Pressburger. Thereâs a largess and thereâs a directness in the films, allegory and visual allegory. Thereâs interplay between graceful moments and more direct, operatic moments. Thatâs what gives the film, and all my films, a very specific, very jagged architecture thatâs unlike a lot of other films. To be honest, I donât know if thatâs a good thing or a bad thing. But it is an intentional thing.
âWhatâs so striking about the film is that it is full of hope, but the hope comes from trauma. You canât have one without the other,â says Felicity Jones, who stars in âThe Brutalistâ with Adrien Brody.
(Lol Crawley/A24)
What happens to Van Buren when he disappears after Erzsébet confronts him?
Jones: Guy always says: âTherapy.â
Pearce: Iâve gone back and forth. The power of him just being reduced to nothing, being gone, nonexistent ... that enabled me to go, âGreat. I donât have to think about this anymore.â Which is pretty lazy of me.
Corbet: My partner, Mona, says that once this character has been dismantled, he is just irrelevant. So it doesnât matter if he went on a long walk, or if he hung himself, or if he drowned himself, or froze to death out in the forest.
Brody: What happens to Van Buren? I donât think itâs very good. I think most people come to the same conclusion. The shame, itâs pretty great to be confronted with it. Itâs a deeply disruptive moment. They canât find him, so I interpret it as something terribly final.
Jones: Heâs like a sprite. He disappears into thin air.
Pearce: I mean, the obvious thing is some sort of suicide, because this is gonna be just too big for him to bear. But I wouldnât solidify that. The beauty is that heâs just gone.
Twenty-two years pass and then we see LĂĄszlĂł being feted at the First Architecture Biennale. How do you imagine his life in those intervening decades?
Corbet: I wanted the character to look, visibly, like heâd recently had a stroke and that heâd aged a lot. I was looking at a lot of images of Chet Baker who, at like 57, looked like he was 110.
Brody: Itâs interesting witnessing someone youâve spent all this time with, seeing him much later in life, quite frail, reflecting on his own journey and what he has left behind and the toll itâs taken. For LĂĄszlĂł, thereâs a lot of loss. Heâs constantly forced to endure. Itâs not an easy thing for people to overcome hardship, let alone what he experienced in the concentration camps.
Corbet: Thereâs a suggestion that some of his projects were realized. Thereâs a reason we decided to go predominantly with drawings. Even the worldâs greatest architects tend to not be particularly prolific. My favorite architect is Peter Zumthor, and heâs been working on the new LACMA for so many years.
Brody: There are opportunities of creative fulfillment, and that is such a deep part of any artistic personâs yearnings. So there is fulfillment in that immersion. But I think as far as a fulfilling personal life thatâs brought a great deal of happiness and closure to everything? I donât know if that has ever come.
Corbet: It is a film about legacy, absolutely. But what youâre left with at the end of the film is that LĂĄszlĂłâs legacy is not necessarily the body of work he left behind. His legacy is family and his niece. Through his accomplishments, he has paved the way for her to have some kind of life she might not have had otherwise.
Did he ever build that bowling alley he talked about when he first met Van Buren?
Brody: [Laughs] I donât think he does. A Brutalist bowling alley. The ball is actually a cube.
Is anyone going to build âThe Brutalistâ popcorn bucket that I saw mocked up?
Corbet: I think [âBrutalistâ co-star] Alessandro Nivola sent that to us. Alessandro wins the internet every day.
Brody: I could help design it. It could be made of paper, like an origami cube. You make it and blow into it, and then it pops open into a sphere, and then you just fold it in and fill it with popcorn. If I wasnât so busy with my day job, Iâd get to it.
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