Brady Corbett, who premieres his three-and-a-half-hour historical drama “The Brutalist” at the Venice Film Festival on Sunday, shrugs off the controversy over the length of films.
“This movie does everything we were told we weren’t allowed to do,” the director said during the film’s press conference. “I think it’s ridiculous to have a conversation about runtime because that’s like criticizing a book for being 700 pages instead of 100.”
For him, he continued, it's more about “how much story do we have to tell.”
“The next thing I make might be 45 minutes and I should be allowed to do that. We should all be allowed to do that. The idea that we fit ourselves into a box is so ridiculous,” he said. “We have to get past that, it’s 2024. As Harmony Korine once said, cinema is stuck in the birth canal. And I agree, so we have to help it get out of that.”
Corbett choked up several times during the press conference, at one point saying, “This was a very difficult film to make. I’m very emotional today because I’ve been working on it for seven years and it felt so urgent every day for over a decade. I’m really grateful to anyone who spent three and a half hours working on it.”
“The Brutalist” follows the 30-year life of Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody), “a Jewish-Hungarian architect who survived the Holocaust,” according to the film’s synopsis. “After World War II, he immigrated to the United States with his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), to experience the American dream. Laszlo initially struggles with poverty and humiliation, but soon lands a contract with a mysterious and wealthy client, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), that will change the course of his life.”
Brody turned to his mother, photographer Sylvia Blaschi, for inspiration, saying his character “is someone I feel an immediate kinship and understanding with.”
“She fled Hungary in 1956 during the Hungarian Revolution and was a refugee and immigrated to the United States, and like Laszlo, she started over and pursued her dream of becoming an artist,” Brody said. “And I understand a lot about the implications of that on her life and her work as an artist, which I think is a wonderful parallel to Laszlo’s work and how it evolved and how the post-war psyche influences your work.”
The cast also includes Joe Alwyn, Alessandro Nivola, Jonathan Hyde, Isaac De Bankoli, Raffey Cassidy, Stacey Martin, Emma Laird, and Peter Polycarpou. In addition to directing the film, Corbett also co-wrote the screenplay with his wife Mona Fastvold (The Sleepwalker).
Actor-director Corbett has premiered his films in Venice twice before, with his 2015 directorial debut “Childhood of a Leader” winning the Luigi De Laurentiis Award for Best First Film and Best Director at Horizons, and 2018’s “Vox Lux” competing for the Golden Lion. “The Savage” is also in contention for the festival’s prestigious Grand Prix.
