The Brutalist director Brady Corbet: ‘If you’re not daring to suck, you’re not doing much’

The film-maker’s latest is a three and-a-half-hour epic about the building of a modernist masterpiece, and the toll its creation takes on its architect. The film’s making was almost as gruelling. ‘People told me I’d never make another movie’, Corbet says

The Brutalist is a big, muscular American epic that pits the individual against the machine; the artist against the cogs and wheels of commerce. It spins the tale of László Tóth, a Hungarian-born architect who’s beset on all sides, by capricious patrons, unreliable partners, mutinous contractors and an outraged general public. László is determined to make his masterpiece. His wife, though, is spooked by the psychological cost. “Promise you won’t let it drive you mad,” she says.

Architecture isn’t so different from independent film-making, says the film’s writer-director, Brady Corbet. It follows the same basic principles, throws up the same problems and provides similar levels of agony and ecstasy, and always more of the former. Corbet is now 36 years old and three movies into a gilded career. That makes him a success, a 21st-century Orson Welles. It’s just that each project takes its toll and, financially speaking, artists rarely if ever break even. “Eventually you start doing the math,” he explains. “And with every film it’s the same result. There are so many sacrifices you have to make along the way. And I can’t say for certain that it ever feels worth it.”

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