Central to the plot of the director Brady Corbet’s new drama, “The Brutalist,” is an enormous structure known as the Van Buren Institute. Situated in Pennsylvania, it is made of concrete. The negative space between the two towers that stretch high above it forms the symbol of a cross. When light pours into a chapel below, the same emblem illuminates a marble altarpiece.
Viewers have asked Corbet and his co-writer and partner, Mona Fastvold, if they can visit the institute. The couple regrets to tell them they cannot.
“None of it is real,” Fastvold said during a recent interview.
“And what we did build we destroyed,” including an approximately nine-foot-long model, Corbet added. Given that the production cost only $10 million, they couldn’t afford the storage space to keep the memorabilia.
The institute is one of many tricks that “The Brutalist” pulls off in its run time of three-and-a-half hours, intermission included. Imagined by the production designer Judy Becker, working from details that Corbet and Fastvold put in the script, the edifice is crucial to understanding the psychology of the film’s hero, the Jewish Hungarian architect László Tóth, played by Adrien Brody.
László, a Holocaust survivor who arrives in America at the start of the film, is commissioned to build the community center by his wealthy patron, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce). Van Buren sees it as a tribute to his late mother, and seeks approval from the small-town government that demands it have Christian iconography. László turns it into a personal project related to the suffering he and his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), endured. The ways in which he conceived it as a tribute to their love are only revealed in the film’s coda.
While “The Brutalist” has a feeling of verisimilitude that leads audiences to think it might be a biopic, László is not based on a real person. In fact, Corbet and Fastvold tried to avoid any overlap with real figures. They consulted the architecture historian Jean-Louis Cohen (who died in 2023) to make sure no architect emerged from the war with a career like László’s.
“We wanted to talk about these bigger concepts,” Fastvold said, “and if you’re locked into a real person, then it’s harder to do so because you’re married to what happened to them vs. just looking at this period in time and the relationship between postwar psychology and postwar architecture.”
Brutalism, defined by its looming geometrical contours and stark exteriors, made sense as László’s specialty because of its emergence in the 1950s, but it also appealed to Fastvold and Corbet’s sensibilities as filmmakers.
“It is such a cinematic style of architecture,” Fastvold said. “It uses shapes, forms and light in a way that we use it.”
Corbet agreed, pointing to their previous collaborations, including the drama “Vox Lux” (2018). “The films are both minimalist and maximalist in the way that this style of architecture tends to be,” he said. “I think that dynamic is something that I really respond to.”
Although László has no exact real-life analog, Corbet was inspired to embark on this project after reading Hilary Thimmesh’s book “Marcel Breuer and a Committee of Twelve Plan a Church,” about that Hungarian-born architect’s design at Saint John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minn.
Breuer might be best known for the looming facade on Madison Avenue that once housed the Whitney Museum of American Art. And while, unlike László, Breuer moved to the United States before World War II, Corbet found an interview with Breuer that was particularly informative.
“When he talks about his experience of coming to America and how alienated he felt, there were all these things that just really fed into our conception of the character,” Corbet said.
Breuer’s work was also a reference for Becker as she began to envision what the institute would look like. She thought of a synagogue in Scarsdale, N.Y., that was shaped like a Star of David. She only learned recently that it was a work of Breuer’s.
In their screenplay, Fastvold and Corbet were as descriptive as possible about the features the institute needed, and included information about materials that should be used to build it as well as what each room should contain. And yet Fastvold could never fully visualize the final product.
“It had to be this work of art that’s processing his trauma, and also the romance and love that’s in there as well for Erzsébet was so important. But I kept thinking, ‘Oh gosh, how is the physical manifestation of all these things not going to be heavy-handed?” Fastvold recalled. “I think Judy really had this vision. It was such a relief.”
For Becker, an Oscar nominee for her work on “American Hustle,” the biggest puzzle was how to incorporate concentration camp imagery. In her research, she was surprised to find that the barracks had windows. Those became crucial to her design, the sky representing a sense of freedom.
To create this sensation she looked outside the time period, studying earthwork artists and James Turrell, who is known for his use of light.
While Becker said she always tried to use the characters to inform her design, in this case she was actually designing as one of the characters — especially challenging since she does not have an architecture background.
“I clearly did not train at the Bauhaus, so that’s very daunting,” she said, referring to László’s schooling. But Becker wanted László’s style to be wholly his own and not an amalgam of other famous architects. In that process, she also started to feel the weight of the story.
“When I was working on the institute, I felt a huge sense of trauma from living in the Holocaust a lot of the time,” she said. “It was really hard for a while just to constantly be looking at that imagery to the point where I was almost believing, and I don’t, but I was starting to feel reincarnation in a way. It felt so strong and familiar.”
Corbet and Fastvold had few notes when they saw Becker’s initial concept, and gave it to a friend of Corbet’s, the architectural designer Griffin Frazen, who conceived how it would look in three dimensions.
Representing the institute on film would be another challenge, for they didn’t have the budget to build a full-scale version. They ended up using the model, plus some existing locations in and around Budapest, and visual effects. Becker also explained that the team built certain elements of the construction site as the institute is being erected that would be crucial to show what it would be like to enter and exit it.
“It was done in a pretty old-fashioned way,” Corbet said. (George Lucas’s use of models on the original “Star Wars” was an inspiration.)
In capturing all of this with VistaVision cameras, a midcentury technology with high resolution and a wide field of view, the cinematographer Lol Crawley tried to convey the sensation of being surrounded by László’s grand construction.
“We were very careful about the height of the camera and wanted it to feel very close to an average eye height,” he said.
Of course, no one will ever know how that truly feels, a fact that breaks Becker’s heart a little.
“This is the first time I designed something to be experienced,” she said. “It’s kind of a shame that it won’t get built probably.”
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