Art, money and power: a blueprint for The Brutalist

Writer-director Brady Corbet’s Golden Globe-winning film The Brutalist is the saga of László Toth (Adrien Brody, Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty), a Hungarian-Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor who emigrates to the United States while his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones, The Amazing Spider-Man 2), a fellow Holocaust survivor, remains trapped in Eastern Europe. Straddling the years between 1947 and 1980, The Brutalist explores how the American Dream turns toxic after László, whose reputation as a successful architect in Budapest doesn’t translate to America, accepts the patronage of industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce, Mare of Easttown). In exchange, László agrees to build a community centre, dubbed The Institute, as a monument to Van Buren’s late mother. Over the course of the film, The Institute becomes a symbol of László’s genius, his wartime struggles, and his epic battles with Van Buren to get it made. 

Adrien Brody as László

Read on as Brady Corbet, Adrien Brody, and The Brutalist production team draw up a blueprint for the movie, outlining the links between movie-making and architecture, the predatory relationship between capitalism and art, and the immigrant experience in the United States. 

“The film is about many things, including building a building, but it’s also a movie about making a movie,” reveals Brady Corbet. “Architecture and filmmaking have a lot in common because it takes roughly the same amount of people to construct a building or make a movie. The Brutalist for me was a way of talking about the more bureaucratic aspect of the artistic process.” 

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Building an immigrant tale

Adrien Brody as László

“The Brutalist is essentially about László trying to re-establish himself in America after being separated from his wife for a decade,” says Adrien, who won the 2025 Best Actor Oscar and BAFTA for the role. “I pulled from two profound influences in my life – growing up the son of a Hungarian refugee, and representing Wladislav Szpilman.” Adrien’s mother, the photographer Sylvia Plachy, fled Budapest during the Hungarian revolution in 1956, and emigrated to America as a refugee. “I saw The Brutalist as a story of quiet perseverance and the need to strive for excellence,” Adrien says, “even when the ground has been ripped out from underneath you … It’s a journey of a refugee connected to his past who has also been stripped of his past. He’s trying to find his way in a new land with a new set of rules.”

Adrien won his first Best Actor Oscar in 2003 for playing Polish-Jewish composer and Holocaust survivor Wladyslaw Szpilman in The Pianist. “Although they are two entirely different characters, the months spent researching and connecting with Szpilman‘s past, and the horrors of that era, still haunt me and offered an emotional understanding to the harrowing experiences and loss that inform László’s journey coming to America as a refugee,” he explains.

Brady Corbet, who took seven years to make The Brutalist, adds, “It examines how the immigrant experience mirrors the artistic one in the sense that whenever [someone] is making something bold, audacious or new – like the Institute László constructs over the course of the film – they are generally criticised for it. And then over time they are lionised and celebrated for it … Brutalism is a style of architecture that was predominantly created by immigrants. In scope and scale, Brutalist buildings are begging to be seen – but the people who designed or built them were fighting for their right to exist.” 

Brutalism does not mean brutish

Adrien Brody as Laszlo and Felicity Jones as Erzsébet

English architects Alison and Peter Smithson came up with Brutalist as a label for an architectural style in 1954, based on the French term béton brut, which means raw concrete. Famous Brutalist buildings in South Africa include Johannesburg’s Hillbrow and Brixton Towers, Ponte City, and Johannesburg Central Police Station, as well as Cape Town’s Artscape Theatre Centre and Provincial Administration Building. 

“Brutalism can be austere but it’s also monumental in style – these strange objects that are loved and loathed in equal measure and take time to unfold in the public imagination because people can’t seem to figure them out in the moment,” says Brady. “Post-war psychology and post-war architecture – including Brutalism – are linked, something we bring to life in the movie through the construction of the Institute.”

“For a designer, making a movie about an architect is a dream come true,” adds production designer Judy Becker. “The major challenge with this one wasn’t simply designing period-specific sets and locations, but constructing the Institute, which symbolises László’s lived history and struggle.” Judy researched Brutalist and Modernist architects and their commissions, but also drew on her own background. “The structure needed to relate visually to a concentration camp, so I studied images of the camps, which was upsetting but necessary to understand László’s history,” she explains. “When I was a child growing up in New York, I remembered our local synagogue, which featured a Star of David overhead. It was a huge moment for me when I realised that the Institute should be in the shape of a cross, towering above the building’s lower feature, which looks like concentration camp bunkers.” 

Meanwhile, Brady consulted architectural scholar Jean-Louis Cohen for insight into America’s Post-war immigrant architects. And while László’s is a figment of co-writers Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold’s imagination, his experiences in America reflect those of key artists of The Brutalist movement, including Louis Kahn, Mies van der Rohe, and Hungarian-born Marcel Breuer, who designed the Whitney Museum in New York City (now named the Met Breuer). 

“The truth of the matter is that most Eastern or Central European Jewish architects that got stuck in Europe during the war did not make it out alive,” says Brady. “In Breuer’s case, he was a well-regarded academic who was invited to work with Walter Gropius in America in 1937. In the latter part of his life, Breuer was not a particularly celebrated architect. Now he’s considered to be one of the finest architects of the 20th century.” 

The real brute in The Brutalist

Guy Pearce as Harrison

From the outside, Harrison Lee Van Buren is a progressive businessman who represents the American Dream at its peak, raking in a massive fortune through the power of relentless drive, as well as his shrewd understanding of how to manipulate people to his own ends. All underwritten, of course, by a billionaire’s best friend ‒ generational wealth.

“Part of his power is to be charming and win people over,” says actor Guy Pearce. “He’s troubled, but there’s also a big heart in there, someone who is willing to financially support a struggling immigrant like László, whose architectural talent he recognises. He’s got taste, and if he has power over everyone around him, everything is okay. His entire façade is constructed around that.” But when Van Buren doesn’t get his own way, watch out. He is prone to explosions of rage and violence, both as a tool to get his way, and because he’s the kind of man who has so much unchecked privilege that self-control becomes unnecessary. 

Marble Quarry

Harrison and László’s differences come to a head when they visit a quarry in Carrara, Italy to source marble for the Institute, and the true depths of Harrison’s depraved and exploitative nature emerge in the hollowed-out marble caves dug into the mountainside. “Carrara for me is indicative of the way capitalism has been so harmful to the planet, so the landscape mirrors the characters’ interiority,” explains Brady Corbet. “It also reflects the rapaciousness of Van Buren – a visual reminder of how his ilk devours and plunders everything in their path.”

“The crux of the movie is the problems László runs into in the course of designing and building the Institute, but it’s not strictly a question of architecture, design or construction, because it relates to bigger issues,” adds production designer Judy Becker. “When someone is paying your way, like Harrison Lee Van Buren is funding László’s vision, how much power do they actually have over you?”

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