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- [00:00]
Rob Harvilla
Look, it's not that confusing. I'm Rob Harvilla, host of the podcast 60 Songs that Explain the 90s. Except we did 120 songs and now we're back with the 2000s. I refuse to say aughts 2000 to 2009. The Strokes, Rihanna, JLo, Kanye. Sure. And now the show is called 60 Songs that Explain the 90s. Colon, the 2000s. Wow. That's too long a title for me to say. Anything else right now, Just trust me. That's 60 songs that explain the 90s. Cole in the 2000s preference, preferably on Spotify.
- [00:38]
Sean Fennessey
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Adam Naiman
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Sean Fennessey
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Adam Naiman
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Sean Fennessey
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- [01:03]
Adam Naiman
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Sean Fennessey
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Adam Naiman
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Sean Fennessey
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Adam Naiman
Offer valid for new app users only. Free Medium Drink Reward upon registration.
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Sean Fennessey
14 day expiration terms apply. See DutchBros.com.
- [01:39]
Adam Naiman
I'm Sean Fennese and this is the Big Picture A Conversation show about the Brutalist it's finally time. Later in this episode, I have two separate conversations with two of the key figures behind my favorite movie of 2024. The first is with co writer and director Brady Courbet. This is Brady's third feature as a director and his best work yet. I had an amazing conversation with him about getting this movie financed, mounted its big swings and bigger themes, and a lot more. And then I talked with the star of the Brutalist, Adrien Brody, who delivers an exceptionally deep and nuanced portrayal. Adrian talked about his personal connection with Lazlo Toth's story and his own history. The long road to making this film and a lot more. These are great conversations. If you care about this movie, they are worth your time. Speaking of great conversations, I am joined by Adam Naiman, the mean pod guy par excellence. He's here maybe to spar with me, maybe to agree with me. Adam, I'd like to start by asking you, is there a better description of a cube than that of Its construction?
- [02:39]
Rob Harvilla
No, no. The best description of a cube is of its own construction. Form follows function. And we're off to a rousing start.
- [02:50]
Adam Naiman
So we're talking about the Brutalist today. You've written a piece about this film, fortheringer.com that I highly encourage people to read. I'm excited to talk to you because I think you have a slightly more maybe ambiguous and complicated relationship to the film. For me, it's a big celebration of a certain kind of filmmaking that I really enjoy. I think you have some suspicions about its success. Ultimately, as I said, this is Courbet's third feature. His first two 2015's The Childhood of a Leader and 2018's Vox Lux, I think signaled ambition, but were not always as successful to me as the Brutalist is. This movie, like those previous films, is co written with Mona Fastvold, who's his partner in real life and also his creative partner. She's also a filmmaker in her own right. Movie shot by Law Crawley in a Vista Vision format, which is a more or less dead tech stock that he has revived here. It has not been shot on an American film in many decades. I think Shohei Imamura may have been the last person to have use this format internationally. And he shot it on 35 millimeter. It's being projected in 70 millimeter. This is a big film, bro, talking point that I guess we can talk about whether or not it is a success. But he just said it just seemed like the best way to access the period that the film talks about, the 1950s, was to shoot it on something that was engineered in that same decade. Movie stars Brody Full, Steve Jones, Guy Pierce, Joe Alwyn, Raffi Cassidy, Stacey Martin, Isaac DeBankold, Alessandro Nivola. It's about an immigrant who comes in the aftermath of the Holocaust in the United States to seek refuge and find family and hopefully a new life in the United States of America. And stumbles upon great fortune and terrible fortune, as do many immigrants to this country. Adam, what did you think of the movie the Brutalist?
- [04:38]
Rob Harvilla
I think that everything you said about the size and the scope and the tactility, these are like true things about the movie. They are selling points for the movie. None of us, you know, woke up yesterday reading the culture industry and said, oh my God, movies are products for sale. I mean, we know this, this is implicit. And talking about movies as a business and as an art form is where the interesting tension in what we do lies. Right? So one of the courses I teach at U of T is about that tension, it's about the economics of movie making. And it's not always financial economics. It's also cultural economics, political economy, and again, marketing. The 20 year olds in this class, and if any of them are listening, I'm not using them as a prop. They're great. I love my students. They're dying to see this movie. And I ask them sometimes not so rhetorically, I'm like, why are we interested in Hungarian Jewish assimilation? Is this a period of time that you've always wanted to see explored on film? Are you fascinated by brutalism? Or do you like that a guy had final cut? And that every interview about the movie is about how hard it is to get that kind of final cut? And fighting against the apparatus in the industry of moviemaking, which is the running theme of the director's interviews. And he's done critics a solid by saying, that's also what the movie's about. So interpretation becomes celebration, right? Like, he's like, oh, the movie's kind of an allegory of its own production. He's more articulate about it than that. And there's more to the movie than that. What my students are responding to is this is a hard, difficult, physical process of making a movie. And this means it's a monument to itself and to movie making and to all the things that are eroding from film culture. This is going to be built to not erode, right? The whole point of the movie is like, use good materials and something will kind of stand up. And then the question of what it is is open to interpretation. I do not deny the excitement people have around the movie. The reasons for that excitement are fascinating and we can talk about them in good faith. What the movie is when you're a critic and not a distributor or a marketer or the person who made it is a slightly different discussion. I don't think we're too, too far apart on the movie, but the movie is being celebrated in proportion to how fetishized all of this format, projection, size stuff is. And when you let yourself get totally ground down by that, or if I speak going for myself, if I let myself get totally ground down by that, I'm not really talking about what works and what doesn't in it.
- [07:18]
Adam Naiman
That's very thoughtful and articulate. And I think you're right that we are closer than maybe we seem. And the differences, one, I think they elucidate how we think about movies. And two, I'm very comfortable saying I am historically very susceptible to this marketing and storytelling around the release of a movie. In fact, I kind of valorize it and use it to prop up the show. And I have no problem with that. So I tried to enter this movie, especially the second time I sat down to watch it, with a little bit of consciousness about what I was doing. And then try to focus on what the movie actually is. Now we know all this stuff because, as you say, Courbet's been saying in an interview, he could have. They could have not blared that this was filmed in VistaVision in the opening sequences of the film or on the poster treatment or in the trailer. They could have just buried all that stuff. That would have been. It could have been an interesting talking point for somebody who is a little bit more curious to ask about. But they are using it to promote the movie the same way that Courbet is using his personal experience, it sounds like on Vox Lux, and the frustrations he had with the financiers on that film. And use that as a framework to make this story about artists and patrons. But when I watched the movie the second time, and trying my best to strip away a lot of what was surrounding it, I found a movie that's just more or less about pain. Like artistic pain, personal pain. The tremendous frustration with trying to move through the world while trying to create something. And I think if you receive the movie on those sincere terms, take away the brutalist boy's gimmick, you know, take away the A24 marketing machine and just look at what the movie is. I find it to be a tremendously profound, straightforward and big expression on what feels like a big scale, but is ultimately a very small scale. And that's the thing. One of the things I wanted to talk to you about, because as I watched the movie a second time, I realized that this is not an epic. It is a long movie. It is a movie that takes place over a long period of time. But it is what I'm calling, what I'm trying to develop as a concept, as a sort of microepic. You know, there are other microepics in movie history. The Conformist, for example, is a microepic that's a very small scale movie that seems extremely influential on this movie, the Bertolucci movie, but that has a handful of characters. And while it does, you know, cross country lines and tells a big story about fascism and power and, you know, deception, it's a character study. And this movie, I think, is ultimately a single person character study with maybe two other characters who are meaningfully developed beyond sketch. So what do you make of that? The idea that the movie, even though it feels gargantuan and they keep using monumental to promote the movie, that it's actually like a tight person story.
- [10:03]
Rob Harvilla
I think you're right. I think that the way that opening sequence is developed is all about scale because, you know, the fact that Lazlo emerges from that ship onto the deck and, you know, even before you get to the Statue of Liberty, which I also talked about in the shots of the earpiece I did for Ringer almost, because you kind of have to. Which you say with admiration and also a little bit of just grudging. You're like, well, you know, you start your movie that way. I mean, it doesn't pass without comment if you turn the Statue of Liberty upside down. Right. But, you know, the whole way that that opening scene is designed is he's one of many. He's one of many stories. And, you know, the epic context is displacement and war and global catastrophe and this very ancient idea of like, you know, leaving home to make home. Right. These are all epic things. This is epic in the sense of Homer, you know, this is epic in the sense of the Odyssey. But then when you shrink it down to one person, it does become about that one person, and it really aligns yourself with his point of view and his experience very, very closely. Which is why I also want to talk about it as a tale of two halves, because there's a different emphasis on subjectivity in part one and Part two, which is where some of my. My. My doubts arise. But I think calling it a micro epic is good. I tried to allude in my piece it came off as mean, but wasn't meant to be mean. It's just, you do your. Your. Your job, you know, that critical lens that Manny Farber had of the White Elephant and the termite. And that makes sense to me if. If you look at this as a movie about construction, like I'm simplifying the. The argument, but that movies that seem to be kind of digging in and eating away with inside their own borders, where it's just restless. He called it restless, unkempt activity movies. It's not that they're small, and it's not that they're unpretentious or that they're genre movies, but you. You constantly sense them kind of working within themselves and struggling against their borders. Or the White Elephant movie, which is. This is just made to be big, and it's going to overwhelm you with size and scale, even of ideas, you know, and It's a fun game to play at home. If you read Farber's essay, be like, which movies I like are white elephants. And which movies are termite movies? And sometimes the movies have those qualities overlaid on each other. For a lot of critics, White Elephant has become something that you put down. It's a way of saying, this movie is pretentious, this movie is overscaled. This movie is too much swing and a miss. You know, all that stuff. I like the idea that this movie has both qualities. And I wish that the termites had eaten the elephant in the end.
- [12:33]
Adam Naiman
But I think I want to explore that with you. Because I read your piece and I noted that with interest. Because I'm obviously susceptible to the elephants. I like a lot of termites, too. We've talked a lot over the years about different kinds of movies that we both enjoy. But I do think you are historically pretty suspicious of White Elephants. And I'm wondering why that is. Ultimately, what do you think? Not forget about the critical community at large, just you personally. When you see someone with the obvious ambition that Courbet has, like, this is a person who is openly saying, I wanted to make something big. That feels like a filmic representation of the brutalist movement. What is it that makes you a little bit. Is suspicious the right word? I'm not sure what the right word is for how you feel when something like this is presented to you.
- [13:18]
Rob Harvilla
Maybe because the White elephant in the room is always a kind of success. A success measured by commerciality and consensus. And I think if you don't have some skepticism of those things, you're in trouble. I guess if you have too much skepticism of those things, people think you're an asshole. But you also have to take each film as it goes. A filmmaker who I know you really have no interest in. You've never discussed. He's of no interest to you as Paul Thomas Anderson.
- [13:44]
Adam Naiman
What was the name again?
- [13:46]
Rob Harvilla
What was that guy's name again? And, you know, in my book about him. And when we've talked about him as a teenager or young cinephile, Mario Chase. It felt necessary to be skeptical of him. Because in some ways it was like, why is he arguing over Final Cut in the first movie? And why is he making a three? The rhetoric around him when Magnolia came out, if you scoop out the Internet, you know, like, the Internet doesn't exist in the same way. But this is what Boogie Nights in Magnolia were about. You know, it's like, are you doing too much? Why are you making this thing that's so big. Why is bigness encoded in everything? What are you overcompensating for? I mean, Boogie Nights makes it hard to not read those things in terms of, you know, swinging your dick around as a filmmaker, you know? And then I think it's not that Anderson's not prone to making white elephants, but, like, his white elephants are so weird. They're like mutant white elephants. And I love that he can make something like the master that a lot of people don't like. Like kind of a diseased elephant, you know? And also, he reached the point in his career where his other influences fall away. And even though you see them, you see him. I wasn't sure what I'm seeing in this movie. Not just because I see a lot of PTA and Bertolucci and everybody else. We could do an A to Z of people who are in this movie. That's what it means. Work and a tradition. And it means Brady's seen some other movies and good for him. You and I have both sat through plenty of movies this year by people who don't seem to have seen a movie before in their life.
- [15:07]
Adam Naiman
So true.
- [15:08]
Rob Harvilla
And movies that are greenlit by people who also don't want people to see movies or subsidized by streamers who would prefer that movies were actually just static. We know this. Right? But the danger of the white elephant, I guess, is just that it's. What's the Family Guy line, Lois? It insists on itself. When Peter was talking about the movie, I forget what movie it is. He says he's never seen the Godfather.
- [15:32]
Adam Naiman
Yeah.
- [15:33]
Rob Harvilla
He's like, my problem is it insists on itself. Sometimes the insisting is annoying. Or sometimes the insisting seems to be in compensation or in distinction to like, what's actually in it.
- [15:46]
Adam Naiman
I think you're right.
- [15:47]
Rob Harvilla
Was that unpretentious enough to talk about Family Guy? Am I going to get in trouble for speaking in long sentences and then boiling it down to Family Guy?
- [15:54]
Adam Naiman
You're never going to get in trouble here. But I appreciate you bringing the high and the low together, as is often the strategy on the show. I think that this movie is attempting to be very high, but also is very low in some ways, too. And so. And I think that the. I think that is a very smart delineation, bifurcation of the idea, which is that this is, in some ways is a small scale story, a very personal story that is told not predictably, especially in the second half of the film. The first half of the film feels very historically grounded and feels like it is emblematic of a kind of movie, a kind of Coppola movie, a Bertolucci movie. Like the movies that we're talking about. The sort of the rise in the American story in the middle part of the 20th century. The movie itself is literally bifurcated. There are two parts of the movie. And that in and of itself I guess seems pretentious. It's a very novelistic literary conceit. In fact, the first part of the film is literally named after a VS Naipaul novel. And there is an intermission which has been talked about quite a bit. A literal 15 minute intermission with a countdown clock during your screening. There's an overture, there's an epilogue. This is a very designed story and very purposefully underlining each step that it is taking. Now again, these choices I think in some ways are obviously to kind of help a common movie going audience understand. I greatly appreciated the intermission. As someone who often needs to go take a pee break at a movie, I was grateful to have it. I was grateful to know when it was coming the second time I saw it. I think that they're also part of the marketing of the movie. You know, I think they're part of the strategy of getting the movie not just made, but to communicate something about it. I don't know that that necessarily impacted how I like felt about it creatively. It just feels like a structural decision. The same way that the form follows function idea behind brutalism and that wave of mid century architecture and design is necessarily built into its conceit. I don't know. What do you make of the way that he has organized the movie?
- [18:05]
Rob Harvilla
I think the movie's organized very smartly. I think you're right that it's. It's bifurcated and then a little unpredictably, it kind of gives you a little extra, you know. And the coda is quite fascinating. You know, we'll get there. We try and avoid spoilers on the pod. But also if you want to talk about a movie properly, you kind of have to talk about what's in it.
- [18:24]
Adam Naiman
We eventually will have to spoil the movie for sure.
- [18:26]
Rob Harvilla
Or you know, talk, talk, talk a little bit about the fact that, you know, it was his sled. Now that's not the spoiler in the movie.
- [18:32]
Adam Naiman
That's going to come up in my conversation too.
- [18:34]
Rob Harvilla
It's going to come in your cover. I hope so. Yeah. You know, a movie of two halves. A movie with the inner, not the inner titles, but like those. Those two halves are titled in ways that help you understand the movie? You know, the enigma of arrival. And someone I like on social media asked, you know, did he choose that because he knows the novel and the themes of immigration, the novel, like, does it just sound good? And I think, you know, it's a little bit of both. Can both be true? Yeah, be true? And you know, the Q and A that he did in Toronto, I didn't go, I sent my, my, my wife but, because I'd seen the movie already but she told me about the Q and A. And he talked about that. He talked about Naipole, he talked about Alice Sebold. I mean he talked about everybody because he's not pretending this movie exists in a vacuum. You know, he talks about the architects who he researched. The character is named after a kind of iconoclastic figure who defaced a Michelangelo statue. You know, sometimes the, the, the context is a little much. I, I've laughed every time I remember that guy Pierce is named Harrison Buren. You know, like my friend texted me, my friend texted me, he said why isn't his name potus van Power broker? You know, I mean it's, it's, it's, it's a lot.
- [19:36]
Adam Naiman
George Washington Trump. Would that have been appropriate?
- [19:39]
Rob Harvilla
George, George Washington Trump? You know, I, I, I, I'm not sure that that's at the, the, it's, it's, it's a little closer to like Reynolds Woodcock than Daniel Plainview, you know, in the character name game. But no, it's organized, it's built, it's blueprinted and it also, you know, it doesn't just announce where it's going, but it gives you a way to look at it and see what's coming. It's funny, you said the second half's unpredictable. I think the second half is kind of predictable. I don't even mean that in a bad way. Like the lines of this movie are pretty long and clean and it's preparing you for what's to come. Don't love the dramaturgy in the second half of the movie, but we can get there eventually. It's long movie, we have plenty of time. But look, let's just say it's built carefully. And we should also say not skipping too far ahead in the plot, but some of the best writing on this movie. Vadim Rizof said this last year, not last year, in the fall. It feels like a million years ago this movie came out. It was just September. That that idea of a multi purpose building where each chamber has a distinct purpose, but all has to be combined together. That's also him allegorizing what he's doing, you know, like in the plot. His commission is to make something. You've watched it more recently than me, but it's like, what. It's like a. A gym, a library, a church. Well, the church is the last one. Gym, library, something else and a church. And they all have to be, like, multipurpose, but distinct. That's him telling you this movie is compartmentalized. And it's not just about this architect building a thing that a rich guy asks him to. It's about all the other things. So as a screenplay, him and Mona Fastfold. I mean, they definitely got it down. You know, in a way, maybe the difference with Anderson is it doesn't feel like there's a lot of room for experimentation within the structure. You have the way PTA directs. He's just one guy I'm mentioning because he's all over this movie. This movie is pretty carefully written. This movie has to hit its marks in order to work. And it. It's not really within its. It's not really within its conception for anything to go crazy. Yeah, pretty severe.
- [21:47]
Adam Naiman
When we did our Best Movies of the Year episode, we talked about how it's very clear that There Will Be Blood and the Master are presumably influences. I have not even heard Brady mention pta, but it's hard to imagine, just given the hand job of it all. I'll say that that's not an influence. And obviously the way that powerful men manipulate the. Their followers and the way that powerful men kind of reap and sow across the land, like, these are big ideas that are in those Anderson movies that obviously are in this movie. But the Anderson movies, even the most. The gravest of them, are very antic and even silly at times. And while this movie, I do think is kind of funny occasionally, especially in many Guy Pearce moments, it's not antic. It is incredibly structured. I've read a couple times now that there was no delineation from the script, the script that they wrote seven years ago. There was no improving on set. They didn't. There weren't multiple drafts after the actors were cast like they shot the movie they wrote. So you're very right that this movie feels tight. Maybe it's too tight for its own good occasionally. And maybe, you know, as somebody who likes aggressive literary fiction, or at least did in his 20s, I like what they're after here. And I think that there is not a lot of experimentation insofar as, like, what if we stretched out the meaning of this character and let him go on some sort of side quest? Or we spend a little bit more time with a different point of view in the story? Like, there's none of that. There's no magnolia, really, in this movie. To me, that's not a bad thing because most movies really couldn't sustain this. Most filmmakers couldn't sustain this kind of thing. So just as an act, I don't just mean intention, but actually execution, I think it really holds together. We can definitely discuss the things that maybe don't work as much in the second half. As far as other things this movie is about that I think are important. I think alienation and assimilation are probably the two most considered themes and themes that we've seen before in stories about Holocaust survivors or immigrants. But this one in particular, I think is doubled down on by the artisan ability to connect with his patrons or his family or the people who work for him or society, or even how he sees his own ideas. And then, as far as assimilation goes, you've got very direct communication about religious persecution, exile from your home. You've got forcible disassociation from your own work, which is an aspect of the story that I really like, which is that Thoth is this architect in Hungary who has built these remarkable buildings and is celebrated in his time until the Third Reich comes along. And he thinks that work has been disappeared or has at least been forgotten. And he comes to find out that it still exists and that in fact, he is a person of still great renown to at least the Harrison Lee Van Buren's of the world. And I don't. I couldn't. You know, this felt like kind of novel to me, the way that this artist was portrayed, the sort of forgotten and revived artist. I really love that as an idea. And it speaks to the assimilation, too, because it's like an entry point for an outsider to get into a club. You know, you have done something cool, and so we want to adopt you. You know, sort of. Sort of a proto Basquiat situation here with Laszlo Toth that I really liked in the storytelling. What do you make of those two themes and how they work in the movie?
- [25:16]
Rob Harvilla
It's all the stuff about the movie that I like and I'm compelled by with the asterisk. And it's not a negative asterisk. It's just an asterisk that apparently, at the Q and A here in Toronto and as more and more interviews are coming out, the distinction that the director is Putting between that experience of Jewish emigration, assimilation and anything to do with him, that's not a bad thing. But he's clear about it because we're in a year this year where every movie we talk about, whether it's anora or trying to think of another example. Anora. But, you know, lots of. Well, Emilia Perez was a great example too. Like who's telling whose stories, Right. So the question of, you know, mid 20th century Jewish persecution, which is also hugely loaded contextually now. And I think the movie deals with that to an extent, though, since it was written seven years ago and not diverged from. That's also worth thinking about in terms of the coda. But it's not his story to tell because in some ways it's such a big archetypal story that that's why he feels it's his story to tell. It's his story to tell as an artist, if not as a Jewish. Right. It's his story to tell as. And that's where, again, you start getting that question of, is equating a movie that ends up getting built, made, bought by A24 and entered into the Oscar race the same thing as trying to resurrect the artistic identity that was stolen from you? Maybe it's not, but the insistence on this is an allegory of my struggle or an allegory of what I do. That's where you start to. That's where you start to smell the white elephant a little bit. But just within the movie, what you're saying is true. I love that. No sooner has he gotten to New York and gotten his handjob, his very. One of two significantly master ish sex scenes in the movie. Not only is his nose broken, but she's like, your nose is ugly. I mean, this is not subtle, but this is a nice distillation of this xenophobia that ends up going all the way back around to being exoticized. Like a pet. Harrison treats him like a pet. He's like, look at my pet architect. Look at my pet Jewish architect. And the implication of that big, long dinner scene. I mean, there's a lot of long scenes in this movie, but the dinner where he invites Laszlo into his home to all his friends and even hooks him up with that immigration lawyer to try and bring his wife and niece over. The implication is like, God, this guy suffered a lot, but we're helping him. And I think that that character that Pierce is playing is obviously a tremendously fucked up guy. I mean, you know, he's like sweating insecurity the moment you see him. But it's all framed as like philanthropy, you know, and good, good, good, good Samaritanhood. And there's so much guilt in there if you just know anything about American history and about the slowness to act that a lot of Americans had to reckon with about World War II and the knowledge of what's going on versus doing something about it. One thing I'd say about this movie, I don't know what you think of this as a theme or an anti theme, but it's definitely a subject There thing as pure motives in this movie. And art is supposed to be pure, but not just like it gets compromised by, by commerce. Nothing's pure. The, the brutalism isn't pure. You know, it's not just form follows function. He's hiding something inside the building. Everybody's hiding something inside of themselves in this movie. And I guess the artist is a smuggler, right? The artist is a smuggler. The artist has secret compartments. The artist is not a good person really. Most of them aren't. Most of us aren't. So that's all stuff that I give the movie full marks for developing and dramatizing. And when you feel these forces in collision of Laszlo, who's like a genius but broken down, and Harrison, who is not a genius at all, but wants to be and wants to be in proximity to one, that's pretty good. That's the point at which I was most engaged with the movie, for sure.
- [29:20]
Adam Naiman
Yeah. Likewise, the relationship in particular between Van Buren and Toth and the sense of necessity that each of them provides the other is fascinating. Van Buren, who notably made his fortune in, quote, wartime manufacturing, is a stroke of genius. You know, the idea of leveraging destruction and devastation and then trying to somehow, you know, you mentioned guilt. Whether it's pay it back or clarify it to himself is really interesting. By bringing someone like Toph into the fold, but then essentially making him work for him and live on his grounds, but in his guest house, not in the proper house, all feels very purposeful. But you know, Guy Pearce and Adrien Brody, there is something electric between them. And when they are on screen together, especially when they are having that cocktail sitting down, and Van Buren tells the tale basically of his emotional motivation, which is that he's a mama's boy who has been essentially cast out by his mother's family for being a bastard and who's also, you know, this is a. We're in spoiler territory, but has some complex sexual repression in his life, clearly. And he Very quickly glides over discussion of his ex wife, who was the mother of the twins in his family, his. His son and his daughter. And the way that he is constantly trying to level up intellectually while knowing that he has great fortune. But maybe not the intellectual heft I find fascinating. And then using Toth and Toth in real time, identifying a meal ticket. And I think part of it is because he probably had meal tickets in Hungary, and he knows how this works. He knows that there is a certain kind of commodification that comes with creativity when you need things at scale the way that he does. So that conversation that they have where Van Buren tells this extremely personal story that is still kind of encoded and then Toth delivers essentially an intellectual manifesto about his work, is very written, is very novelistic. It does not sound like the dialogue of any old movie you would find on Amazon Prime. But it is aspirational to me about what a movie can be about when it's just two people talking. And it is character development, it is setting up plot detail, it is motivational for both characters. And I just love the two of them together. I feel like this is a part that Pierce is born to play. You know, like using his slickness, his beauty, and his even going back to Ed Exley, you know, that sense of, like, insecurity that surrounds his clear intelligence is so interesting to me. I just love the two of them together. And I think that's a huge reason why the movie is such a success for me.
- [32:09]
Rob Harvilla
Yeah, these guys are both, in their way, like, pretty consistently. I think that they're also interesting actors in terms of choices they have or haven't made or roles that they have or haven't lived down. You know, they're not pure movie stars. They're not pure character actors, but they're both capable of being very great. You know, Brody obviously carries the aura of the Pianist into this movie. It's part of why. I don't know if it's why he's cast, but it's smart. And I think you're right that the Pierce performance this reminded me of the most is him and Mildred Pierce. The Todd Haynes miniseries adaptation, where once again, you sort of have this interesting mix of prosperity and rot. You know, I thought that that's the performance that this reminded me of. He's also really great this year in the Shrouds, actually, as Vincent Gofeld is funny in that. He's so funny. But the scene that you're talking about is interesting, too, because the subtext of the story he's telling. I like how you described it as encoded. It's kind of a story. We're not trying to spoil the movie or recapitulate the whole plot, but it's kind of a movie. How it's like I was in a position to give people a lot of money and I let them know I could have given them a lot of money. And then I kind of had a change of heart for reasons that really matter to me, and they got jack shit. And that's what's funny about that speech he's giving, where it doesn't flatter him. And it's still very much in the period where he kind of wants Lazlo to do his good work for him and help him erect this monument to his mother and himself and her memory and all that. But there is a real subtext there of like, I signed the checks. And one more thing I want to compliment. In the first half, we're jumping around a bit, but just before that, the gesture that gets him interested in Laszlo is the Reading Room. That's been commissioned by Van Buren's son, played by Joe Alwyn, who I just kind of want to say at this point, clearly a good actor who is interested in being in. In decent movies. You know, he's worked with. With. With. With Claire Denis and Hong Li and Yorgos Lanthimos and whatever. I think of all those movies, like, good on you, Joe Alwyn. You clearly are pretty good actor.
- [34:13]
Adam Naiman
I appreciate the choices he's making as well.
- [34:16]
Rob Harvilla
Yeah. But I like that the whole point of the Reading Room is that you can't see the books. It's about a face, it's about effacement. You know, it's exact. There's. There's a little bit of implication in Toth making that choice, even though it is about a beauty. And that room is beautiful and you're so happy that it actually gets finished and you get to see it. It is that idea of like, a guy who fancies himself a reader would love to sit in there. Because ultimately, it's not about the books, it's about the room. And this is all still. This is all still at the point in the movie where I'm like, these are really good ideas, you know, And I like seeing them played out.
- [34:53]
Adam Naiman
Yeah. As a compartmentalizer and a collector. The sequence where we see the execution of Toth's design and it's really. It's only the second thing we really see that he's made. We see early on a very. Marcel Brewer inspired Chair. And then we see this library that he has built for Van Buren at his son's behest. And it's. It is a magnificent sequence when it is revealed for the first time. Shot beautifully and so exciting. But you're right, and I hadn't thought of it quite that way, that this library opens and closes. And in a time when I think that's a very obvious commentary on shielding your own intellect and intellectualism. That, like, this is a time where it's not good to be quote, unquote, pretentious. It's not good to cite your influences. It's not good to speak to the historical, artistic context of the work that you're making. And obviously, Brady's going the complete opposite direction. He's like, I'm reading Sebald and Naipaul and I've studied the Brutalist architects and I'm name dropping like crazy as I go through my press tour. But Van Buren, he can be a great admirer of books and an esthete, but not too much. You know, it needs to be in his little private quarters. It can't be in the dining hall.
- [36:08]
Rob Harvilla
And he has something to say about them whether he's read them or not. Right. You know, it's funny. His only subject is himself. And I also like that he's struggling for the words in that scene where he's just so clearly hungover, which is also the PTA of it all, which is that idea of sort of, you know, that. That idea of trying to remain smooth and unruffled when you are just completely messed up. That's the. There Will Be Blood. Lancaster Dodd in the Master Specialty.
- [36:37]
Adam Naiman
Yes.
- [36:37]
Rob Harvilla
Just trying to, like, sound. Sound important and articulate when you just, like, cannot put your shit together is always fun to see in a. In a. In a character. I mean, I think what we're getting at so far, you know, is that everything about the first movie, about the first half of the film, is well constructed on the subject of construction. And it has this absolutely irresistible power dynamic that the second half purposefully complicates with the arrival of. I guess I would call the movie's third character and third major important character. Although there's really four. Because his wife and niece are both important.
- [37:14]
Adam Naiman
They are.
- [37:14]
Rob Harvilla
It's important that they're both women. And it speaks to the co writing of the film as a kind of his and hers, you know, partner, partnerish script. It's where, as I put in the review, the movie seems to fall off its axis for me. And I'm more interested in discussing it than arguing it. Because it's interesting to discuss, but it's a problem for me.
- [37:36]
Adam Naiman
So I'll put a spoiler warning at this point. Spoiler warning. Cause if we want to get into the second half of the movie, I think what we've talked about largely to this point is primarily the rising action of the first act. And the first act unto itself is a tremendously satisfying. Roughly, what is it, 80 minutes or so? It feels more like, even though it is big in its scope as well, like almost an extended intro to Lazlo in America and the second half of the film. Well, one thing I want to note before we get into the second half that I'm curious for your thoughts on. You know, the film takes place entirely in Pennsylvania. After he arrives at Ellis island, he shifts to sort of Doylestown, I think, is ultimately where Van Buren's estate is. But his brother has a. Or, excuse me, his cousin has a furniture shop in Philadelphia. Courbet uses a series of archival imagery and some audio from documentary images to situate us and to sort of like historicize the movie in a way that I thought was very effective and interesting. I'm curious about how you feel. You know, I have some jokes about Pennsylvania that I can share here if you'd like. It feels like not a mistake that he's chosen the most metro agrarian of the American centers. You know, this is the home of Ben Franklin and Billie Holiday and Grace Kelly and Joel Embiid. And, you know, this is. This. This feels like the right state to me.
- [39:07]
Rob Harvilla
It's all. It's also where they built the village.
- [39:10]
Adam Naiman
That's right, right.
- [39:10]
Rob Harvilla
You know, that. That whole idea of there's, you know, let's just put a big fence around something and divert the plain so everybody can live like, you know, in ye olde colonial, you know, colonial times. I love, love, love, love, love the village. Love M Night, you know, great Philadelphia. Philadelphia filmmaker Adrien Brody film. And Adrien Brody film. Yeah, that's. The costumes are under the floorboards. That's a spoiler, by the way, for the village, for the 20 year old literal line of dialogue in the movie. The costumes were under the floorboards anyway. Yeah, of course it's a good location. And it's important that New York is a way station to get there, because in some ways it's not a New York story, because New York is already built up when he gets there. The whole point of what Lazlo needs is he needs a field, you know, he needs a rise in the hill and then nothing. And again, that's the wonderful metaphor in There Will Be Blood, that America's just like flat at the beginning of the 20th century. And you have the superimposing of him signing the check over the landscape and it's like, this is mine, you know. But it's interesting. Harrison doesn't build. I mean, he builds things. He's an industrialist, but he's not a hands on guy. And you know, I mean, that's the thing with Daniel Plainview is he's like a guy who digs under the ground and then ends up in the mansion because he, he knows how to build something in the first place. Toth is sort of like the first half of that character. He actually makes the thing. But it is interesting too, in the second half, he starts acting more and more like Van Buren because he has a bigger and bigger staff, which is where the directorial self portraiture becomes a little unflattering, you know, like you start treating people like shit, especially when you're behind schedule. So I like that too.
- [40:51]
Adam Naiman
I have some thoughts about that. I think that there are two sequences in particular where he is deeply unpleasant during the construction of the site that at the end of the first act Van Buren presents. There's this incredible sequence where, you know, after a party, they walk up to a hill to that open, that raised space that you're talking about. And he announces that he wants to build a community center. Van Buren does, in his mother's memory. And that he wants Toth to be the architect of this space. And so Toth comes up with this conceit using his brutalist concepts. And he gets it approved, but he gets it approved really, because a number of different forces need to have their say. There's the local government and the mayor. There's the church, there's the project manager. There's Van Buren himself, who's meddling with Toth's vision. A lot of people are getting in his way. There's also very amusingly, another architect who comes into the frame and I had some thoughts about this. And the self reflection of this. Jim the architect is trying to manage his vision and compromise his great works. And Jim memorably has made a bowling alley that's on his cv. The bowling alley is like, that's an MCU movie. That's Jurassic World 3. And the brutalist is a work of art. The Brutalist is the Godfather. And a guy who makes an MCU movie couldn't possibly understand how to craft something like the Brutalist. There's a lot of deep, deep allegorical self meaning in particularly the communications about what Lazlo is doing, what he is attempting to him, capturing and executing on his vision versus how everyone else around him perceives it. That, I think is really funny. Now, the second time when we see him being incredibly difficult and rude to people is when his sort of, you know, the construction workers and his underlings and the people who work there are messing about with his work. But it's after a very traumatic event happens. And so I think that that is a bit more purposeful and not necessarily just a reflection of Van Buren or his own ego overtaking him. And we can talk about that because I know that that's a plot point that has particularly bumped some. We've seen the movie and maybe even you. But who he is rude to and why and who he is difficult about is interesting. You know, we should also say that Toth, very early in the film, develops a heroin addiction and that that recurs throughout the movie, though it is not the focus of the movie. It is a critical plot strategy, particularly when his wife, Erzepet, comes to America and we learn very quickly that she is suffering from osteoporosis and has been bound to a wheelchair. She comes over with Zofia, her, their cousin. They've both survived, they've made their way to the United States. They get integrated into the story. Felicity Jones plays ER Jabet 1 what did you think of Felicity Jones performance? Because I think this is one that has been divisive.
- [43:50]
Rob Harvilla
Not a fan.
- [43:51]
Adam Naiman
Tell me why.
- [43:52]
Rob Harvilla
And because I think it's a losing battle against a character. Not just casting someone who's clearly putting on an accent and not just casting someone who's recognizable. Maybe not in the same way that suits the material that Brody, but it's hard to say because you don't want to sort of say, well, the movie doesn't work in the second half because female characters show up. But there is something to be said for There Will Be Blood, for instance, a movie where women are a structuring absence and that really gets at the stuff. And There Will Be Blood about, you know, the boys, you know, here's how boys are. And both in terms of the aggression of it and the homoeroticism of it. In the Master's, a movie where there's women everywhere, but they're all just one woman. They all look the same and act the same and he sees them the same way. Here you have this person who needs to be a character and. And even when you're just describing the heroin addiction and his relationship with Isaac Debonklay, who again, should be in every movie. I love him. You know, that's where Claire deny boy, that you are. Yeah, Claire Denis, boy, that I am. That's where you start getting to the point of like, yeah, this movie's well written. Is it too well written? And that's not being. I'm not being a jerk. I'm like just talking about. There's the line that Umberto Echo had about Casablanca where he's like, the cliches are having a ball. Like, it's fun when everything is kind of an obvious archetype. But here I'm like, like, do we really have to have him and the one black character in the movie go to the jazz club and get addicted to heroin? Does the scarring that his wife went through by being left behind have to manifest in her clattering around in a wheelchair? Does the muteness of the niece in the horrors of what she's seen literally have to be muteness? Does the catastrophe that befalls the construction project have to be a literal catastrophe where the camera pulls back and seen as far away, then getting into real spoiler terror? Like, if something that Harrison feels about this guy and their relationship has been sublimated, do you have to have it come out that way? I'm asking. I'm not telling because we didn't make the movie. We're just talking about the movie that they made. There is. The Bowling alley is funny because there really is a sense for me in the second half of let's Just knock down some Pins. And I like when movies don't just knock down the pins. That's not form follows function. That's just like, well, of course. And I think the more explicitly shocking the things are, and they shouldn't be shocking. We're all grown ups. But like, movies are pretty de sexed and sanitized and stupid. So, you know, violence or explicit sexuality or all that stuff. I mean, I'm all for it, but it's very tidy. And I feel like the shock tactics are at odds with how predictable that stuff really is. And it's not about outsmarting the movie or being like, because I've seen a movie before, this movie isn't good. I just mean let's even give it a compliment. Let's say it has a heavy inexorable dramaturgy because it's kind of about fate and kind of about self fulfilling prophecy. And this is just. If you act a certain way, it's going to come back to bite you. Like I'm even going to grant it all that or say that that's a good faith way of looking at the movie. It's still less than what the first half is. I found myself getting bored, and it's not for lack of attention span. And I'm not trying to be bored either because we've just talked about all the things in the first half that are granular and real and inhabited and that are. Are interested. Because I will just say, like, it's not quite what you asked, but just to put it out there too, there's obviously a fun movie for people to hate because for all the reasons that people are liking it. And it has a really polarizing distributor in the same way that people saying a 24 is the best and everything they put out gets kind of annoying and tiring. There is the whole idea that hating a 24 is not a personality either.
- [47:39]
Adam Naiman
Definitely not.
- [47:40]
Rob Harvilla
It's a shorthand, but it's a shorthand that people use to indicate that they've seen other movies or that they know what exists beyond a 24. As someone who's in that second category of seeing other movies, it doesn't a priori disqualify the stuff that they make. So this is the thing about a big target. It's a small movie compared to other things. Like, I think Carry on cost more than the Brutalist, if we're being honest. No, no, no, no question.
- [48:04]
Adam Naiman
So Jason Bateman made more on Carry on than. Than anybody on the Brutalist did.
- [48:08]
Rob Harvilla
Good old speaking. Speaking of a termite artist, Jean Collinsera, although he's working for the Devil, but, you know Dwayne Johnson. Dwayne, yeah, Dwayne Johnson. And you know, Reed Hastings. But the size of the movie makes it a bit of a target. It does that to itself a little bit.
- [48:29]
Adam Naiman
Okay, so you opened your thoughts by talking about the excitement that your students are feeling for this movie and then you hoping to interrogate where that excitement is rooted. And I thought that was a fascinating entry point into this. And this is really related to the direction I want to take this conversation, which is I think I, perhaps to a fault, almost certainly to a fault, am extremely optimistic and celebratory about not just movies in general, but a certain kind of movie, a certain kind of autorist act. And I'm interested in intention. And I often ask filmmakers how they got something made and where it came from. Emotionally, intellectually, I'm really just into those things. I'm also prone to Overhyping and celebrating someone, a grand vision, you know, that's something I enjoy. I think I'm still in the mentality as a film fan of the 19 year olds in your class. And I think you are not. And I think you once were. Now you could tell me if I'm wrong about this, but I think an openness after 25 years of considered film study and film teaching can curdle the excitement that you engage with. And I'm not trying to say I am better than you. In fact, I am weaker than you. I am more of a fan than I am a scholar. But I am so interested in this idea because I think obviously a good critic brings this level of skepticism and deep thought to a movie like this. But also I really see this movie very clearly in the tradition of the canon and not in a movie that is like aping the canon, but is that is working in theory to accentuate and continue the work of Palin Pressburger and Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, Bertolucci, like, you know, Sergio Leone. Who do you want to mention, like the dozens and dozens of films that this movie is kind of echoing or scratching at. And I love that. I love finding connectivity in context. And I have sense, particularly among most of the critics that I really admire and who I think are incredibly not just well seen, but really understand the art that there's like a real skepticism to this movie. And some of it I think is the A24 thing that you're talking about, though not all of it, because A24 picked this movie up. Like this is an indie movie that Brady and Mona spent seven years of their life trying to get off the ground. That went through a very difficult production process during COVID I think multiple cast members and creators, like family members, died and say that they had to stop making the movie. It does. Much like Toth's vision, like this was hard to do and Brady's not afraid to say that and also put that in the film. But it's an independent movie about mid century artistry and alienation and devastation. And it is in a way up its own ass about its own making. But it feels like so ambitious to the point of meaningfulness. But that could be hollow. You know, that's a word that you used in your piece and that's a word that I kind of want to explore with you in conversation with what could be described maybe as like canon protection. I think that there's a little bit of concern when a movie like this comes along where it's like, does it really stack up, up to the Godfather? And it's like, well, is that the most important thing to say about this movie? What do you think?
- [51:53]
Rob Harvilla
No, it's not the most important thing to say about it, but it's also the thing that it's kind of nudging you about, or it can feel that way. Your idea of, like, skepticism versus openness is interesting because one of the most. One of the bad faith readings of what critics do is that they're reading things in bad faith. But we do sometimes, and skepticism is a defensive posture and it's a suit of armor, you know, and then we all play our favorites. And I think that there's a whole discussion to be had. And I don't mean this podcast isn't the place to have it. It's just a big discussion that there is an argument that that whole idea of the canon that you take seriously, and I do too, having, you know, a couple of the books I've published are big, monolithic, you know, picture books, even though they have ambivalence about the directors within them. I won't say what the directors I've written about think of those books, but in some cases, you know, it's like, like, wow, that was more critical than expected, you know. But we love this idea. This idea goes back to Orson Welles. I love when people say, well, not every movie, Citizen Kane. They mean it like, somehow Citizen Kane's boring. Citizen Kane's hilarious and contemporary and fast and entertaining. We talked about this during the Mank wars, you and I, you know, that whatever else you can say about Citizen Kane that, you know, it's not boring and it's not homework, you know, so the Wellesian idea of final cut, it's not like some 20 year old woke up and said, that sounds good. It's been sounding good to people for a long time, and it sure is shit better than having Jim the bowling alley guy show up and be like, you know, make a bowling alley. So I. Not only do I get you, we all have our favorites, right? The other thing about, let's say the Conformist, maybe this isn't true, but There Will Be Blood is when the Conformist came out, you could find reviews of it, but it's a different discourse. You know, there's no such thing as instantaneous canonization. There's more just like, well, what did Pauline Kael think? Or what did Andrew Sarris think in the moment? Especially if you're reaching back to where I think Courbet's sweet spot is, which is the 70s. I think there's a lot of PTA in this movie, but that's because cards on the table. I think PTA's most talented American filmmaker of his kind in that interstitial period doesn't even mean I love all his movies. But he's in the air. And it's not just Brady Courbet. He is a transformative filmmaker within a certain moment. I think Courbet's frame of references, the 70s, even the Godfather, winning all those Academy Awards, like. Like it took a while. I think it's not so much that people are trying to guard the canon. They're trying to guard the canon from people sneaking in the day their movie comes out.
- [54:17]
Adam Naiman
Yeah, now that's interesting. I think you put your finger on.
- [54:20]
Rob Harvilla
It and the idea that if something's built to last, which is literally the theme of this movie, we've kind of got to see it. And you know, we talked the other day in the year end thing about a movie that is not first of all cost literally 15 times as much as this movie and will not have the same glory accrue to it and probably agree, full of non psychically sick people would agree that it's not as good a movie as the Brutalist. Like, you know why I'm betting on here, the Zemeckis movie? Because I just want to know what the hell people are going to say about that in 20 or 30 years if we're all still here, you know, which is sort of the theme of the movie. Nothing's here as long as we think it's going to be including, you know, our film culture. The Brutalist is like, I'm here now. What's the Oasis album? Be Here Now. I'm Here Now.
- [55:04]
Adam Naiman
This is not the Be here now of 2024 at the movies, though, let's be honest.
- [55:07]
Rob Harvilla
Hey, Be Here now is also about heroin addiction.
- [55:10]
Adam Naiman
That's true.
- [55:11]
Rob Harvilla
You know, things being too long and too big, you know, that's. There's the hot take. The Brutal. Brutalist is better than Be Here Now. I don't know if it's as good as. Definitely. Maybe a more provisional title anyway. But yeah, it's that idea.
- [55:24]
Adam Naiman
No, I'm thinking of Standing on the Shoulders of Giants. That's another one that. I'm amused.
- [55:27]
Rob Harvilla
That's also a great title. The Brutalist is just Oasis titles. This is a stupid conversation. It's my fault, My fault.
- [55:33]
Adam Naiman
It's very 2024. Oasis is fully back.
- [55:35]
Rob Harvilla
I know which one of them is Laszlo and which one of them is Harrison? I think they're both Harrison.
- [55:44]
Adam Naiman
It's the idea of Liam is Harrison. Come on.
- [55:48]
Rob Harvilla
Is Harrison.
- [55:48]
Sean Fennessey
Of course.
- [55:49]
Rob Harvilla
Okay. Yeah, you're right. I guess Noel actually writes.
- [55:50]
Adam Naiman
Noel is the artist.
- [55:52]
Rob Harvilla
Yeah, he writes songs. That's true. I think it's the idea of instant Visconti that makes people frustrated, especially if they know who Visconti is, instead of saying, I guess Visconti I read as a comparison to the British. But again, we're kind of in the terrain of marketing and I'm going to take a deep breath and give this movie not credit. I denied it on purpose in my review, but we've had such a good chat about it, I do admit it's a hard sell. So giving a hard sell, the hard sell and even having that be like vibrating off of a little bit of arrogance that's within the movie. I mean, what's the alternative? One thing I will say about the Brutalist, whoever streams it, it's never going to be something that just comes up in the Netflix algorithm. And good for it on that count.
- [56:43]
Adam Naiman
Yeah. It's such a fascinating thing. When I was thinking of the micro epic concept, one of the first movies that sprang to mind was Rocco and his Brothers. And you make this point about Visconti. And Visconti made big, grand. You know, the. You know, the Leopard is like a cost. Big, massive, long costume drama. But he also made like, long but tightly focused character stories. And I don't think it's pretentious or out of bounds to compare or to be. To summon a movie like that after seeing something like the Brutalist. But I like what you said about kind of like, wait your turn or wait, time will tell on a movie like the Brutalist. I'm not really in that business. You know, I'm not. I'm in the business of making two episodes a week. And also I think this works in both directions because for someone like me, I see everything. I see 300 new films a year. And I've been encouraged of late by critic friends to stop doing that, you know, to get it down to closer to 100 to 150. But I don't want to do that because I don't feel like I'm doing my job. But what can happen when you do that is something like the Brutalist comes along, which is just so different. It's just not a bowling alley at all that it charges me up and I get overcharged and excited. But I have no regrets about that. I mean, I Want to love something. And so I think the other thing too is that I thought it was interesting what you were saying about the kind of schematic nature of the second half of the movie and the knocking down of the pins. And I found Felicity Jones character, maybe, if not the performance, the character, significantly deeper and more interesting the second time I watched the movie. I wonder if the same would be true for you the second time you watch it. It's not a mistake that this movie is credited as a film by Brady Courbet and Mona Fastfold. And the relationship between the artist and the supplicant is not just in the direction of Van Buren, but also in his wife and his partner, who is also an educated woman, an accomplished woman. And maybe there's like a little bit of 2024 ing in that formulation, but I don't think too much. And I liked the way that she is framed as a person who, despite being in a wheelchair, senses that she has to make a life for herself, for her family. And maybe there could have been more time spent with her, exploring her. Her story. But we got this huge first chunk, necessarily, with Lazlo, so you don't get enough. But I liked at least how the movie is framed. The accent is a little dodgy, the wig is a little dodgy. It's notable to me that this movie was originally supposed to be a very different cast. And I do want to just mention that before we start to wrap up our conversation. The first iteration of this movie was meant to be Joel Edgerton as Lazlo and Marion Cotillard as, er, Jebet and Mark Rylance as Van Buren. I think the other figures were going to be Sebastian. Stan was going to play Harry and Vanessa Kirby was going to play Maggie. That's a very different film.
- [59:41]
Rob Harvilla
Yeah, these were the better choices. It's nothing against any of those actors. And actually, Marion Cotillard is the star of a movie that's also in this film's DNA by a filmmaker I know you and I both admire, and I believe he's been on the pod and he's a great filmmaker. James Gray, from which the step in between the Godfather 2's Statue of Liberty shot and this movie Statue of Liberty shot is the cold open of the Immigrant, where you see the Statue of Liberty with its back to the camera and shout out to James Gray. I like that more. But, yeah, I mean, Cotillard's good actor, but this cast is better, I think, or works better.
- [60:17]
Adam Naiman
Let's talk a bit about the epilogue, because I think this is what sealed the movie for me. Though some may disagree, I don't think I fully understood as I was watching the movie the first time, that there was a Trojan Horse quality to what Toth's vision was, that he was doing something under the good Christian nose of Van Buren. And the movie, which it shifts to kind of a video format in the epilogue, it catapults us to the 1980s. Catapults us to. I believe that sequence takes place in Israel, right? Where he is being honored for his works.
- [60:50]
Rob Harvilla
No, it's in Venice.
- [60:52]
Adam Naiman
Oh, excuse me. It's at the Biennale, right? That's at the Biennale.
- [60:54]
Rob Harvilla
It's at the Biennale, but. And again, it's like, how. How do we tap dance around this? But, you know, it's in the context of his family and later him decamping to the state of Israel, which is where the discourse around this movie has not gone yet.
- [61:12]
Adam Naiman
It's true. We can talk about it. I mean, maybe I'm not the best person to have that conversation in depth, but I'm curious because of what you said about how it was made seven years ago and where we find ourselves in the conversation about the war in Gaza and the state of Zionism and how it's perceived in the world at large.
- [61:29]
Rob Harvilla
Yeah. Oh, good. Yeah. Put it all on me on the podcast with zillions of listeners. I mean, it's put it this way, but what. What I. What I. The first thing I texted someone when I saw this movie, I missed it at tiff, but then I wanted to write about it properly for. For you guys. So, you know, the distributor let me see it here as part of a different screening in between. So I didn't come out of this movie talking to a lot of other critics, but I certainly didn't watch it at home on a link. You know, I watched it properly and the first thing I texted my friend is, I'm like, oh my God, when people start really writing about this movie, which means not the pull quotes on the poster, 15 different people saying it's monumental. Which kudos to a 24. That's pretty funny where instead of having separate pull quotes, you have the same word and then just like 15 bylines underneath it. That's hilarious. That's one of the funniest things I've seen in a trailer in a long time, that when people are going to grapple with what that ending means about this movie, about a Jewish architect who comes to America, let's just say, without spoiling the movie, not treated super well. Even beyond the parts of the movie we've discussed and whose family is trying to get him to go elsewhere. Which made me think of a couple movies I like. Well, it doesn't matter that I like them more than this. I do, but they're great movies. Christian Petzold's Phoenix thematizes this. And if not Friend of the pod, certainly my guy Paul Verhoeven deals with this brilliantly in Black Book. This theme, it's not just that it's timely, it's tricky. And the idea of him ultimately being dragged away from America, but not back to Europe, but to this third place, that's going to be a safe harbor, which is hugely contextualized by the end of World War II and also by whether people wanted to or felt safe in America. That's a big deal. And so is the idea that he kind of continued on his work. It's not like I don't want to be too spoilery, but he gets a retrospective. And I just sort of cynically said in my piece, you know, this is Brady Courbet's aspiration showing. I'm sure he would also like a retrospective of his work one day. And that might be unfair, but the whole idea of a retrospective is you analyze and deconstruct. And to give this movie that I still have mixed feelings about some credit, it's very important that he doesn't make his own speech. Right.
- [63:49]
Adam Naiman
Well put. Yeah, I'm not sure if that was necessarily self reflexive. The.
- [63:54]
Rob Harvilla
I'm not sure it is either. I'm being mean.
- [63:57]
Adam Naiman
Yeah, you are being. You're being mean. POD guy. I think it is a testament to the genius that is sometimes communicated to us, but not always shown to us about Laszlo and whether or not that's worthwhile and whether or not his mission ultimately is to subvert patronage. You know, I think that's something that the movie is really very much about. And it's obviously informed by Brady and Mona's experience on previous films, but it's also informed by like the entire apparatus of art across the 20th century, where you just. You for the most part need money and need people who have money to persist as an artist in the public space and to meet your own ego in addition to your own creativity. It's an idea I really like. And the idea that Toth is able to subvert the expectation of a traditional Christian capitalist power structure within his artwork as an immigrant is just a great idea. And the final needle drop too. Which.
- [64:57]
Rob Harvilla
Are we going to spoil it?
- [64:58]
Adam Naiman
Maybe I shouldn't spoil it.
- [65:00]
Rob Harvilla
The final needle drop is Good Luck, Babe by Chapel Roan. I didn't see that coming.
- [65:06]
Adam Naiman
Maybe I shouldn't spoil the final needle drop. To me, it's an Andersonian gag. It's a really funny song.
- [65:14]
Rob Harvilla
Yeah, it's a funny song. I mean, again, you know, Petzl did that in his movies. In Barbara and Transit, where you have this kind of incongruous credit song. You know what you were talking about this idea of the artist and the patron. I mean, we talked about this movie briefly. You've talked about it this year. But the other movie that comes to mind because it's about an architect is Megalopoulos, in which, I guess the Toth figure and the Van Buren figure are united in the form of Francis Ford Coppola, which is that if you don't have to farm out your artistry to some, you know, other guy because you are the genius. But that's why Megalopolis, whatever I think of it, I think parts of it are pretty funny. You know, I'm not. I'm not anti Megalopolis. I don't think it's very good. There's no tension. The tension is all in the subject matter. I mean, that's a movie like, the world's gonna end. What are we gonna do? We need to stop time, I guess we need to stop time to. To watch Megalopolis, you know, but, like, that idea that the architect exists as someone who's supposed to, like, stop time so that we can think about things and see things and analyze their work. That's a real shared theme between these two movies. Just in Megalopolis, it's about Coppola worshiping himself. And here you have a different thing because there's the money and the creativity are separate.
- [66:29]
Adam Naiman
One of the reasons I don't like that movie, despite my autourist fantasies, is that that's a movie whose primal message is, I alone can do it and should be celebrated and elected to do it. And this movie is the opposite. This movie is. I may have the inspiration, but I cannot do it without these forces that are often unethical, evil, violent and dangerous. That's a much more pragmatic viewpoint of the world and the work. Coppola has earned the right to do whatever he wants and say whatever he wants in his movies.
- [67:01]
Rob Harvilla
Sure.
- [67:02]
Adam Naiman
But I like that Courbet is kind of in the shit still. You know, that's really where he's at. And I think that's one of the reasons why I'm drawn to this is. It's like it is still a bit of a hustle for him. And the same way that we valorize Coppola fighting the studio on casting Al Pacino when they wanted Robert Redford as Michael Corleone, I'm the guy valorizing Brady Courbet for pushing ahead on this movie for no financial gain and then having to make commercials to make money and feed his family. So, you know, they are very worthy contrasts right now. But they say a lot about having made it versus trying to make it. And I like that them in concert together.
- [67:42]
Rob Harvilla
Yeah. I like, as a critic, having a movie that's worth arguing about even. And I try not to do this shtick too much when I write for you guys or elsewhere. But if people read my work or. I mean, I'm always interested in movies that are divided. Not just the idea that not everything is great or terrible, which is an unfortunate byproduct of how social media works. Not just talking about movies, but talking about people's opinions. You know, this idea of measured ambivalence, like it's not a joke. It's like an interesting way to look at movies and see where they puncture that ambivalence and where they make it kind of go away. This is a movie that you can have an hour long conversation about, not just because you're trying to. I don't mean you or me. I mean like anybody. Rhetorical, anybody could, if they watch it with their full attention, which it holds, you know, could have a discussion about it. But I guess that you asked me about that word hollow, which I know sounds really harsh, but I don't second guess it because in some ways it's a movie where a lot of it's kind of built for you to put a lot of stuff into it. And I'm not sure that architecture's smart. I'm just not sure how solid the ideas, all of them really are. Whereas a movie is weird and synaptic as the master, which is like all connective tissue. And I know it's an unfair comparison, but it invites us. It like, I'm pretty sure I know what that movie's about and I'm pretty sure I like how it's about it and what it's about here, I'm not sure. But we are instantly have to review it and talk about it. So I am airing, as you kind of implied rightly, you kind of got my number on that sense the side of caution.
- [69:16]
Adrien Brody
Yeah.
- [69:17]
Adam Naiman
Which I think is completely reasonable. And I really like the way that you threaded the needle on the hollowness of the construction. I think that. That maybe the problem, or perhaps it's not even a problem, maybe the issue is that you like to work a little harder to locate the meaning and implications of a movie. And this is a movie that, if you're paying attention, it's not very hard to understand what the filmmaker is trying to say. It is a blunt formulation, like a brutalist building. And I guess maybe I don't have as much of an issue with that, or maybe I'm just a dumber guy. But either way, this is a. You know, we haven't even talked about, like, just the number of striking images and sequences. We, of course, mentioned the Statue of Liberty, which is already being used as a marketing tool and is cited in every review. But, you know, that library reveal and the hug at the train station and the steel beam walk and the dinner seduction and the model presentation to the community is a fascinating sequence where he is kind of simultaneously shielding his identity and celebrating it to this group of Christians.
- [70:20]
Rob Harvilla
Almost all in the first half. Because when I'm thinking. Because when I'm thinking about the striking images in the second half, they're striking, but they're yoked to me to scenes where, again, the. The bit. Much alarm goes off. I mean, we don't. I don't know if we have time because we. But. But, like, you know, the whole detour to the. The marble caves.
- [70:40]
Adam Naiman
Oh, I loved it. You didn't like it?
- [70:41]
Rob Harvilla
I liked it and I didn't like it. I don't really like what happens in there. Not because I'm a prude. I'm just like. Like, this is where the meta. I said the pieces. Where the metaphor becomes the meta.5. Right. You know, it's like. I guess that is what Harrison's doing to him now. Literally. But, you know, that. That stuff's quite beautifully shot. I guess in the second half, it felt less to me that it was yoked to it, tied to what Laszlo's seeing. And I think that the pullback in that train explosion or the explosion that you see through the clouds that goes so far back and so far up, it becomes about its own scale to me. And that's telling. It's a great shot. But it was one of those where I kind of felt myself nudging my. I was nudging myself in the ribs a little bit, being like, are we overplaying our hand here?
- [71:32]
Adam Naiman
Can I posit a theory to you about that sequence of the film?
- [71:35]
Rob Harvilla
Please.
- [71:36]
Adam Naiman
The editing style and score and even the cinematography meaningfully changes at that point in the movie when we get up into the Carrera Marble mountains. And I think it is very fair to read it as a kind of illusion or delusion metaphorically. I don't. You know, that's not supported. But the movie changing its pacing. And the same is true for when the party sequence happens in the evening time. There is a shakiness to the camera style. There is a haze around the movie in that. In that period. I would suggest that that is not a mistake. Not only is it not a mistake, it is part of the point. And some of that blunt metaphor that goes into five, as you put it, is maybe not as. Is literal, but not meant to be received literally, if that makes sense.
- [72:26]
Rob Harvilla
Oh, I love movies that are. That aren't meant to be received literally. I mean, I like movies that have a complete. A complete texture of both. Like when you can get that literal figurative binary and just tear it away, you know, Claire de Nis or A Pichapong or the Master, you know, which is a movie where, like, literally you are inside someone's point of view and outside of it the same time. And I guess this all comes back to this idea of frame of reference, which is, in some ways, if you share this movie's frame of reference, whether it's the real literal influences or, let's just say, the vibe of the director, because this is a cinephile director. And if you look at the directors he worked with as an actor, like, this is a guy who could tell you what won what award at Ken in the last 10 years. I'm not making fun of him. I'm just saying he was there. He's well known for competition.
- [73:12]
Adam Naiman
Many, many screenings during the New York film.
- [73:13]
Rob Harvilla
Many, many screenings.
- [73:15]
Adam Naiman
He is around in New York.
- [73:17]
Rob Harvilla
Yeah. And all more power to him. So when you share the frame of reference with the filmmaker, you get the film and the intertextuality and the tradition of it all. But then you start measuring it against that tradition too. The two things happen. And if you choose to emphasize the one over the other, that's just your fair take as a viewer. But, you know, you kind of see the things that it takes from or that it does or doesn't measure up to. And sometimes that's one. The metaphor people love with this movie is like the big swing. You know, sometimes if you take a big swing, you don't strike out. But it's not a home run either. Like, there's all kinds of ways to make contact. So I'M not the sort of person who's like, the big swing in and of itself matters, but I do prefer the big swing to most of the other movies that got made this year, which are in a different ballpark altogether.
- [74:10]
Adam Naiman
Adam, I know you don't really trend in the awards discussion too deeply, but I had someone suggest to me maybe that I'm underestimating the Brutalist as a legitimate Best picture contender, not just like the movie in third or fourth place that everyone admires and will get eight nominations but not win very much.
- [74:26]
Rob Harvilla
Do you think this movie could win in this field? Yeah, I do. I think that the one read which I'm sure you guys will consider as we get deeper into awards season, is that Hollywood, as a kind of stronghold of liberal tolerance and a bastion of progress, will want to celebrate itself in the absence of having an electoral victory to celebrate. So a nice movie like Wicked that knows who the good guys are and who the bad guys are, but that movie wasn't quite the commercial phenomenon we thought. It's done very well. You know, you could make a zillion.
- [75:01]
Adam Naiman
Brutalist short of being that mega hit.
- [75:04]
Rob Harvilla
Yeah. And you're not really getting people standing up for it critically in a meaningful way. And the rest of the field is pretty diffused, you know, I mean, is Anora. Whatever one thinks of it, you know, like, is that a movie that can also level up from being around that kind of cruiserweight, boutique, antique distributor, critical rallying point to actually winning an Oscar? God help us. Is Emilia Perez going to be nominated for Best Picture? So in a field this dispersed, the Brutalist has some things going for it. We're now talking purely. Since you asked about award handicapping. Right.
- [75:39]
Adam Naiman
Yes.
- [75:40]
Rob Harvilla
It's big, it's impressive. It takes itself seriously. It is there to be taken seriously. It's released on Christmas Day. I mean, that all is to its benefit. It. So, yeah, why not? But it's also, by Academy standards, it would be closer to the. Again, the There Will Be Blood, no country for Old Men sign of the ledger, where sometimes compared to the movies that win awards, you look at these things and you're like, how did that happen? You know, like really sort of. This is pretty rigorous, arty movie making. And this is not really what this. This voting body goes for.
- [76:13]
Adam Naiman
Adam has. Has Harrison Lee Van Buren says to Laszlo Toth, I find our conversations intellectually stimulating.
- [76:21]
Rob Harvilla
You were sitting on that for 90 minutes.
- [76:23]
Adam Naiman
You had it there perhaps a few days, perhaps weeks.
- [76:26]
Rob Harvilla
Honestly, perhaps weeks. Yeah. This was great. No argument, just vibes. Good End of year vibes.
- [76:34]
Adam Naiman
I chalk it up to your grace and dignity and artistry. Thank you.
- [76:38]
Rob Harvilla
Adam, crucially, did you like Carry on?
- [76:41]
Adam Naiman
I did. I think it is third tier jcs, but that is no insult.
- [76:47]
Rob Harvilla
Yeah. It's not second third tier. Who can say? I'm happy that it exists, you know. Oh, absolutely.
- [76:54]
Adam Naiman
As far as streaming movies go, it's in the top five of the year.
- [76:58]
Rob Harvilla
Yeah. No, good, good, good, good for him. We love Jean Colet Sura over here in my office in Toronto.
- [77:05]
Adam Naiman
We are a big fan term termites and elephants, they can live together.
- [77:08]
Rob Harvilla
Termites and elephants can live together in harmony. Yeah.
- [77:11]
Sean Fennessey
Thanks.
- [77:11]
Adam Naiman
Adam Naman.
- [77:12]
Rob Harvilla
Yeah. Cheers.
- [77:13]
Adam Naiman
Okay, let's go to my conversation now with Brady Courbet. This is the sound of your ride home with dad after he caught you vaping. Awkward, isn't it?
- [77:48]
Sean Fennessey
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- [78:29]
Rob Harvilla
Oh, such a clutch off season pickup, Dave. I was worried we'd bring back the same team. I meant those Blackout motorized shakespeare blinds.com made it crazy affordable to replace our old blinds. Hard to install? No, it's easy. I installed these and then got some from my mom. She talked to a design consultant for free and scheduled a professional measure and install hall of fame son. They're the number one online retailer of custom window coverings in the world. Blinds.com is the goat shop.
- [78:53]
Adam Naiman
Up to 45% off select styles plus a free professional measure during the blinds.com year end blowout. Rules and restrictions may apply. Well, I'm very excited to have Brady Courbet here to talk about the brutalist. Brady, I wanted to start with a question about your acting career. Quickly though because I couldn't help but notice you exhibited such incredible taste as an actor. It felt from afar like you were picking parts to learn from great masters to prepare yourself for what you're doing. Now was that something intentional that you were doing or just a consequence of getting good opportunities?
- [79:28]
Sean Fennessey
It was a combination of both. You know, I. I was a cinephile from a very, very young age. I mean, I Mean, honestly, like, I, I can't remember a time before, you know, Hitchcock or Orson Welles was, you know, a huge part of my, my mind's eye. And I sort of fell into performing and I sort of, I always had a little bit of one foot in and one foot out. I was sort of shy, and I struggled with the attention in a way, it didn't feel so natural for me. And I didn't love being poked and prodded and having my photo taken all the time. And I mean, even, you know, now I only deal with that for a few months when a film is released. And that is sort of challenging enough for me. And so I kind of just knew that in the long run, it wasn't really the right path for me. But I also loved the experiences I had on film sets, and I loved the collaboration. And, you know, I, I, when I was, when I was a young teenager, I found the experience really, really intoxicating. And, and, and I was very happy to do it, but, but I also realized from a pretty early age that I was only happy doing it when it was a project that I actually cared about. And I didn't really care about the size of the role or the part. You know, I mean, that's, that's, I suppose what separated me from, from, from real actors is that I didn't have, you know, you know, roles that I wanted to play. I just wanted to, to work on great projects. And frankly, there weren't that many of them. So it also meant that in the long run, I wasn't sure how sustainable it was as a business model if I only got out of bed every three years for a filmmaker that, that I liked that was also happy to have me, you know, so by the time I was 18 or 19, I had already finished, I'd already done Funny Games when I was 17 with Michael Hanukkah. When I was 20, I think I'd done Melancholia with Lars von Trier, but I was already making my own stuff. And in fact, the way that I ended up working on Lars's movie is that I had met with his partners at Zentropa about making my first film, the Childhood of a Leader, on their stages there. And they called me a few days after our meeting in Cannes and said, hey, you know, we, we mentioned Lars that we'd met with you and, and he was wondering if you'd come and do a role in, on our new movie. And I, I was like, well, I mean, I'd be absolutely delighted. I, I, I admire it. Lars so much and what a treat. So no, I felt very fortunate and I really enjoyed my experiences. But by even the time I was 21, 22, I had truly had enough of it and I had started letting everyone know that I wasn't going to continue and that I'd be focused on making my own projects. Now in retrospect, that seems more or less insane because my wife Mona and I were expecting a child and I was walking away from a career. Now listen, I wasn't making bank working on art house movies. I think I was making about 10 to $15,000 a pop whenever I would work on one of those great films. But it was a source of income which was better than absolutely nothing. So I don't know what either of us were thinking, but I just realized that it was impossible for me to focus on making films and also being in them because they were both full time jobs. And whenever I would go and work on someone else's film, even if it was just for a month, it would throw me completely off track and I would have lost progress that I'd made on setting up the childhood of a leader. And so at a certain point I just had to put that first.
- [84:17]
Adam Naiman
It's funny you bring up childhood of a leader. I revisited it last night and there's a sequence early on in the film. It's like a shot looking up at a glass circular ceiling. And I was like, huh, that's funny. That's a bit of an echo in the new movie. And. And has a movie about an architect or exploring the world of architecture been something that you've been thinking on for a really long time? Or did it come after the first two movies?
- [84:41]
Sean Fennessey
Well, I don't remember the sort of initial instinct to do a film on an architect. I mean, literally, I knew that I wanted to make a film on, on the post war years. Childhood of a Leader is a post war film as well. And it's on World War I, of course, and sort of about the interwar period. And then of course wanted to do something on the 1950s and the way that the pendulum swung so far in the other direction after the trauma of the 1940s. There was this sort of, of gloss on everything, like, you know, women were in Housewives in the Kitchen, you know, and it was, it was all very Leave it to Beaver that period. And yet of course we know what everyone was grappling with psychologically at the time because, you know, even if you were fortunate enough to not have had family that was, you know, directly affected by by the Holocaust. Almost everyone had an uncle, a father, a grandfather that was fighting in the second war. My grandfather was in the Air Force. And it's fascinating to me, in retrospect, that he clearly had been through so much, but he never spoke about it. In the 1950s, you know, men and women alike were not encouraged to express themselves verbally. And, you know, I often think about my grandmother. She was a stewardess, and she loved her job. I mean, in the mid century, there was no more liberating a profession for women than becoming a stewardess and traveling the globe. Globe. And, you know, she got married, became pregnant, and she was fired, which was just standard practice at the time. It's not something that she ever speaks about, but because she's. She's still alive and well in her 90s now. But she had photographs of. Of, you know, herself and her team on. At the airline, you know, all over the house. And. And it didn't dawn on me until much later in life how traumatic it must have been to give up the one thing that she loved so much and how painful that must have been. And so I really wanted to do a film about characters that couldn't really express themselves. And especially with Adrian's character, I. I thought how extraordinary that this character is only able to express himself, you know, through his work, which is pretty common. You know, I. I mean, one thing that I think is always very difficult about the press circuit is that if you could tell a film, then why make a film? And you sort of are obliged to deconstruct it over and over and over again, you know, thematically, philosophically.
- [88:09]
Rob Harvilla
But.
- [88:10]
Sean Fennessey
But the truth is, is that I don't think that. That there's any way for me to. To be more articulate than spending years and years on. On putting a fine point on exactly what it is that I hope to express. And, you know, the. The films are. They are explorations. They are. They. They are. They are not didactic. They are films that are about a feeling for history. And I really struggle with the way that most historical novels and biographies, how they always sort of grapple with history in a very linear fashion. It's just a series of bullet points and dates, which is the driest way you could possibly, you know, try and educate someone about the past. And so it was important, you know, for me, the great novelists that have had an impact on the way that I think about history, you know, as much as I love David Bukola and stuff, like, I was much more interested in the virtual histories, you know, coming from WG Sebal, Robert Musil and Ingeborg Backman and writers writing in that tradition because they're transporting books. I mean, they're books that really make history vital. And I think that that is the obligation of anyone that is working on a historical theme or subject.
- [89:55]
Adam Naiman
I do want to talk about some of those themes. And I think one of the reasons why you've got the press asking you to deconstruct is because your films are often deeply thematic, which not every movie is. But one of the things that I think could be helpful to talk about, which is a bit wonky and maybe dry, but is, I think, relevant, is the way that you got this movie made, retained control, made it on a very low budget, despite its scope and expanse. All of that stuff is fascinating and. And I'm curious to hear you talk about it, because even the process of presenting a film to a financier and saying, this is what I want to do, and I want to do it the way that I want to do it, and then being able to suss out whether that person would be a good partner for you or how to extract the most amount of money to get what you need to do the thing the way that you want to do it.
- [90:45]
Sean Fennessey
Well, first of all, and I mean this, I am extremely grateful to anyone that, you know, is. Is. If is. Is even, you know, considering a project of ours, because it. It takes something out of people to sit down and read a screenplay. And, you know, I'd like to think that our scripts are pretty strong. But, you know, a screenplay, it's. It's. It's like reading a manual. It's not like, you know, reading Tolstoy. So I always come from a place of humility and graciousness and gratefulness. I've worked with some terrible, terrible partners in my career, but I've worked with predominantly great people. And on this movie, I worked with really great, great people. And there's a few things. I mean, first of all, the older I get and the more context that people have for my work, the easier that conversation becomes. Because when you're making a first film, the proof is in the pudding. But there's no pudding. So nobody really knows what they're going to get. They kind of have to take your word for it. So that's the most difficult one. There's just a level of arm twisting there that. That, you know, you got to kick the tires, like, over and over and over again. But. But nowadays, you know, I think most people, they're able to to watch what I've made and they know whether it appeals to them or not. And then, you know, I, I, I also have gotten a lot better about choosing wisely. You know, I, I think that I really, really trust my instinct nowadays that, that if I sit down with someone and there's something that sort of, you know, gives me pause, I know, to trust that instinct because the only, the only regrets that, that I've ever had at the end of a process is when I didn't listen to, to my gut, you know, when I had the opportunity to if it. I think that there were moments when I was younger where I was just so desperate to get these things off the ground that I was more willing to compromise and work with people that had very different morals and ethics than I do. But now I can only work with people that I really respect because it's also, so it's not a great feeling to know that you're making something that someone that you're working with is going to hate. Like that is like a, that's a terrible. Because it's, it's this thing, you know, and I mean I, I have absolutely, you know, snuck movies in the back door that way and you know, like through the gift shop. And I, the stress was just unimaginable because I knew that I was working with people who didn't understand what they were going to get. And now I'm fortunately in a place where I'm able to just be completely transparent and if something's not for someone, no problem, then I'll have a conversation with someone else. And usually if you talk to enough people, eventually you'll find someone that you really do see eye to eye with. So it's hard for me to know whether or not in the past when I've worked with people that were not particularly like minded, I'm not sure I had another option. But now I know that I always have another option. There's always someone and something else, another opportunity around the corner. And actually, you know, there's a lot of fish in the sea and, but I think that when you're, when you're young, these amounts of money, they seem so exorbitantly huge that, you know, even raising $1 million to see, you know, I had never interfaced with that amount of money before, so I was overwhelmed by the prospect of kind of ascending, you know, that, that hill. But I eventually realized and, you know, and I started changing my relationship. My own perspective about, about how much things should cost and can cost and what makes sense And I'm just, you know, have, I have a. I have a much better sense of, of the marketplace nowadays and, and I sort of usually know realistically what I can raise on a movie. When I first started off, you know, there wasn't much of a difference between 1 million and 10 million for me. And it only through you know, a process of years and years of producing films that I now know what something really should cost.
- [96:09]
Adam Naiman
Were there any producers or financiers who could quickly ferret out that the film, in a way, you know, it being about artists and patrons and perhaps a reflection of a filmmaker mounting a project, could be a reading of the movie. Did people talk to you about that? Because making the meta text text is an interesting thing when you're trying to get a movie made.
- [96:30]
Sean Fennessey
Totally, yeah. I mean on this movie it sort of was self selecting. The movie was such, like it was so out of the box. Like it was so long, it was 170 pages. There was a scripted intermission. You know, I think that it, it only attracted the right people. I think what was complicated about making my last movie, for example, that was, you know, about a pop star, is that it attracted a lot of people for the wrong reasons. And so, you know, a movie about a mid century designer, I think that it was a little bit more obvious to folks whether or not it was something that they were interested in being involved with. So I felt really good about our partners on this. Like it was a group of people that had a lot of taste and appreciation for the film's themes and subject matter. And so, you know, and therefore it was a much more peaceful process. It took years to mount. It fell apart over and over again. But it was totally for circumstantial reasons and nothing to do with our producers or financiers. You know, we didn't have any antagonists on this movie, whereas in the past I've had real antagonists, you know, where someone just, you know, they have a totally different idea of what the project needs to be or should be. And it's just a constant battle and those situations are a nightmare and I hope to not find myself in situations like that again anytime soon.
- [98:20]
Adam Naiman
I'm curious about your collaboration with your wife Mona, who is a filmmaker in her own right. And you've got this very pointed credit at the beginning of the film that it's a film by Brady and Mona and you guys have a family. And it seems like this is an incredibly hard movie to make. And I often ask co writers on the show, like how they write together, you know, because there's the image of the two people back to back banging away at their typewriters. But you guys are living together and have a whole life together. So how can you talk about the collaboration?
- [98:53]
Sean Fennessey
Yeah, you know, we were working together for years before we were a couple, which is one of the reasons that I think it's, it remains viable for us to continue to work together because I think that we've only known a life of working together and so there was no learning curve. And I think that we ultimately fell in love because we were so, you know, like minded and, and we complemented each other well and we had different strengths and different weaknesses and you know, Mona is so incredibly practical that I can get, can get pretty hung up on the theoretical, I would say. And Mona is extremely good about pushing us forward and like, oh, know, don't overthink it. Let's just, you know, get some work done today and, and we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll figure it out eventually. I think that, you know, I'm extremely good with the, with the details, but she's always been so great with the, you know, the, the overarching structure of, of every project and you know, she, she just is, she just has served as a real engine for all of our projects.
- [100:27]
Adam Naiman
I'm curious about the division between the two parts in the film, which is a very novelistic strategy. There's a nod to a novel in one of the titles of the sections, but it's unusual and maybe historically there are more examples, but it's not something you see too often. And I'm wondering, was it primarily because of the length? Was there because you wanted to create this sort of arc in particular that you wanted to underline? Why the choice to split it up?
- [100:51]
Sean Fennessey
Yeah, I mean, I sort of always conceived of the movie as being, you know, the first half of the film being classical American optimism and the, and the latter half of the movie as, as being, you know, pessimism. I, I think that when I'm in the hands of an artist, you know, before they delve into abstraction, I want to know that they are capable of figurative drawing and painting because otherwise it sort of looks like a mess. So for me, I sort of have this fascination with both looking over our shoulder towards the past and, and racing forward towards the future in the sense that I'm interested in modernity versus antiquity. I'm interested in ways that we can use technology from the past to create a new vision for the future. And I Think that because I knew that the film would sort of derail in the second half by design, that it was very important that everyone had 100 minutes of the other experience knowing we're absolutely capable of doing this, but we're choosing to do that. For me, it helps me as a viewer to know and feel that I'm in. I'm in good hands, that there is an intent behind every choice. The inclusion of something or the omission of something is all by design.
- [102:45]
Adam Naiman
I know you've talked a lot about the decision to shoot with the VistaVision format. One thing I wanted to hear you talk about a little bit is it seems like you've got this visual motif that is running counter to the way that that film works, which is that in the film you've got these series of moments where you're sort of racing down a track or a road, this forward momentum that you're talking about. And then obviously, just the movement, the horizontal movement of this division and the way that.
- [103:10]
Sean Fennessey
Of the caption.
- [103:11]
Adam Naiman
Yeah. And I don't know if you saw that as like a diagrammatic thing, that they were working together or against each other in some way. You thought even. Or am I just overreading?
- [103:21]
Sean Fennessey
No, I mean, these are things that I'm always thinking about, you know, what it is. It's about counter movement. There is an inherent tension that I find really visually arresting when, for example, you're rushing forward but you're zooming out. And those sort of. Those counter movements, they can give the image a sort of concussed quality that I find really kind of psychological and visceral and, And I. You know, it's interesting because, of course, the films are. They're. They're very cerebral movies, you know, but. And, and, and at times esoteric, but they're very, very sensual films as well. And, and it's. That's very important to me. Like, you know, I. When I go see a concert, I want to see someone play a guitar till their fucking fingers bleed lead. And it is. If, for me, you know, cinematography, it's, it's, it's. It's our instrument. And, And I, I, you know, I know when I. When I go to. To see, you know, a saxophonist or, you know, like, I. When I. When I see someone pushing themselves to the very, very brink, in. In that moment, there is transcendence. And I'm constantly looking for those opportunities in the material. So, like, for example, I always think about it as. As it relates to, you know, a traditional song structure of verse, chorus, verse, Chorus. I'm much more interested in a long verse where that, you know, six or seven minutes that finally gives way to a melody because it does something where, you know, it's that tantric thing where you've had to wait for it. And so it's just, it's such an epiphany. It feels so good and so much great. I mean, if we think about the best films ever made. I mean, I mean, if we're thinking about Ellen Klimov's Come and See, if we're thinking about Andre Rublev, if we're thinking about, you know, I mean, you know, you, you name it. These are films that sort of, that sort of have these long sustains and then, and then suddenly these huge orchestral swells, these, these, you know, these big gestures. I mean, what makes 2001 A Space Odyssey so affecting is that you have 25 minutes sometimes of process and, and silence and astronauts moving, you know, in real time. So that when you finally get, when you finally get to the point in the film where you are transcending space and time, time, it is so, you know, dramatically satisfying. So it's a very interesting thing when we talk about pacing because I think movies that are like. Movies that are, are described as slow cinema are films that are thought that's like, oh, well, this is sort of the, this is the, the. This. These are not public facing films. These are films that are, you know, about the filmmaker, Filmmaker flexing. You know, it's about the filmmaker's ego. That can be the case. I mean, that is sometimes the case, but usually it's a public facing decision to have the audience holding their breath. I find that to be incredibly suspenseful in. If I'm, you know, if I'm in the hands of a great filmmaker. It's one of my favorite feelings is that moment of anticipation. It's like I think that I'm constantly trying to create that sensual experience for the audience.
- [107:53]
Adam Naiman
You do it in two parts. You have moments of incredible explosive dynamics just between two actors in a sitting room. And then you also have the Marble Quarry, which is almost entirely visual and immersive. And I'm curious how you think about that. Like, the dynamics of the song is really cool, but kind of when to know when to be tightly focused on your characters and when to say, hey, we are still making an epic here.
- [108:18]
Sean Fennessey
I mean, I think that's just sort of about intuition because, for example, if we spent three and a half hours of the movie in Carrera, it would sort of start to lose its luster after about 15 or 20 minutes. And I think I can just feel internally that, okay, you know, like, I mean, we had so much footage from Carrera that like we could have made that sequence 10 or 15 minutes longer if we wanted to. It just felt like, you know, it is such an amazing place. And shooting that place on VistaVision in particular, it's so gorgeous that we had to be careful not to indulge because especially that part of the movie, the reality becomes a little bit like liquid. And editorially, you know, there starts, there's, there's these overlapping texts and, and it starts jumping forwards and backwards and forwards again and, and you know, I, I, I just, I, I occasionally like to activate the audience and their relationship with the passage of time because it's, you know, as I said earlier, for me, history is not linear, time is, and the passage of time is not linear. And cinema, it's an extraordinary medium to be able to express that.
- [109:41]
Adam Naiman
So related to that choice, that is an interesting editorial choice, as you put it, that makes that sequence feel not just otherworldly but otherwise dreamlike almost. And then nightmarish at a certain point in that section of the movie.
- [109:55]
Sean Fennessey
Yeah, that's right.
- [109:56]
Adam Naiman
But then you also have different, you use different film stocks in the epilogue you're shooting on, I don't know, is it some sort of video format? And you've also got all this archival footage which I know you've used in other films before to kind of drive us through the period of history that we're entering. And so this is a little bit high minded, but the difference between history and truth, I think is like kind of at war in the movie at times and trying to figure out.
- [110:20]
Sean Fennessey
Totally, totally. Well, that's because of the fact that like, so this is, I think, the first time this ever dawned on me when I was about 9 or 10 years old. Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt was a really popular memoir and my grandmother had a copy of it in the house. And I remember reading that book and Frank's descriptions of what his parents were eating for breakfast and the season. And it's very, very detailed memoir. And I remember just thinking like, how on earth could he possibly remember what his parents were eating when he was 5 years old? I don't remember what I had for breakfast this morning, much less 25, 30 years ago. So I think that like there was this kind of weird moment when I was very young where I was like, wait a minute, all biographies, like all historical accounts are, you know, they're they're fictionalized. Of course they are. They're, they're, they're stories that are, that, that, that have, you know, more in common with a fable than less. And I started realizing that we've all been sold on these versions of events that are largely inaccurate and much, much more nuanced than we were led to believe. And by the way, for the record, I think that Angela's Ashes is an incredibly moving book and actually a really great book. Actually, it was just such a strange thing for me. I mean, I remember when the controversy around A Million Little Pieces and James Frey, you know, being let out on the stage when he was doing Oprah and being asked to apologize and stuff. And I was kind of annoyed because I was like, you know, of course this isn't, you know, is not 100% accurate. Like, doesn't everybody know that, you know, like, like deep down. And, you know, I, I, I felt that, you know, I, I was, I, I felt that he was made such a mockery of at that time. And I was really kind of flabbergasted because I was like, look, do you think it's a great book or not? You know, like, I was, I, at the end of the day with the J.T. leroy scandal or whatever, like, who cares about the truth? I think that whatever JT LeRoy was communicating, or the artist formerly known as JT LeRoy was communicating, those books, it functioned for readers and why take that away from them? I just think that, I think it's a little obnoxious because of course, once you start writing, it all becomes fiction.
- [113:20]
Adam Naiman
Yeah, it's an interesting point and maybe kind of leads to something I was curious about, but maybe is obviate about what you just said, which is, I think in the case of J.T. leroy and James Frey, there was this sense that they were capitalizing on the understanding of their own pain. Whereas with what you're doing, I really am interested in the Van Buren character, that very blustery, fragile psyche of that character. And my instinct is to be like, Brady, who is that guy? Based on? Who were you thinking about when you were crafting that Persona? But maybe the point is, like, it doesn't matter and trying to apply some real world idea to it ruins it in some way.
- [113:58]
Sean Fennessey
Well, you know, I mean, listen, I think that we always try to imbue every character with some piece of ourselves because, you know, his character, Guy's character is an antagonist, you know, out of a mid century melodrama, which is what the movie is. But because the movie is being made today by, with, you know, like via a contemporary prism or lens. You know, it's also important for there to be many, many shades of gray in the character. And so what's funny is that people always ask me about how much I relate to Laszlo. And of course my wife and I both, both relate to La Shlo and er, shebed very much. But, you know, we also are collectors and we, I grew up working in a bookstore. I collect tons of, you know, I've collected first editions since I was 7 years old and I, I, I collect albums. I, I collect and, and, and I'm, and I've read a lot about, you know, about collecting. I mean, Walter Benjamin writes beautifully about, about, about, about, you know, the, the, the, the, the collector, the flaner, you know, and I, I think that, that I, I, I really did try to see things from his perspective as well. Because there are these moments when you're spending someone else's money where I go like, oh my God, you know, what are we, what are we doing? I mean, you have moments where you just feel like this better work because, Christ, you know, we're hemorrhaging money left and right. And even though this film was Only made for $10 million, $10 million is a lot of money. It's just, it's not a lot of money for considering the scope and scale of the movie. But it's a lot of money and it, and it's huge responsibility and I take that very, very seriously. And I have a lot of respect for our partners, I really do. And I don't want to see a petty waste. You know, as you know, I produced the film as well, and it's very important to me that I see money being spent wisely.
- [116:17]
Adam Naiman
I'm not surprised to hear you say that. You're a collector, by the way, because just watching the sequence in Van Buren's State, after the library is completed, you are shooting shelving with like a kind of majesty. Like we all need nice storage for these things that we collect.
- [116:35]
Sean Fennessey
Yeah, no, that's exactly right. I mean, it's so funny. Like my dream space, just like an empty room with a chair in the middle of it.
- [116:45]
Adam Naiman
It's really wonderful. This is a little bit of a perverse question, but is there any part of you that likes having to do something like this on more of a Shoestring or more under more pressurized circumstances?
- [116:57]
Sean Fennessey
No. No.
- [117:00]
Adam Naiman
So you'd like to have like 50 million on the next movie?
- [117:03]
Sean Fennessey
No. No, I wish, I wish that we had enough money to make the movie, which was just to say that if we had an additional, you know, one to $2 million and an additional two or three days of shooting, two or three days is equivalent to 36 additional hours of shooting time. So. Or three days is rather specifically. Therefore, you know, having that additional 36 hours means that, that I never have to ask my crew to go into overtime. No one has to, you know, go home too late. No one has to get up too early. An additional one to two million dollars means that my first ad and all of my department heads are, are paid, you know, a real living wage. Because everybody that works in entertainment has managers, agents, lawyers, and you know, commissions, plus taxes. You're left with half, I mean, usually 48 to 50% of the gross amount. And so that just means that I want people to be able to work with me and not have to choose between working with me or being able to support themselves and their family. So I mean, I think that on the next movie, listen, we have to constantly adjust these things for inflation because by the time I'm actually making another movie, what was 10 million usually has become 12 or 13 or what was 12 or 13 because become 15. So I don't want to paint myself into a corner because I don't know actually when I will be in production on the next one. Even though I'm already planning and casting the next film already.
- [118:56]
Adam Naiman
I don't want.
- [118:56]
Sean Fennessey
To have an amount of money that makes me feel beholden to anybody. I want to make things for what they cost. I am not trying to make bank or buy a house with the fees that I make on these movies. I have historically made $0 on the movies that I direct, but it also allows me to take on other projects and you know, and, and there's other ways of, of, of of subsidizing our expenses. And, and so, you know, it's afforded me a lot of opportunities as well. So it's not even wholly irresponsible, I would say, when I've made those choices to put the movies, you know, sort of above of, you know, our, our, our personal needs. Because in the long run, and you really got to look at the big picture, you know, it allows you opportunities to direct ads or, you know, direct television, where, where you really are, are, are, are making more than enough to make up for it. So, you know, it, it is, I would say that we're, we're constantly, whenever we're making sacrifices, we're really trying to do it in as thoughtful a way as possible. And we Never do anything which we think is ultimately irresponsible for our crew or certainly as importantly, our little family.
- [120:30]
Adam Naiman
Couple more questions for you and I'll let you go.
- [120:32]
Sean Fennessey
Sure.
- [120:33]
Adam Naiman
Knocked out by the epilogue of this movie. Was the epilogue always a part of the story?
- [120:39]
Sean Fennessey
Yes. Yeah, yeah. That was always how it ended. And we actually shot the. We shot. We rolled cameras for the first time on the movie. In 2020, I went to Venice with my wife's cinematographer. On her last film was a fantastic DP named Andrei Shamatov, who is. He shoots for Roman Gavris. He is Darius Kanji's nephew and worked with Darius for years. He's a brilliant DP and a great guy. So Andre was going to be in Venice anyway for the premiere of my wife's movie, because the World to Come was premiering the year that Venice was the only festival that went forward during COVID And I decided to start shooting some footage for the movie there. And he owned a 35 millimeter camera. So I said, you know, can you do me a solid and bring your camera? And I'm going to raise, you know, just a small amount of money to shoot about two hours of celluloid for these establishing shots in Venice that conclude the film. And because it was during COVID it meant that we were able to shoot San Marco Square without a bunch of tourists holding up selfie sticks and stuff that would really give us away. So that was the beginning of the movie, was the end of the movie.
- [122:21]
Adam Naiman
It's fascinating. Is your next thing a period piece?
- [122:26]
Sean Fennessey
Yeah, it is. Yeah, it is.
- [122:29]
Adam Naiman
I'm curious about that. You know, there's a lot of discussion about filmmakers, especially a lot of Matt, like older masters, not wanting to work contemporarily because of some of the challenges that, like, technology presents with storytelling.
- [122:40]
Sean Fennessey
Oh, yeah. Just like the aesthetics of today.
- [122:42]
Adam Naiman
Yeah.
- [122:43]
Sean Fennessey
I mean, vehicles are so ugly today. IPhones. And it's totally. It's totally insane. I mean, it's funny, but I actually do think that. I think you're right. I think it has a lot to do with just like, you know, like, battling stuff that is just not particularly attractive to shoot. No, but, you know, the thing is, is that I. It's hard for me to really think of a more vital theme than how we ended up here to, you know, right. Right now. And for me, making films about the events that have led up to the moment time we're living in, it helps me to sort of really wrap my head around the many disturbing nuances of the present moment. I think that I will continue to. To work on historical films until eventually, you know, I find the right project to work on about. About what will come. You know, I would love.
- [124:00]
Adam Naiman
I would.
- [124:00]
Sean Fennessey
I would love so much to. To work on. On. On a science fiction project. I mean, I'd love to do that more than anything, but, you know, for me, that'll be a really big choice because there are so few great films. I mean, there's essentially 2001 and Solaris, and then there's everything else. So if you're gonna. If you're gonna do it, you. You really gotta. You really gotta be ready. So. So, yeah, so, I mean, I'm. I'm continuing to work on. On the. On the themes that.
- [124:39]
Adrien Brody
That.
- [124:40]
Sean Fennessey
That. That compel me, which is predominantly about, you know, the American experiment.
- [124:46]
Adam Naiman
Holding yourself to the standard of Kubrick and Tarkovsky is. Is fun. That sounds like a nice way to live.
- [124:52]
Sean Fennessey
I mean, I mean, you know, I. I honestly. I just think that, like, if you're not. If you're not trying to carry the torch a little bit further, like, why. Why bother trying? Because it's just. Movies are so hard to make. Like, it's so painful and so difficult to make a mediocre movie that you should, at the very, very least, you know, be aiming for the stars. Like, I just think that. I think that's. I think that's really, really, you know, important. And anyway, you know, we'll. We'll. We'll see first, before I take on anything else, I just need. I need to take a long nap.
- [125:31]
Adam Naiman
I hear that. I will let you get one very shortly. If the reaching for the stars thing is. Is a big part of what I was responding to, which is this. This is someone trying to do something great, which is very rare. So I admire it.
- [125:43]
Sean Fennessey
People psych themselves out. I think that. And I get why. It's extremely overwhelming. It's extremely overwhelming. But I just think that it's a very young medium, and it's the responsibility of this generation to really continue to. To explore and forge some new paths.
- [126:05]
Adam Naiman
Brady. We end every episode of the show by asking filmmakers what's the last great thing they have seen? You are obviously a cinephile. What have you seen that you've liked recently?
- [126:13]
Sean Fennessey
My favorite film this year is Matty Diop's movie Dahomey.
- [126:18]
Adam Naiman
I still haven't seen it. Tell me about it.
- [126:20]
Sean Fennessey
Well, you know, I think it's a seminal documentary. Like, it is a film which is really. Is sort of invented its own language for exploring themes of Colonialism and everything that Frantz Fanon was writing about. I think that, you know, I'm a little bit biased because Mattie in Full Disclosure is a friend of mine. But, but, but genuinely for me, it was the movie that. That left me feeling the most exalted this year. And it was the film that I was the most surprised by. And, you know, it's such a cinematic experience. I mean, there's not very many documentaries that demand to be seen in a movie theater, but Tahome really does. And then what's also so extraordinary about it is that she's managed to do it in 68 minutes. I mean, the film feels immense and yet it's so fun. I mean, that is the funny thing about, about runtime is that it just doesn't matter. Like a Movie can be 60 minutes, it can be four hours. If it's good, it's good. And that movie for me, felt, you know, really, really complete. But what's amazing is the way that she sort of oscillates between this very cinematic language that's quite stylized. And then, you know, there are. There's a sequence in the film that's as good as anything Frederick Wiseman's ever done. And that's just, you know, that's not nothing. I think Frederick Wiseman is probably the greatest American director, full stop.
- [128:02]
Adam Naiman
It's a great recommendation. Really. Genuinely a pleasure, Brady. Thank you. And congrats.
- [128:07]
Sean Fennessey
No, and to you, pal. I really appreciate it. Have a great day. Night. Wherever you are. I only see that you're in a black box.
- [128:14]
Adam Naiman
I'm in a black hole of nothingness. Time does not exist here. But thank you for joining me in this void. I appreciate it.
- [128:21]
Sean Fennessey
All right, take care. See you on the other side, pal.
- [128:30]
Adam Naiman
Okay, let's go to my conversation now with Adrien Brody. What an honor to have Adrien Brody here to talk about my favorite film of the year. So, Adrian, congratulations on the Brutalist. And I'd just like to hear how the film came your way. Was it a script thing? Audition? What happened?
- [128:49]
Adrien Brody
Yes, thank you so much. And I. It was initially a script that was sent to. To my representatives. And I was incredibly moved by it when I read it, of course, because it's just so beautifully written and nuanced and vast and multi dimensional and. And it speaks to many things that I find very relevant, not only to my own journey as an artist and my mother's journey as an artist and Hungarian immigrant. And my mother and her parents, my grandparents, fled Budapest in 1956 during the revolution and emigrated through Vienna, refugees and emigrated to the United States. And so I understood that struggle and loved how the complexities of that world were depicted in the storytelling and the complexities, more to the point of assimilating and still being a foreigner, and the disconnect between the, the hopes and dreams of immigrants and the reality of the, the American dream and the, the myth of that. And I just thought it was so beautiful. And then I met with Brady and we spoke about it and he's a wonderfully intelligent cinephile and knows a great deal about art and, and film. And we, we, we had a very stimulating conversation, as in the script.
- [130:38]
Adam Naiman
Who's who in that conversation is the question.
- [130:41]
Adrien Brody
Well, Brady's definitely very much Laszlo. I'm. I'm not as mercurial as, as Van Buren.
- [130:50]
Adam Naiman
Yeah, no, I'm not.
- [130:52]
Adrien Brody
I'm not quite that. I'm. I, I think Brady saw a lot of himself in me and my ability to represent those truths in his story.
- [131:06]
Adam Naiman
When you read the script, did you have an instinct to call your mom and ask her about those experiences and to explore it, or is it more of a personal thing that you're processing as you're thinking about doing a movie?
- [131:18]
Adrien Brody
It is a personal thing. Initially, I think I tend to digest things on my own first, even though there's many, as I had already alluded to, many personal things that she has guided me through and even beyond the context of me finding truths and portraying Laszlo, just a greater understanding for the journey of an artist and the yearnings to leave behind a body of work that significant and lives up to some own personal expectation and how that's never quite fulfilled. I watch as she still works day and night on her photography and finding parallels through images and correlating them. And it's just something deeply moving. It's. She's so immersed in her work and I have such respect for her. And then we spoke about it later, but I don't recall. It's been a while. I mean, I read this about five and a half years ago at this point, and, and the film had gone away from me also within that time. And then we all lived through Covid and then a new iteration of the film came around where I was again in consideration. And then finally Brady was able to offer me the role. And then we began digging into the, the character work etc, and the details. And then I, I spoke at length to my mother about my grandparents. And I have very vivid memories of my grandfather and my gram and both my grandparents, but my grandfather Struggled more with. He had a very prominent Hungarian dialect and it limited his ability to get the kind of work that he craved. And he was a brilliant person. He just had to contend with that. In addition to new land and new cultures and lack of resources, et cetera, my grandmother spoke five or six languages and was able to get work, but it was much harder for him to kind of live up to his own potential.
- [133:49]
Rob Harvilla
Yeah.
- [133:49]
Adam Naiman
I wanted to ask you specifically about a moment without revealing specifically what the moment is, but there's this incredible moment near the end of the film where you break free with the expression of rejection and alienation that you are feeling in America. And, boy, it feels real. It really feels authentic. And I don't know how much of that you're pulling from people in your life who maybe felt the same way at certain points.
- [134:15]
Adrien Brody
Break free. Sorry, can you be more clear just so that I can refer.
- [134:20]
Adam Naiman
Yeah, just enunciating maybe a feeling that we're seeing the character have.
- [134:24]
Adrien Brody
Oh, I know what you mean.
- [134:25]
Adam Naiman
You know what I'm saying.
- [134:28]
Adrien Brody
There was nothing quite as overt as that that I recall from. I'm sure the pressures were enormous. And, and I know that they were much more so along the way. I mean, my mother at 13 and her parents literally fled under a bed of corn while they were shooting flares, looking to shoot people fleeing across the border. And, you know, I, I, I, those hardships were very real, you know, so I, I'm not sure how, what, what the reference point was in the film, but I, I do know that so much of it felt deeply complex and frustrating for the character and, and was very understandable. I think the, one of those complexities is the, the, the fact that, you know, Laszlo is toiling through poverty as he embarks on this new beginning in America and then finally encounters Van Buren, who is this wealthy benefactor and can seize all of this great potential and recognizes the accomplishments and achievements that had been lost for Laszlo. And, and there's so much hope in those moments and so much, you know, there's, that, there's this scene where Van Buren is offering to compensate him for something that he was meant to have compensated him. And although money is so important and that he has none, what is most meaningful to Laszlo in that moment is to retain these images of the buildings that he had built that he thought had been destroyed during the war that are still standing, and that someone has acknowledged the existence of that and that he could. There was something incredibly healing about that. And, and, I don't know, that was very Touching to me.
- [136:45]
Adam Naiman
I really love that sequence. I think when I was watching the film for the first time, I was trying to figure out what your character is actually thinking there. Is it the retention of dignity? Is it not wanting to seem too forward? Is it shielding something else? And I think maybe you can interpret that, it's shielding something else as you see the entire film. But you and Guy Pearce have an amazing chemistry. There's something very electric and maybe it's just in part that the characters keep saying there's something electric going on here when we're talking. But you have to be both partners and adversarial in a way. And I know you've done that many times in movies before, but maybe you can talk about how you sort through chemistry like that.
- [137:23]
Adrien Brody
The gift is to have the opportunity to work with great actors who listen and are able to interpret all the nuance in their. Their own portrayals that you can key into that somehow give you new insights that you didn't necessarily know in the. In your own interpretation, I guess. And. And Guy's a wonderful human being and very committed actor. And. And he brought a great deal of. Of nuance and complexity to his character. And. And the dynamic between the two carries. Characters is quite complex. Obviously. You know, there's a. There is a. There's a sense of great appreciation and respect of Laszlo and his capabilities. And at the same time there's a degree of resentment and almost hatred for the. The sensitivity Van Buren does not possess. And it's kind of like Salieri and Mozart. It's kind of this kind of very complex level of appreciation, but envy and a need for control and power and ownership and domination and. And also an understanding that he can somewhat cash in on the social standing that comes as the result of enabling Laszlo to build something as unique as this institute. So it represents him quite well. So there's all of that at play. But in that one scene, I'm sorry, I tend to digress and kind of reflect on the kind of emotional journey of these characters when I recount these moments. But in that one scene, what was most powerful was first of all, the surprise of that encounter. And it's very visible that Van Buren has an explosive quality to be wary of. But even in that initial outburst, Laszlo is polite but not intimidated by it and doesn't engage in a reactive sense, but he stands his ground and basically tells him, you know, good luck with your life, and, you know, my job's done and I'm sorry you don't appreciate it and don't talk to my. Me or my people that way. And I can relate to that, that, that. That trait. But this new revelation in this moment in the diner that we're reflecting upon is just. It's quite special because physically and metaphorically, those doors to the past have been shut, have been stolen from him. They've been robbed by the Nazis. The whole bous movement had been shut down. All of his contemporaries had been killed. All of the creativity and artistry and potential that can be given to the world has been extinguished. And here he is, you know, working in a filthy construction site, doing menial labor and trying to get by. And here comes this man offering him a great deal of hope and respect and recognition. You know, it's very moving. It's very moving. Those circumstances are incredibly moving.
- [141:42]
Adam Naiman
I mean, it's a testimony, I think, to how invested we are in Laszlo and your performance that when he returns and you have that diner sequence, it's like your guardian angel has arrived or something. We're rooting for this to be a success. We're rooting for this union in a way that. That you didn't think was coming. So it's just a great sequence. I had a question for you about the making of the film. There's been a lot made about how it was shot in VistaVision and this unusual format. And. Yeah, it's a big camera and a big rig. And the movie, while it is expansive and has these great vistas, it's very intimate. You and Felicity, in particular, have a lot of really intimate scenes. What is it like to be having that giant rig on you when you're acting in sequences like that, that.
- [142:27]
Adrien Brody
It's a wonderful question. And I was initially concerned about it just because sound is an issue, obviously, in recording film and doing adr. The process of post recording to. To fix poorly recorded sound is done in a studio, sterile environment. And you're trying to recreate feeling.
- [143:04]
Sean Fennessey
In.
- [143:05]
Adrien Brody
An incongruous setting and at all cost. I prefer to avoid dubbing for the sake of clarity. If it's audible enough. Enough. It's imperfect. I would prefer to not redo it unless we can do it better. And there's just so much because the. Just to be clear what Vista. The. The camera was created. It was a wonderful. The negative is in a different format, so you have a. It's mounted horizontally in the camera. And it's this. This very analog piece of equipment that is quite noisy. It sounds like a sewing machine just whirring away in the room. And we didn't have the resources, they. They do build balloons and bubbles to kind of shroud that sound. And we didn't have that. So it was real, kind of rudimentary in a way. And what's so wonderful is that Brady and Lowell Crawley, our wonderful dp, implemented the use of this in a. In an innovative way because they shot it handheld at times and they used it for these intimate close ups and it was more for these vast expanse of sequences. So wonderful and like later in the film and marble quarries etc, they're just vast and really the depth of field is so wonderful and through those lenses, but it worked somehow. We didn't have to recreate those. And it was. It. It. It lends self to creating a feeling of truth and feeling from another era, because it is from another era. It is from the era that we were depicting of Laszlo's arrival and Erzebet's arrival and that time in history. And interestingly, not one American film, I believe since 1961 has been shot on VistaVision till Brady said, I have an idea. So it's pretty remarkable.
- [145:32]
Adam Naiman
It's a great choice. I'm very interested in what the practical execution of things like that are because you read about these things and you're like, oh, well, the movie looks great and those marble quarries are breathtaking. But it is. I remember during the production of Oppenheimer there was a lot of talk about this because they use those large IMAX cameras and it's a very similar thing where there's a loudness that makes quiet moments difficult. But you guys did beautifully. I wanted to ask you a bit about the Pianist and this film and the incredible success you had with that film. And is there any part of you that feared, even though the similarities are superficial, the idea of there being too close an association with a previous work or repeating yourself or anything along those lines?
- [146:14]
Adrien Brody
I mean, I'm so grateful for having done the Pianist and for all that it's awakened in me even before any accolades or career changes. And really it opened my eyes up to so much in. In. In this world. And I think all of the work that I had done to my sense of responsibility on that gave me an understanding that has lived on with me and was instrumental in. In representing and understanding Laszlo's past. So these are vastly different films. They do reference how art can triumph, these terrible chapters in human history. But this is an immigrant's journey upon arriving. And there is some real validity to all the work that I had done for that other film. My understanding of the past, of what. What Laszlo is leaving behind and the trauma that he is coping with. And I'm grateful for those parallels, you know, but because the Pianist was such a tremendous success and was so moving, I've received countless offers to portray men of that era in some capacity. And I. The journey of an actor and the beauty of being an actor is to play a diverse array of roles. And actors are often typecast. Funnily enough, I worked very hard to not play a role with any kind of similarities to that. And the one great role that comes my way many years later, it does have certain similarities, but it is just so beautifully written, expertly crafted, that I. I knew I had to say yes to this and I knew that it had new things to say and impart. And I am portraying a very different person with very different traits and more so it spoke to my own family's direct struggle of coming fleeing conflict in Hungary, not pertaining to World War II, but to escaping communism and coming to America and starting again and how hard that was and how that speaks to people of all ethnicities and is, you know, what's built the foundation of this country and how many of the contributors who have built this country are not on equal footing or viewed in the same regard as they should be because they are foreigners and they are not quite given that in spite of assimilating. And that is what I wanted to speak to on this film. And I think that's what this film speaks to.
- [149:40]
Adam Naiman
You know, you've made dozens of films and TV series even since the Pianist. And you mentioned, you know, this is a great part, like something that you could not do if you had the opportunity to do it. Do you know, at this stage of your career, when you're on a set like, this is actually going to be great. This is actually going to work. So you hear stories all the time about actors who are like, I thought we were making a good one, but it just turned out it was an easier shoot or I thought I was making something terr. Terrible and it turned out great in post. Like, do you have a sense when you're making something like this is actually really going to be profound or at least great.
- [150:11]
Adrien Brody
You have a sense that. You have a sense that you're working together and collectively on something and that when things are firing and cooking collectively, you feel that momentum them and you build upon that and you nurture that. Now, I've worked in many films in my lifetime and I've worked with many circumstances that were very painful and difficult and with people that were very challenging. And my understanding was that that's par for the course to make great work. I always felt that there was a need for some of that additional suffering beyond the suffering of the character. Just the circumstances had to be difficult. And that brought out that turmoil, that struggle that you have to overcome, brought out some kind of greatness. And the remarkable thing was that we didn't have any of that. On the Brutalist. I remember coming home speaking to my family of how it was so wonderful to work with a director with such a specific vision, yet who honored me along each step of the way with a level of respect and calmness and gentleness and gave the space for me to do that caliber of work that I've been yearning to do for so many years. And I'm not saying others don't give that space, but Brady somehow cultivated that amidst plenty of chaos and plenty of financial limitations, which only add to the stress of a filmmaker who's visionary. And I really respect that and appreciate that and did not only offer that courtesy to me, but to every member of the crew. And it was exemplary.
- [152:29]
Adam Naiman
It's a big achievement. Adrian, thank you for doing the show. Thanks for chatting.
- [152:32]
Adrien Brody
Hey, very. My pleasure. Really. Thank you.
- [152:34]
Adam Naiman
Nice talking with you.
- [152:35]
Adrien Brody
I enjoyed this. Thank you. You foreign.
- [152:44]
Adam Naiman
Thank you to Brady Courbet, thank you to Adrian Brody, thank you to Adam Naman, thanks to Jack Sanders, and thanks to our producer, Bobby Wagner for his work on this episode. That's our last episode of 2024. Thank you, as always, for listening to this show. It is a joy to make and hopefully you enjoy listening to it. We will be back in 2024. Amanda will be back in 2025. There's a lot happening here on the show. We have a new project coming that we will announce on January 2nd. We will see you then.