Adrien Brody is the magnificent center of Brady Corbet’s intimate-yet-sprawling epic The Brutalist, giving the performance of his career as László Tóth, who emigrates from Hungary following the Holocaust to restart his architectural ambitions in America under the patronage of Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce). Brody’s layered performance is one of passion, persistence, and pain.
With the film now in limited release, Conor O’Donnell and I spoke with Brody, who returned to The B-Side to discuss the personal history that helped him prepare for his performance, how the film is a metaphor for artist-driven filmmaking, some of his most overlooked performances, and getting to act with Beyoncé. Find a transcription below, edited for clarity, and listen to the full conversation here.
The Film Stage: The Brutalist really feels like a moment and a defining role for your career. If this was ten years ago, do you think you could’ve played this part? Or how would you have played it differently? Do you ever had thoughts like that as an actor?
Adrien Brody: It’s a valid and quite an interesting question. Of course I could have played this character younger in my life. Would it have the depth of experience that I have as a man today? No. Because the beauty of being an actor is to harness all of the things you’ve found and felt and found unjust and wrong or unable to process in words and try to put it into some kind of form of expression that is fitting as it helps to bring a character to life. And the more experience in living you have, the more you have the tools to work from and the information to draw from. But this character in particular: I have insight from years and years of my life, since my childhood of witnessing my grandparents struggle along very similar lines of what László experienced.
My mother and her parents were forced to flee Budapest in 1956 during the Hungarian Revolution and leave their home and family and friends behind while tanks were rolling through the streets and bullets were flying, and they fled under a bed of corn and they were on the back of a cart in a field and flares were being shot at the Austrian border looking to illuminate the sky at night so that they could shoot fleeing people. Then they came to America and New York, and I very much recall how hard it was for my grandfather with language and his dialect being very specific, and certain personality traits that I recall that I can use as a kind of genuine guide for me to create this character. I’m really grateful to, first of all, honor them in a way––to honor that immigrant struggle and speak to that disconnect––and also to represent the fact that art and extraordinary beauty can arise from these kind of dark chapters in human history time and time again, and that there are some links to that today.
Corbet has talked about how László is not necessarily based on any specific architect. So while you’re kind of bringing that family history into it and all those experiences, what went into bringing the technical aspects of László into it?
Yeah, it’s a very interesting thing. Brady and Mona Fastvold, his wife and co-writer of the script, set out to write a movie about architecture and their appreciation of architecture. And a European architect who survives World War II and emigrates to America and one who is established and who has to start again. In their research they discovered that there were no surviving architects who had remained in Europe throughout the German occupation and were survivors. And so they were forced to tell a fictional story that, creatively, was an amalgamation of Louis Kahn and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer and architects of that time that, in Breuer’s case, left in the ’30s, I believe––escaped prior and went on to leave behind this really meaningful body of work. And it says a lot about what is lost, and the potential of all the beauty that had been kind of eradicated from this earth and inspiration for generations to come.
Photo by Mettie Ostrowski, courtesy of New York Film Festival.
We were speaking with Guy Pearce earlier, and one incredible thing in the film is the idea of working with a client, which is really well-defined. There aren’t enough movies that tackle that relationship. Where do you come from with that?
Well, I relate and I’m sure you relate. You should speak to Brady about it, because the crux of the story, really, is also his struggle as an auteur filmmaker, a visionary filmmaker. You fight for what is important in the face of myriad obstacles of the need to finance a movie, which is an enormous expense, obviously. And it is a responsibility of the artist filmmaker to deliver something that will recoup if that filmmaker wants to continue to tell artistic stories. You can’t just make something because you find it interesting, and even that, when we spoke about Clean, was so important to me: I wanted to tell a story that was accessible but also spoke to the hardships that I found of young people, and all of those obstacles in impoverished communities and blight and drugs and poverty and just to get through it, and I kind of wanted to avenge that.
But look: you need a benefactor. And sometimes you’re fortunate to have some people that really champion your work. And those people are very much needed and I value them, and some people want to retain control and power for the sake of control and power. Not because your vision isn’t living up to something, but because they somehow fancy themselves as the artist. And this is a very real thing. I think it’s very…
Relatable.
Relatable, but it’s also beautifully depicted in this movie.
We were talking to Guy about, there’s an inherent ––
The artist gets screwed!
Since we have you on The B-Side, and we were lucky enough to talk to you about a few things last time, I did want to bring up a couple I want to tell people about because you’ve made a lot of really good movies. I just wanted to shout a couple of young ones: Summer of Sam and Liberty Heights.
Love it. By the way, back-to-back.
You shot them back-to-back?
Back-to-back, the same day.
Your abilities as an actor––those could not be more different characters. For those who don’t know, Barry Levinson, that’s his fourth Baltimore movie, Liberty Heights. Because he made, Avalon, Diner, and Tin Men. Then Summer of Sam was a bigger movie for Lee at the time, and it’s really gained a greater appreciation over the years. Is that your memory? Were you kind of pulling a Michael J. Fox and filming them at the same time, basically?
Was he doing multiple films?
He was shooting Family Ties during the day and Back to the Future at night.
You’ve got to do work on the day job, too, you know. [Laughs] That’s the nature of this business. It usually rains and then pours and there’s a drought.
Yeah, feast or famine.
Yeah, it’s feast or famine. And oftentimes the ones that are really special come at the same time and work. And that almost happened in that situation, actually, because it was very important. First of all: they were both wonderful roles. They were both very meaningful, important journeys for me; vastly different characters, like you said. Spike needed me to shave my head and have a blond mohawk. I also got punched in the nose on that final week, too, and broke it.
Oh, no.
Yeah, I was in that fight scene and Barry Levinson was wonderfully accommodating and made adjustments so that I was able to still do the movie, even though he wasn’t happy with certain circumstances. He fought for me to do it. And so I really cherish that about him. I loved the experience. We made two pretty meaningful movies in my career and my lifetime. And they were both very important.
They’re lovely films, and in totally different ways. Also The Brothers Bloom. It’s a movie that I latched onto sort of immediately when I saw it. One of the things that I think is interesting is your ability to layer performances on top of each other, like people who are performing. That’s actually something that comes up quite a lot in The Brutalist as well.
A performative thing in the character, you mean?
The idea of a character who is really one thing and then has to either succeed or fail at giving a good or bad performance on top of that. Obviously that’s more overt in something like The Brothers Bloom because you’re playing a con man. Thinking about both films in tandem, this idea of László witnessing [his cousin] Attila (Alessandro Nivola) trying to assimilate and give this performance that’s failing and then forced to have to navigate that world almost immediately after, when you’re bouncing off of Guy Pearce, who is giving one performance that’s hiding another. When you give these kind of performances, is that ever a calculation that you’re making of: this is the thing that’s being presented, but this is the thing that’s really being thought?
It’s a wonderful question. If it’s overt, then it may feel useful to even reveal something to the audience––almost a wink at how it is something that the character is actually aware of and the stakes are at play. I think there is some of that with László throughout, which is actually quite interesting. But I didn’t look at it through that lens; he was just intelligent enough to play his cards. And I think part of that is how we must interact in life, anyway. You know, someone reveals something, you reveal something you might not have liked to have revealed, they may have not liked to reveal that, and you just carry on. But you know what was just revealed.
And it’s very interesting. It is not spoken about and may never be spoken about again. There’s several moments where Van Buren is revealing behavioral traits that are a little unhinged and dangerous, and even as László kind of half-jokes in the Christmas scene, he’s like, “Is this a test?” Because he just basically heard how he annihilated these people because they didn’t quite pass his test of what things were. [Laughs] And he’s asking him, “So why architecture? Why is that important for you?” And he’s like, “This is a test.” I think it just comes down to: he’s a man with a lot of depth and a lot of complexity, and also is also hiding elements of his own pain and suffering and afflictions and addictions, etc., and that just comes out.
And the beauty of film is that you can try different things. You don’t have much time on a film of this scale––just because there’s no time with the budgetary constraints that we had––but if you’re listening to each other and something does spark something, you can react to that. And the camera is there and you can have that, and it may fit in continuity with other elements of it. I think that’s really beautiful. So I hope that answers the question. I think that the character in Succession was more calculated than any of this, but I think it’s less of a calculated character in the least. He’s much more emotionally led, which I am and I relate to, but he’s smart enough to know: keep your mouth shut if you can help it in this moment.
The other guy [in The Brothers Bloom] can just pop off because he wants you to know that he’s the biggest dick in the world. He’s almost more like the Van Buren character, in that regard.
Yes, yes, exactly.
But Van Buren, in this case, reveals way too much, in my understanding, that there’s still a lot that’s unexpected. However, he’s opened so many opportunities for László which are genuine things to be grateful for. And it is an interesting relationship. It’s a very complex friendship. But then there’s a darkness within that that is even beyond comprehension, you know?
Yeah. As we wrap up here, I wanted to shout out one final B-Side that is not talked about enough: Cadillac Records. Your moment with Beyoncé at the end. There’s no real dialogue when she’s singing. It’s great no-dialogue acting, emoting without saying anything.
The luxury was that I had Beyoncé singing, at last, to me, alone. I mean, there’s a crew there, but alone in this moment singing her heart out to me, and fortunately they must have shot it with two cameras because I don’t recall having… there was a lot of having to act in that film because the music was the priority. So they would shoot the musical sequence first and then they bang out multi generations behind the studio, so they’d age me and run out and come back and ten years later and they’d be done. I’d have to recall them and kind of act them out, and that was challenging. But that moment that you mentioned with Beyonce, it was really evocative and she’s just so talented and beautiful. She bared her soul. And the camera was there while I received that, and I just was so moved that it wasn’t really acting in that moment.
The Brutalist is now in limited release and will expand this month.