With a sprawling 215 minutes and VistaVision footage, not to mention a variety of other formats––including 8mm, 16mm, Super 16mm, 35mm (two-perf, three–perf, four-perf, and eight-perf), Betacam, even an Arri Alexa shot––constructing Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist took editor Dávid Jancsó two years. The result is an intoxicating tapestry of epic proportions and one of 2024’s most accomplished feats of editing.
As the film continues its run in limited release, I spoke with Jancsó about that unforgettable opening sequence, planting seeds in the first half that sprout in the second, how much was left on the cutting-room floor, how budget constraints affected the edit, and the overwhelming emotional experience of its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival.
The Film Stage: I know you worked on Childhood of a Leader, and then not on Vox Lux, but got back together for The Brutalist. Can you talk about your initial discussions with Brady and how you came aboard?
Dávid Jancsó: For Vox Lux, it was a scheduling conflict that he just couldn’t wait for me at a certain point. But I was kept in the loop. They sent me cuts; I gave him feedback. I was very delicate always. I’m always very delicate in giving feedback. I’m not the feedback type of guy at all, but I did Mona’s film [The World to Come] in-between, which––they did Childhood together, they did Vox Lux together. They did The World to Come together. They did The Brutalist together and now they’re doing Ann Lee together. So it’s always been a family affair. And I was there very early on for Brady’s first film. I was there helping them raise their child in Paris while we were cutting there in their apartment back in the good old days, which was up until 10 years ago, which hurts to hear. I’ve kept in touch with Brady. We’re friends; we’re very close. I did read the first script [for The Brutalist] back when they were doing Mona’s film, so I was already involved back then. I tried to convince them not to have the actors try to speak Hungarian, but…
To dive into the actual editing, the film starts with such an impact, its opening sequence and then the credits. Can you talk about finding the perfect rhythm for initially disorienting the audience, but then letting the audience breathe a bit with that title sequence?
The opening itself was always meant to be this guttural… well, we open with her at the border crossing, and just setting the tone and the aggressiveness of what’s to come, and then going deep into the belly of the beast––which was the boat––was always the idea. We had the music ahead of time, so we knew what we were dealing with. And hopefully you don’t see how many cuts there are in that beginning boat sequence. [Laughs] Part of it was shot in the boat, then New York was shot in New York. So we had to wait quite some time until we got the whole sequence together. That’s when we decided to start swirling it around, the same swirling that you feel inside the boat and the sound design of it. We had the sound team come in a little bit early to help us out to mock it up.
It was always meant to be hitting you in the head right off the bat. It already set the tone for a lot of the other sequences that were to come later as well. The whole building up and arriving to America was the most important way to to draw the audience in and see who this person is, where he’s coming from, the letter that’s being read, the emotional turmoil that he has to go through just to even arrive to this place that is supposedly the dream. That’s, of course, the sequence that we always kept going back to. I know it’s cliché to say that you always start from the beginning of the film, but the beginning of this film was very, very important to us––of how it affected everything else later.
Dávid Jancsó
Corbet has mentioned the first half of the movie is optimism and the second half is realism. If you watch it a second time, there’s certain things you plant in the first half that really sprout in the second. From an editing point of view, I’m sure it’s in the script, but were there specific discussions on making sure how much or how little you are revealing in the first half? I think of Guy Pearce’s character––you know he’s not the greatest guy in the beginning, but he obviously shifts.
The script was perfect in the sense that it provided the plan for us in the edit, too. I mean of course you go to shoot it and this shoot wasn’t a huge-budget film, so therefore there are always constraints––even if you’re doing an extremely large-budget film––of how you can actually record what is on paper. But it was very well-written, very nuanced. We always looked at the totality of the film, meaning that those tiny clues that are at the beginning need to be able to connect the audience to what will happen later. It cannot come out of the blue instantly. So the storytelling of it, and just the emotional journey of these characters, has to be based on something. So I’ve been asked a question––if these are two films. Yes, but no. Or we could say it’s a series with an intermission. It was always important to go back and see the scene that connects to the scene at the beginning that connects it to the end. So without going into any details of what exactly those are, I’m sure you can imagine which one I’m talking about.
Definitely. Something I was impressed with in the editing, and I’m sure some of this is conceived on set or prior, but the camera really stays with the characters, whether it’s different monologues from Guy Pearce or Adrien Brody. There’s not a lot of heavy cutting. How important was it to have the audience really sit in these conversations and feel the perspectives from the other characters?
Again, it might be cliché saying this, but every cut is very deliberate in the film. We were very keen not to overcut the film because we knew we were handling a three-and-a-half hour movie, so you don’t want to blow all your audience’s attention away at certain scenes. So we had to be very nuanced with certain scenes. The monologue scene [with Guy Pearce] was a 15-minute scene. It is now something like seven minutes. I don’t remember how long it is because, for me, the whole thing is one but editing is very funny. Editing is brutalist architecture at the end of the day, because it’s all into tiny details that you don’t notice. It’s the same effect on this film too.
These actors’ performances were incredible. So getting these dailies and listening to them, and even though we had a limited amount of takes certain times, you have constraints, because you’re shooting film. You can’t have all the angles all the time, which weren’t even planned to do, but at some times we felt we needed to go closer. And that’s why shooting on these large formats is great, because you have the ability to go in closer and reframe the image at certain points. So a lot of this helped us, a lot, to guide the audience honestly and take them through this very long but, over the decades, emotional journey.
You’ve mentioned it’s long, but I could have sat for another hour because you’re so enveloped in the story.
That was the point. Thank you. That’s a great compliment.
From that point of view, did you trust your instincts the whole time? I imagine you didn’t do test screenings, but did you screen for friends and family, and did that feedback help at all? Or once it was done, were you just ready to show the world?
We were very afraid to show the film early on, because of the nuances that we had to do to it. So we had a very advanced cut already. I mean, it was just two of us in the edit. It was my partner, co-editor [Ilka Janka Nagy] and I who worked on this film for the two years that we did the edit, but a lot of those tiny details we didn’t want to show. We showed parts and sequences to people to get their feedback on it. And we were very interested in the feedback, but they were so positive all the time, it wasn’t really helpful. [Laughs] Because an editor’s number-one thing is like, “Yeah, I understand you love it, but what do you hate? Tell me: what do you hate? Because that I can work with!” Nobody hated anything; it was horrible. [Laughs]
Oh, man. You mentioned the budget was small. Does that mean there wasn’t a lot left on the cutting-room floor?
There was some, but not a lot obviously. Plus, we really wanted to stick to the script. It was a fabulously written script, and we wanted to stick to it. Again: it’s three-and-a-half hours. If you take something out from a certain point, then it might not [make sense]. And we knew that we could do a long movie. It was our constraint, but also our big freedom, too, because we knew that we wanted a longer intermission. It was five minutes at first and 10 and ended up at 15. We didn’t want to lose anything from the story’s perspective. Yes, of course: there are scenes that aren’t in there that we cut because it just didn’t fit into the story itself, or the way it was shot wasn’t as good as the rest of what was shot. Again, small-film constraints, but no––not much was left on the cutting-room floor.
I’ve spoken to some editors who will edit scenes but then, whenever they want to review, they want to watch the whole film for context, an entire cut at a time. I imagine for this film this length it’s a little tricky, but I feel like you wouldn’t be able to gain a sense of the entire rhythm of the film until you see it in totality. What was that process like of trying to rework it from in a total experience?
Really? You want me to tell you how the sausage is made? [Laughs]
I would love to know.
Yes, well, I mean, to sit down and watch this film took you a day because you sat down. You didn’t want to start working on it immediately. So every time we did major changes, we sat down and watched it. And this film, again, is not something that you can watch on your phone screen. You have to go into at least a big monitor or a theater to be able to judge. And we were very delicate in not overdoing anything again, because of, funnily enough, the constraints, which meant that we were actually having a post that is twice as long or three times as long as it should have been. It required Brady’s dedication, my dedication, Ilka’s dedication, to be on this project and keep engaged with it all the way through. Which added to us being able to keep watching it as many times as possible and being able to make these decisions. So, yeah. I mean, I cannot tell you how many times we’ve seen this film.
We interviewed Sean Baker for Anora, and I know it’s a little different in that situation because he edited that himself, but he said he needs a six-month break from filming to editing. I’m curious how you work with Corbet. Does he need that space too? Did he wait until you had a more complete assembly cut to watch?
We did do a more complete cut for him. His prep and shoot were very difficult and I stayed back, waited for the film to develop, be scanned, etc., and try to give him a film as a whole to watch already when he came into the edit. He came in and watched sequences, but he was very, you know, “You do you. I’m dealing with the shoot. I’m confident that you would tell me anything, if there is anything missing or something.” I mean, I won’t tell him anything. I mean, I told him, “Whatever you shoot, I’m not gonna say you shouldn’t. Just go and shoot it. The more I have, the better we’ll make it.”
Yes, there were times when he stepped away a little bit just to go on a family vacation. For example: in the summer we kept working on it, fiddling with it, and he came back. It’s important for every director to be able to handle their PTSD from the shoot and just be able to walk away a little bit, calm down, and then be able to present it as an editor. It is your job to help him see the film as it is in the edit suite instead of the smells and sounds and horrible experiences he might have had eating something very bad on set, which I can’t relate to. I hate the set.
That’s good to know. From an audience point of view, was there a certain sequence or set of scenes that proved more difficult and took more fine-tuning that, watching it, we may never realize?
Well, I hope you never realize. Let’s just put it that way. [Laughs] Should I? Should I tell you what was the difficult part? So now you can point to it…
The dome sequence. I can tell you that for sure, that was very hard to shoot, too. Again, they had to break a dome. It was the stunts and just, again, constraints, constraints, constraints that were on the shoot did not help us in post. That was a sequence that had to be fiddled with. The Italian crew was very small––very effective, but very small––so the Italian shoot had its issues. I think we did pretty good job on the Italian sequence.
Yeah.
I’m proud of that one, too. I mean, a lot of times the camera was just going, and they had to record what was there in front of them for certain sequences. But honestly, no, it was… it was a pleasure. You could always find something in it. And again: you had the playground to do so because of the epicness of the film.
This may be a naive question, but I’m curious. There’s so many technical components of this movie. It was output on DCP, 35mm, 70mm. The score and sound design is so heavily integrated. There was even mixed media with the way the epilogue was shot. For your specific job, how do all those elements factor in, and is the challenge exciting for you or are you really only dealing with the edit itself?
I’m of a very classic breed of editors who are there from prep all the way through delivery. So I was very hands-on with all these formats that came on. Obviously we have 8mm; we have 16mm; we have Super 16mm; we have 35mm two-perf, three–perf, four-perf, and eight-perf. We have Betacam. We even have an Arri Alexa shot. If anybody can point me to it, then I’ll buy them a drink. [Laughs] So it was very important for us because these specific formats were very tuned into the era that that specific sequence played in. The most obvious is the Betacam at the end, which is the ‘80s.
Was it a hassle? Of course it was. But it was worth the hassle, is what I’m saying. So yes: I was very much paying attention. My co-editor as well, because she found most of the archival footage that is in the film, so there was a lot of search-and-rescue for these materials to get into the film. And it’s not easy finding a good version of this, so we had to go back to ask for either the print or the negative, have it re-scanned for us. A lot of this film was surprisingly technical.
That’s great. I was very curious about that.
It was 700 terabytes of footage, which is a lot.
Do you know how many feet of film overall was shot?
I can look it up, but I don’t off the top of my head. And with feet, I mean––there’s the 8mm, there’s the 16mm, etc. If I tell you the length, it doesn’t mean the width is included in that. [Laughs]
Got it. Lastly, at Venice, what is going through your head and the emotions when you’re seeing your two years of work play in front of an audience and realizing it plays well? I saw it at the New York Film Festival and that was right after A24 picked it up and Corbet said they didn’t want to change a single frame. As an editor, what was that whole experience like after being so close to the film for so long?
I was tense up until the very last minute. Everything before Venice was last-minute. Can we actually do the 70mm? Will it arrive in time? Festivals aren’t prepared to screen 70mm. We had problems during the tech check. We had some problems during the screening itself, but as soon as the last reel came on, reel 13, I started crying, and couldn’t stop until everybody left the room. So, I mean, I had issues at the end there, I have to tell you. It was an amazing feeling that something you’ve worked so hard on and dedicated two years of your life and be loyal to everything and everybody. If they would have hated it, I still would have cried, just so you know––because it’s just the letting-go of something that you have put so much of your energy into, and Brady too. We were so emotional that day.
The Brutalist premiere at the Venice Film Festival. Photo by Dávid Jancsó.
The Brutalist is now in limited release and will expand this month.