When it comes to stretching a production dollar, Warner Bros., which just went through the exercise of spending $190 million+ on Joker: Folie à Deux, might want to have a conversation with filmmaker Brady Corbet, who shot his 3 1/2 hour Venice Film Festival-winning epic The Brutalist for between $6 million-$8 million.
The original post-World War II set feature follows Hungarian-born Jewish architect László Tóth (Oscar winner Adrien Brody), who arrives to America and finds newfound success when his talents are hired by a rich real estate tycoon, Harrison Lee Van Buren (played by Guy Pearce). However, not everything is as great as it seems. Felicity Jones plays László’s wheelchair stricken wife, Erzsébet Tóth who arrives some time after Tóth’s time stateside.
How did Corbet pull off shooting in VistaVision and at such a low cost? There will even be 70MM prints of the movie when it hits theaters via A24 on Dec. 20. The distrib bought the movie out of Venice.
“We’re not reinventing the wheel,” said Corbet at a CAA screening yesterday, “The reality is that we would have been happier and more comfortable if we had more money.”
“It came at a great personal, physical expense at times because the number of sleepless nights in the last seven years,” Corbet explains about making this movie post his 2018 Natalie Portman popstar-in-crisis pic Vox Lux, “You have to have blind faith for getting this thing which is completely malnourished across the finish line.”
Part of this entailed shooting in Hungary to take advantage of tax credits. Corbet also worked with his previous collaborators, i.e. DP Lol Crowley.
“We were shooting in a country where things would cost what they really should cost. Hungary is not that cheap where we shot. It’s cheaper than New York City where we spent $1M in transpo on the last movie.”
Having kept it thrifty, he says “We want to be in control of how sand is moved around in the box. We think money is frequently misspent; a reality that all of us exist in. I don’t think I’m overstepping by saying that. But also to make this movie for this amount of money meant that it was a real sacrifice from our HODs (heads of departments).”
Such sacrifices included Corbet forgoing printing film stock “because it’s too expensive to process something that we’re not going to use anyway.”
So, really, what’s the trick to pulling off an epic at a low budget?
For Corbet, it’s a no-brainer. “This is how they did it for a century.”
“It takes time to train contemporary line producers. Studios are usually run by people who frequently haven’t made a lot of movies on the ground. It’s a lot of explaining and educating people on the ground. It’s a process,” adds the filmmaker.
The Brutalist is Corbet’s third directed feature. Corbet won Best Director at Venice. He addition The Brutalist won the Arca CinemaGiovani Award, the FIPRESCI prize, the Premio CinemaSara Award and the UNIMED Prize for Cultural Diversity.
