There’s nothing Hollywood likes better than a bumptious young director with talent to burn – at least until the world turns and puts them out of business. This year’s model is 36-year-old Brady Corbet, whose new film, The Brutalist, a 215-minute period epic shot on defunct film stock, has become the unlikely frontrunner in the 2025 Oscar race.
Corbet’s a relatively fresh face, only three features into his directing career. But he’s also a throwback, or a holdout, an old-school independent filmmaker following in the footsteps of his idols. Critics compare him to the auteurs of Seventies American cinema, some of whom are inconveniently still alive and making movies of their own.
Corbet, let’s assume, is aware that success has a shelf life and that every good work of art is just a shuffle step from disaster. The Brutalist, after all, is a film about artistic struggle, casting Adrien Brody as driven, brilliant Laszlo Toth, who wants to build a modernist masterpiece on a Pennsylvania hilltop. Officially speaking, Laszlo Toth is a Hungarian-born architect, just off the boat in 1950s America. But he could just as easily be a struggling filmmaker from modern-day Brooklyn. The Brutalist invites us to feel his pain as he tangles with his backers, stays true to his vision and tests the patience of his otherwise doting wife. “Promise me you won’t let it drive you mad,” she pleads.
Corbet, perhaps tellingly, co-wrote The Brutalist with his own wife, Mona Fastvold, and admits that the film’s troubled journey to the screen drove him right to the edge. Seven years in the making, Corbet’s epic finally went before the cameras in Hungary so as to capitalise on the country’s tax breaks. It was cobbled together for a little under $10m (£8m) and was predominantly shot in VistaVision, an antique film stock that hadn’t been used since the early 1960s. The director recalls being told that the film was a folly and was going to end his career, so he’s entitled to feel vindicated and to bask in his success. Most critics agree: The Brutalist is a tour de force; an expansive, richly textured saga of the post-war immigrant experience. It has been likened to Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II.
Leone died in 1989 and has safely passed into legend. Coppola, though, remains very much last year’s model; a man gone up-river like Colonel Kurtz out of Apocalypse Now. He’s merrily burnt all his bridges, is making films for his own amusement (when he’s able to make them at all) and represents the logical final stage for any self-respecting auteur. Last year’s Megalopolis, Coppola’s first feature since 2011, could almost be The Brutalist’s wealthier cousin – it’s a long, lush movie about a visionary architect (this time played by Adam Driver) who is determined to make his masterpiece and likewise has to battle a corrupt east coast establishment.
Except that where Corbet made his film for peanuts, Coppola self-funded Megalopolis to the tune of $120m (£98m), raising the money from the sale of his vineyards. And where The Brutalist’s shoot was defined by bustling, belt-tightened business, the Megalopolis set was reportedly one of chaos and waste, with the director accused of smoking marijuana while working and ordering young female extras to sit on his lap (both charges he denies). The Brutalist premiered with little fanfare and then gained momentum as the rave reviews mounted up. Megalopolis, by contrast, shot itself in the foot with an advertising campaign that relied on fabricated, AI-generated pull quotes, together with a five-star review on the film cataloguing site Letterboxd which was posted by Coppola himself.
Years from now an enterprising film professor might build a college module around these two films, showing the right and wrong way to make an independent arthouse picture. They may conclude that The Brutalist was a hit (assuming it triumphs at the Oscars and box office predictions play out) and that Megalopolis flopped (current worldwide gross: $14m). They could then go on to compare Corbet’s discipline with Coppola’s wayward free-style indulgence, proving by any reasonable measure that The Brutalist is the more successful and satisfying production. And yet the truth is that I love both these movies – or rather, what I love is the fact that they exist in the world. Megalopolis and The Brutalist feel personal, distinctive and defiantly at loggerheads with conventional industry wisdom. The fact that one beat the odds justifies the existence of the other.
Does this automatically make them auteur films, the singular works of inimitable artists? I suppose that it does, insofar as the auteur theory means anything any more (it’s almost as degraded as that VistaVision film stock). Yet what’s interesting about The Brutalist and Megalopolis is that both films are fixated on this very subject. They’re fascinated by the vexed relationship between art and commerce and by the pursuit of excellence in a standardised modern world. It’s no accident that the first film harks back to the 1950s and the second to the expressionistic silent era of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Abel Gance’s Napoleon. Corbet and Coppola, I suspect, are pining for the days when the concept of the great artist was still a recognised phenomenon, be it a monomaniacal architect or a Hollywood filmmaker with jodhpurs and a bullhorn.
The auteur theory crested in the Sixties and Seventies and made heroes of a number of talented, distinctive directors, Coppola among them. Since then, it’s been a casualty of a changing business model, pushed to the sidelines by the ongoing fan service of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the digital innovations of ChatGPT. Personal statements are out, mass entertainment is in and if the superstar director even exists any more, it is more likely to be found in Silicon Valley than Hollywood. Generative AI – amorphous and anonymous – is poised to turn the industry on its head. Handtooled human craft risks becoming obsolete. All of which makes Corbet and Coppola more precious than ever, like endangered red squirrels or a pair of Catholic monks working on their illuminated letters. Auteurs can be exasperating, hubristic and sometimes outright offensive. But we should protect them, preserve them, because what’s coming is worse.
‘The Brutalist’ is in cinemas from 24 January
