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Though The Brutalist is just recently making its long-awaited theatrical debut on the 2024 movie schedule (at least in select cities), I was lucky enough to catch an early screening of actor-turned-director Brady Corbet’s epic over a month ago. Since then, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about how the Adrien Brody film, arguably one of the best A24 movies, was made for $10 million.
The sprawling epic about a Hungarian architect making a new life for himself in post-World War II America has been making a lot of buzz since its debut at the Venice Film Festival a few months ago, and for good reason. With Oscar-worthy performances, a miraculous story about identity, courage, and art, and stunning visuals on the scale of Lawrence of Arabia or Once Upon a Time in the West, there’s a lot to love. But I still can’t figure out how this feat was pulled off so damn well…
The Brutalist Is A 3.5-Hour Epic That Feels Like A Massive Hollywood Production, Not A $10-Million Independent Film
Considering The Brutalist has a runtime of just over three-and-a-half hours, which includes the much-talked-about 15-minute intermission, I assumed that the epic about an architect and a wealthy industrialist teaming up to build an ambitious and massive structure in the Pennsylvania countryside would have a huge budget. I mean, it was shot on 35mm film in the VistaVision format, for crying out loud. That can’t be cheap, right?
Well, according to Variety, The Brutalist cost around $10 million to produce. That’s like a fraction of what it cost to produce Killers of the Flower Moon, another recent movie with a runtime of over three hours. Sure, Corbet’s movie doesn’t have stars with massive fees like Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, but this is a movie with huge sets, ridiculous attention to detail, and a story that spans nearly 40 years.
What Brady Corbet Has Said About Shooting On Such A Small Budget
Since first hearing that Brady Corbet made The Brutalist for around $10 million, I’ve been wondering how. Like, how did he do this? Well, in the aforementioned Variety article, the director explained:
We cut every corner we could to make sure that every single cent was on screen. It was a Herculean effort, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone, because it was just years and years of essentially working for free. … I never thought, ‘I wish I had $30 million more.’ There’s a lot of strings that come with that kind of money. It invites lots of opinions. You have all these executives who don’t trust the director and bury them in notes. What you get is something antiseptic that lacks a signature. It’s the difference between a bowl from Crate & Barrel and a Wabi Sabi ceramic.
Cinematographer Lol Crawley later added to Corbet’s comments by telling The Hollywood Reporter that once cameras started rolling, they shot everything in 34 days, which is wild considering all the sets featured in the movie. Crawley, who previously worked with the director on The Childhood of a Leader and Vox Lux, said Corbet really knew what he wanted and got some of the film’s most pivotal scenes in one shot. This is particularly impressive for one scene in particular, but I won’t ruin that for you.
The Brutalist was already my favorite movie of the year and one of the 2024 films everyone should watch. But after reading what Corbet had to say about making one of the biggest epics in recent memory on essentially a shoestring budget, I appreciate the movie even more. I didn’t think that was possible.
I’m not sure when The Brutalist will come back to my neck of the woods (most likely early on the 2025 movie schedule), but I’ll be there opening day of the wide release to watch it again. Who knows, I could go back to watch like four or five more times like I did with There Will Be Blood in 2008.
We’ll be surely talking about The Brutalist much more as awards season kicks off. But in the meantime, there are a lot of other upcoming A24 movies worth checking out.