Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series spotlighting the scripts behind awards season’s most talked-about movies continues with Brady Corbet‘s The Brutalist, the A24 epic that won the Silver Lion for Best Director at the Venice Film Festival and on Sunday became an Oscar Best Picture front-runner by winning Best Director, Best Actor – Drama for star Adrien Brody and Best Picture – Drama honors at the Golden Globes.
Corbet’s post-World War II drama, co-written with his partner Mona Fastvold, delves into the story of László Tóth (Brody), a Hungarian-Jewish visionary architect. After surviving the Holocaust, he emigrated to the U.S. to begin a new life while awaiting the arrival of his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), trapped in Eastern Europe with their niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) following the war. The film also stars Joe Alwyn, Stacy Martin and Emma Laird, with Isaach de Bankolé and Alessandro Nivola.
After its world premiere in Venice, A24 acquired rights to the pic and released it December 20, scoring several awards and nominations along the way including nine Critics Choice Awards noms, Best Film and Best Actor for Brody at the New York Film Critics Circle and a Top 10 Films spot at the AFI Awards.
Corbet and Fastvold’s 168-page script (the film’s run time is 3 hours and 35 minutes) immerses us in postwar rural Pennsylvania, a world of blue-blooded elites. Set against the backdrop of the emerging Brutalist architectural movement, Brody’s performance captures the character’s internal turmoil as he grapples with the challenges of starting over in a foreign land. The film offers a moving exploration of the immigrant experience of settling in an unfamiliar country.
Spanning three decades, the screenplay follows Tóths after László’s journey to America. The American Dream turns sour as he meets and accepts the patronage of the wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pierce), in exchange for constructing a memorial to Van Buren’s late mother on the oligarch’s sprawling Pennsylvania property. Throughout the film, that monument becomes a testament to Tóth’s genius, his struggles in the war, and the epic battle he engages in with the capitalist Van Buren to get it made.
“It examines how the immigrant experience mirrors the artistic one in the sense that whenever one is making something bold, audacious or new — like the institute László constructs over the course of the film — they are generally criticized for it,” says Corbet, who spent seven years making the film. “And then over time they are lionized and celebrated for it.”
Adds Fastvold: “We loved the partnership, friendship, and love story that developed between László and Erzsébet as we wrote the screenplay. These were the first sparks and ideas that became The Brutalist.”
Read their script here:
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