There is a moment, roughly a quarter of the way through Brady Corbet’s period epic The Brutalist, when the audience in your theater may be prone to a collective gasp. It isn’t prompted by a shocking act of violence, nor an eye-popping sex scene. (Though both do occur during the film, you won’t find any spoilers here.) Instead, that sharp intake of breath is induced by a library.
Of course, this is not just any library. In The Brutalist, it’s one of the first glimpses we get of the genius of the film’s protagonist, the fictitious Jewish Hungarian architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody). A Holocaust survivor, Tóth has recently emigrated to the United States, where his Bauhaus training leads him to an unlikely assignment at a rural Pennsylvania mansion belonging to industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce). As the twinkling, sostenuto piano of Daniel Blumberg’s score plays in the background, and slats of dappled light illuminate the elegant chair at the center of the space, the sleek cupboards Tóth has designed open up like the petals of a flower, revealing the minimal shelving underneath. It’s the point in the film when you realize that Tóth is, without a doubt, a master.
For The Brutalist’s production designer, Judy Becker, who received an Oscar nomination for her work earlier this week (her second, after a nod for David O. Russell’s American Hustle in 2014), the project represented a rare opportunity. “A lot of times the design is important in expressing something about the characters, but I haven’t done a movie about an actual architect or a designer before,” says Becker. “I’m not a real architect, but I worked really hard to make it feel strong, and I’m really proud of it because I think it was successful—but it was a big challenge, for sure.”
Much has been made of the film’s monumental scale—the fact it was achieved on just a $10 million budget continues to boggle the mind—and one imagines no other senior crew member felt the pinch quite like Becker. Tasked with inventing the Van Buren Institute, the sprawling modernist community center, designed by Tóth, that sits at the center of The Brutalist’s narrative, Becker began with sketches. Then came an intricate scale model (which was used extensively in the movie itself) before she constructed portions of it in the countryside outside Budapest, and scouted modernist buildings around Hungary she could dress to appear as part of the building’s whole—a process she likens to the assembling of a puzzle.
Yet even if bringing Tóth’s uncompromising vision to life could be a grueling process at times—“I’m kind of a method designer,” Becker says, noting that spending many months inhabiting the mind of a fiercely individualistic, heroin-addicted creative required more from her emotionally than your average production design job—she wouldn’t have had it any other way. “I’ve been doing this for almost 25 years, and it’s probably the best filmmaking experience I’ve ever had,” she says, with a wide smile. “I really mean that.”
Here, Becker tells Vogue about landing the job after almost a decade of following Corbet’s work, how she went about defining Tóth’s unique artistic identity, and her own lifelong passion for Brutalist architecture.
Vogue: Take me back to the beginning of the project. I read that you were a fan of Brady’s work, and reached out when you heard about the film?
Judy Becker: I was chasing Brady, basically. I try to work with directors that I admire, and there’s plenty that I admire, but they don’t have openings—often, they have a designer they work with a lot. I knew Brady as an actor, and when I saw The Childhood of a Leader [Corbet’s feature directorial debut], I was just totally astonished by it—not just in terms of storytelling and as a movie, but how fantastic the visuals were. It was clearly an auteur work, and a visionary work. So I told my agent that I had to work with him, and when The Brutalist was announced, I was like, “Pete, you got to get me in.” My agent knew that I love Brutalist architecture—even though at that point, I actually had no idea if it was even really about Brutalist architecture—so I was like, “Come on, this was made for me!” He got me a meeting with Brady, and we hit it off and I got the job. I think it was just one of those times when everything fell into place. It was a great group of people, and we had a great time working together. It was really a wonderful collaboration and it makes me really happy whenever we’re reunited for a Q&A or a premiere. I’ve been doing this for almost 25 years, and it’s probably the best filmmaking experience I’ve ever had. I really mean that.
That’s so interesting to hear. Given how much conversation there’s been around everything you were able to achieve on a small budget, I’d think the making of it would have been quite grueling.
I mean, not every minute of it was positive, but that’s true for any movie. There are always challenges, and you don’t have enough money for this or that—even on a really big-budget movie that happens. More money doesn’t mean things go smoothly. Well, I’ll make one exception here, because when I worked on some miniseries with Ryan Murphy, things did go pretty smoothly. He really cared. There is a lot of money and a lot of it goes towards the production design. I’m not saying I got everything I wanted, but it was pretty nice working on those. But on movies, it’s never easy. Obviously, we really had to stretch the dollar more than usual on this, but I enjoyed that part. I’m good at delegating, but it’s much more fun when I’m busy, and I designed pretty much everything myself. I thought I would be finding specialists to design more of it, furniture designers and architects, but in the end, I didn’t. I was just sitting at home drawing it all, and I’m pretty happy with the way it came out. It was a great experience—I can honestly say that. Maybe if you had asked me right in the moment when things were pretty stressful, I wouldn’t be saying that. But hindsight is an amazing thing. [Laughs.]
In terms of that research process, there are a handful of real-life designers whose names have come up as possible inspirations for László: Marcel Breuer, Louis Kahn, Mies van der Rohe… How did you reconcile trying to create something that felt authentic to that period of design, while also imagining what László’s spin on those traditions might be?
A lot of the correct sort of period sources were already in my vocabulary. I knew them pretty well. I’ve always been interested in Bauhaus architecture and Brutalism, and Marcel Breuer was one of my favorite architects before I started this project. But when I was designing the institute, for example, I avoided looking at architecture from that period because I didn’t want to end up copying anybody. I looked at James Turrell for that relationship between the sky and the interior, and I did look at Tadao Ando and some land artists, because I was working a lot with the underground and nature. You don’t see it in the movie so much, but I did design this whole building as if it could actually be built, and thought long and hard about how it would be experienced by a visitor. Obviously, the design of concentration camps played into it a lot. And although I’d looked at many, many images of concentration camps throughout my life, this was the first time I ever thought about them in terms of design and architecture, which was a pretty intense experience, and it took me a while to crack the code of how that would be incorporated into the institute. I designed it so that it would be very claustrophobic for the visitor and also imprisoning in a sense, and then it would open up into these wider areas to give a sense of freedom. We built a model that a miniature person could visit, and we shot inside the model with a tiny little pencil camera.
How did all those puzzle pieces of the institute come together onscreen? The miniatures, the sets you built, the locations you scouted and then presumably dressed to appear as certain parts of it…
It was a lot of push and pull. The first thing I did on the movie was design the institute, as Brady wanted to show it to the producers to explain how we were going to build parts of it but never have to build the whole thing—because, clearly, that would be outside the budget of any movie, really. Some things were already scripted, like the incorporation of the Holocaust experience of Erzsebet and László and the light being reflected on the altar, but it wasn’t fully described. I was influenced a lot by this synagogue that Marcel Breuer designed that was in the shape of a Star of David, but you could only see it from above. I was also inspired by the subway system in Washington, D.C., as it has this enormously steep descending staircase that was designed by an architect named Harry Weiss. And I designed a part of the institute so that as you descended, it also narrowed—so by the time you got [to the bottom], you were basically a prisoner. I love that idea that as you're entering this grand institute, you were becoming a prisoner of László’s, and it was his little joke on Harrison. That was a big part of the institute that you never see as a viewer of the movie, but it was sort of an Easter egg. But, yes, we built a few portions of it, as you see in the movie—you see the construction site and you see some entrances and some walls and some exits—and then we scouted in Hungary for buildings that could replicate certain parts of it.
I had designed the chapel to be a round area, like a bell tower or a crematorium chimney, and we found these old silos that were pretty perfect for that. And there was another fairly contemporary Brutalist-style house a few hours from Budapest where we shot a lot of pieces of the institute. And I did make a few adjustments to the large-scale model to align with that building. It was actually a red cement house, but we changed the color in post. Another thing that people notice when they see the movie is this underground water cistern with columns towards the end. That was a location I scouted: It was the reservoir for Budapest. They let us shoot in there, and it was beautiful. It reminded me of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax building in Racine, Wisconsin, which has this open bullpen for the secretaries with similar columns. Brady wrote it into the script, as it was so cool-looking. We basically looked for what was good and used it as a way of expanding the institute.
I also wanted to ask you about the library—I saw the film in Venice, and when that was unveiled, I remember there were audible gasps from the audience at how beautiful it was. It must have been quite challenging to create something that is so spartan, but also so striking.
I’m so pleased to hear you say that. I saw it in Venice too, and I felt the same way—I was sitting next to Lol [Crawley], the director of photography, and I was just like, “Wow!” We both turned to look at each other, because we’d only seen rough cuts previously, and it looked so beautiful. To be honest, I was inspired when I saw the location—it wasn’t fully described in the script because it was always going to be very location-dependent. It wasn’t Brutalist in style, it was just modern. But it had to show that László was an artist—and a very talented artist—so it was a very important scene. When that location was found, there was only one room that seemed like it could be the library, but it was a winter garden and it was all glass, so I was a little confused as to how I was going to create bookshelves in there. The only script note about the design, really, was that he designs these shelves that are pulled up by ropes and are like a flower opening. And it was a sort of square, boxy room then, with this rounded element at the end. I thought, we should build these cabinets that create a forced perspective, because I felt like that would change the shape of the room in a more modern way. And the floor-to-ceiling aspect with the backing would get rid of the glass issue, and would create a place for me to hang the shelves. And that just came to me all at once in the moment, which is pretty rare—that almost never happens.
I drew it very crudely and showed it to Brady, and he liked the idea, and that was that. The hard part, really, was finding enough wood in Hungary, because they get their wood from Russia and Ukraine, and the war had started by then. Figuring out how to seam the pieces of wood together was also challenging, because it was very important that it be meticulously done. It was very painstaking and time-consuming, but it was important that it looked perfect because it had to be this stunning moment. And when I saw it, I felt like we achieved that. You do feel in that moment that László is a true artist. It was one of those moments where we put more of our limited amount of money, because it’s so important.
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It must be quite rare as a production designer to do a project where your work is really one of the stars of the movie, and there are these really pivotal, emotional moments in the film that rely almost entirely on the sets.
This is the only time I’ve ever done it to this extent. I mean, a lot of times the design is important in expressing something about the characters, but I haven’t done a movie about an actual architect or a designer before. It’s so important to get it right, because I remember someone saying to me, “You see movies where you’re told the character’s a great artist, and then you see the art and it’s bad.” I mean, you do see that a lot. [Laughs.] The one movie I did where the character was an artist, I was like, “We have to get a real artist to do the artwork,” and we did, and the art looked great. And on this one… I’m not a real architect, but I worked really hard to make it feel strong, and I’m really proud of it because I think it was successful, and it was a big challenge for sure. I’ve spent my entire life, since I was probably five years old—I’m not even exaggerating—interested in architecture and design, and I can thank my mother for that. She was very interested in it, and she brought me to museums and taught me about design. So even though I never studied it formally, I guess it paid off. Don’t underestimate the power of an informal training.
You mentioned beginning to feel like László was a real person, and I saw you joke at a Q&A with Adrien Brody recently that you were also playing László in the movie. Did you feel at times like you were inhabiting him, or he was possessing you in some way?
Definitely. I mean, I usually feel that way anyway when I’m designing a movie. I really try to live the characters so I can see the world I’m creating through their eyes. I’m kind of a method designer in that way. In this case, it wasn’t so easy, because of his experiences in a concentration camp, and then coming to America after the war and being completely impoverished and pretty depleted creatively. When he is designing the furniture, he’s got his Bauhaus training, but he’s also forced to use leftovers from [his cousin’s] hideous American furniture shop that are lying around. And I really thought about all of that when I was designing everything—how gradually he becomes more and more of a person again, artistically and in terms of his own self. It had to be that way, because otherwise, it wouldn’t have made sense.
This was a very challenging film to make, for numerous reasons. When you were working on it, did you have a sense that you were making something special? And how has it been to see such an enthusiastic response from audiences?
I definitely had a feeling that it was special, because I loved the script and Brady’s work. I wanted to do the movie so badly, and it was truly a labor of love. I mean, whenever you get asked to do a low-budget movie, it’s a labor of love. But this really was one, for everybody who worked on it. But I definitely did not expect that it would get the kind of response that it’s been getting. That’s so rare for any movie, and especially for what I thought was really an art film. I was so nervous at Venice. I don’t know how Brady felt, but I can say that the people I was sitting next to felt really nervous, so it’s been incredibly gratifying to see the response. It feels great. Really great.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
