Adrien Brody Says Mother’s Life Journey Gave Him Sense Of ‘Kinship’ With Hungarian émigré Character In Venice Title ‘The Brutalist’

Melanie Goodfellow
·3 min read
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Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Joe Alwyn and Stacy Martin hit the Venice Film Festival on Sunday for the premiere of Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist.

They were joined at the press conference by the other members of the buzzy cast – Raffey Cassidy, Stacy Martin, Emma Laird, Isaach De Bankolé and Alessandro Nivola – who squeezed onto the stage.

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Brody stars as László Tóth, a Hungarian-born Jewish architect who emigrates to the U.S. with his wife Erzsébet after surviving the Holocaust. Working through poverty and indignity toward the “American dream”.

Pearce plays a mysterious wealthy client who gives him a life-changing contract, while Jones is Tóth’s wife.

Brody said he had felt “immediate kinship and understanding” for the character of Tóth due to the trajectory of his mother, the photographer Sylvia Plachy.

“She’s a wonderful photographer, but she’s also a Hungarian immigrant who fled Hungary in 1956 in the Hungarian Revolution. She was a refugee and emigrated to the United States, and much like László started again and lost their home and pursued a dream of being an artist,” he told the press conference.

“I understand a great deal about the repercussions of that on her life and her work as an artist, which I think is a wonderful parallel With László creations and how they evolved and how post war psychology influences your work in a creative manner and all other aspects of your life… this fiction feels very real to me, and that’s so important for me to embody a character and make him real, and for a film like this to not only represent the past, but remind us of the past and how so many things in our present we must learn from.”

The picture shot in Hungary and Italy in 2023 with Corbet opting to film using VistaVision cameras with the intention of having a 70mm release, to chime with the era of story.

Pearce said this made for a novel experience.

“I’ve never done a film where I’ve never done any ADR… we had to deal with the noisy camera, which personally, I found sort of invigorating and exciting,” he said.

“For those of us who have spanned the era of working on film and are now working in the digital realm, it’s really lovely to work with machines that you know are actually sort of working and have a sort of a time limit… there’s an organic process that that belongs there, and you feel like you’re part of that. Very quickly, you slip into what is most vital, which is our connection and relationship, not just with each other, but with Brady, and what Brady is giving to us and bringing to us every day.”

Actor and director Corbet, who cut his filmmaking teeth as an assistant director on Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, made his international debut at Venice in 2025 with The Childhood of a Leader, which also won the Luigi de Laurentiis award for best first film.

The Brutalist is Corbet’s third feature after Vox Lux, which starring Natalie Portman and Jude Law and also played at Venice.

Corbet co-wrote the screenplay for The Brutalist with Norwegian filmmaker and wife Mona Fastvold (The World to Come).

The crew included cinematographer Lol Crawley (White Noise), production designer Judy Becker (Brokeback Mountain), composer Daniel Blumberg (The World to Come) and costume designer Kate Forbes (Fair Play).

The movie is lead produced by Trevor Matthews and Nick Gordon for Brookstreet UK alongside Brian Young and Kaplan Morrison’s Andrew Morrison with Andrew Lauren and D.J. Gugenheim for Andrew Lauren Productions.

Focus Features acquired international rights to the film during the Berlinale.

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