‘The Brutalist’ Director Brady Corbet on Making His 215-Minute 70mm Epic and Including an Intermission
Brady Corbet, the director of “The Brutalist,” is still trying to figure out the best way to deliver the print for his film to the Venice Film Festival, where it will debut next month. That’s because the epic 215-minute story of a Holocaust survivor forging a new life in America will be shown in 70mm, which means that all 26 reels of film will need to travel in four Pelican cases from Los Angeles to Italy, weighing in at approximately 300 pounds.
“We may have to buy a couple of plane tickets,” he said, shortly after Venice unveiled its lineup. “We have to figure out the best way to get it through customs in order to hand deliver it in time.”
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But Corbet has been resisting the digital tide for years, having shot his two previous films, “Vox Lux” and “The Childhood of a Leader,” on celluloid. That’s become something of a rarity as the industry has moved towards sleeker, cheaper digital cameras. And it’s a complete anomaly in the case of 70mm, which may be experiencing a renaissance on big studio movies like Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” and Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part Two,” but is rarely, if ever, an option for independent filmmakers like Corbet. But when he first started planning the movie seven years ago with his co-writer and wife Mona Fastvold, Corbet felt that the format was perfect for a story that begins in World War II and concludes in the 1980s — with a substantial chunk of it taking place in the 1950s. That was an era when classic Hollywood productions like “Vertigo,” “North By Northwest,” “The Ten Commandments,” “White Christmas” and “The Robe” were routinely filmed in VistaVision, CinemaScope and other widescreen formats.
“It just seemed like the best way to access that period was to shoot on something that was engineered in that same decade,” Corbet said. “But since our film is nearly the length of two films, it required double the film stock. It was a labor-intensive process that required us to really sharpen our pencils and try to figure out a way to do this cost-effectively.”
“The Brutalist,” which was photographed on VistaVision, pays tribute to that time by including a 15-minute intermission, a common feature of movies that approached or exceeded the 3-hour mark. But things have changed in the intervening decades. Last year, filmmakers like Martin Scorsese balked when theaters inserted intermissions into sprawling films like “Killers of the Flower Moon,” complaining they ruined his vision. But Corbet says he wanted viewers to have a chance to stretch their legs.
“I like the idea of them,” he says. “It gives everyone time to reset and no one has to stress about missing a scene to run to the bathroom, which is a legitimate concern on longer films. I would describe it as a rolling intermission. The movie doesn’t stop exactly. There will be images and sound and there is a timer to let the audience know how much time is left.”
The producers of “The Brutalist’ didn’t balk at Corbet’s 70mm ambitions and by working closely with companies like Kodak they were able to find ways to economize without sacrificing quality. Ultimately, finishing the movie on 70mm amounted to about 1% of the film’s budget, which, for context, is roughly the equivalent of what most films budget to take care of cast perks and other assorted above the line expenditures.
“I really believe that the future of theatrical exhibition is large format,” Corbet says. “You need to event-ize moviegoing so it feels like a night out. You need to get something special, so it feels worth it to spend $20 or $25 on a movie ticket. I want to send a message to the filmmaking community that large format is available to them even on an independent film.”
Corbet likens the difference between 70mm and digital photography to seeing Michelangelo’s David in marble or glancing at a picture of the famous statue.
“It feels grander and more accurate to the color that a director and colorist and all the engineers are working to achieve,” Corbet says. “It’s the most accurate representation of the film as a final product. You have better definition and color separation between the foreground and the background — it almost creates the impression of an image that is leaping out of the frame.”
Once something only the wonkiest cinephiles even knew about, 70mm has entered the public square in recent years thanks to evangelists like Paul Thomas Anderson, Villeneuve and Nolan. In the case of “Dune: Part Two” and “Oppenheimer,” 70mm screenings quickly sold out, leading theaters to add showings, and fans crossing state lines to see the movies in the directors’ preferred format.
“For a long time a lot of producers were able to make the case that audiences couldn’t see the difference,” Corbet notes. “Well, audiences are a lot smarter than people give them credit for. They’re so much more aware of the process than they were 50 years ago.”
Programmers at Venice have worked with “The Brutalist” team to screen the film in 70mm, and Corbet hopes that other festivals this fall will showcase it in the format. The movie, which stars Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones and Guy Pearce, has been building buzz ahead of its premiere through select industry screenings. CAA will be selling domestic theatrical distribution rights and the hope is to show the picture on the approximately 100 theaters that are capable of screening 70mm. That may mean shelling out for more plane seats to carry those massive prints of “The Brutalist” to their next destination, but it’s a celluloid sacrifice that Corbet is happy to make.
“Bringing a movie to the screen is so profoundly difficult and painful,” he says. “There are more sleepless nights than you can count and so many possibilities for things to go wrong. You’re driving a bus up a treacherous hill. But at the end of the journey, it’s nice to have something tangible to show for it. And there’s nothing more tangible than 300 pounds of footage. It feels better than having it end up as a QuickTime file.”
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