How The Brutalist Director Brady Corbet Made a Modern-Day Epic For Just $10 Million

The Brutalist is a film that announces itself. Even before entering the theater, the three-and-a-half hour runtime—with intermission—is a statement. Its dizzying opening images unfold fast, Daniel Blumberg’s musical score blares, and when the camera at last settles on the Statue of Liberty, framed upside down and then sideways, there can be little doubt about director Brady Corbet’s intentions. This is epic cinema of an old tradition, placing itself squarely in a long lineage of novelistic American portraiture onscreen. Greed, Gone With the Wind, East of Eden, The Godfather, Reds, Once Upon a Time in America, Malcolm X, and There Will Be Blood all come to mind. And when the end credits at last unspool, you’ll be forgiven for thinking its production was as grand and lavish as the film itself. And then you’ll learn it was made for only $10 million.

“I definitely knew that the movie was not possible to make for less than $8 million,” says Corbet, who directed the film and co-wrote it with his partner, Mona Fastvold. For such a lengthy period movie, shot on film, spanning decades and vast expanses of geography, to even think it could be brought in for a sum so low almost sounds fanciful. In 2018, when Corbet was first trying to get The Brutalist off the ground, the budget tabulations were around $28 million. “The line producer was like, ‘I’m being conservative, you know?’” Corbet recalls. “I was just like, ‘That's bullshit. I mean, that's such fucking bullshit. We don't need to make this thing look like Sweeney Todd.’”

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