Why epic period drama movie The Brutalist was shot on VistaVision

The Brutalist is one of the movies of the year and was shot almost entirely on VistaVision, a format last used in Hollywood in the 1960s. Writer-director Brady Corbet and editor Dávid Jancsó talk about this, Vince Clarke, Wagner, the responsible use of AI, architecture, and more.

From writer-director Brady Corbet comes the story of László Tóth, a Hungarian-Jewish architect who, after surviving the Holocaust, emigrates to the United States to begin a new life while awaiting the arrival of his wife, Erzsébet, trapped in Eastern Europe with their niece following the war.

The Golden Globe winning feature starring Adrien Brody (Tóth), Felicity Jones (Erzsébet) and Guy Pearce (as industrialist and benefactor Van Buren) is likely to feature highly at the Oscars where it would deservedly be judged film of the year. Its sprawling narrative, co-written by Corbet’s wife Mona Fastvold, spans over three decades and runs 215 minutes. It was shot almost entirely on celluloid film in and around Budapest standing in for Pennsylvania, for a remarkable $10m budget.

Here RedShark News talks with editor and regular Corbet collaborator Dávid Jancsó about aspects of the production. 

Editing brutally

For Jancsó, László Toth's monumental work in the film became the stylistic reference for how he thought about structuring the film's equally monumental runtime. 

“The architectural motifs were also mirrored in the editing style,” he explains. "The clean, geometric precision of brutalist architecture influenced the cutting patterns, with long, unbroken shots interspersed with sharp, abrupt cuts, creating a rhythm that reflected the tensions in László’s life."

It helped that the editor has a family member who studied Bauhaus architecture. “I was already predisposed to Laszlo's artistic vision. There’s a simplicity to Brutalism and so we wanted to stay bold in our cutting all the way through to connect the architecture with our film.”

Brutalist architecture came into fashion in the 1950s, among the reconstruction projects of the post-war era and in a style that was predominantly created by immigrants. It emphasises minimalist constructions showcasing bare elements like exposed concrete or brick, over decorative design. 

As Corbet puts it in the film’s production notes, “In scope and scale, Brutalist buildings are begging to be seen — but the people who designed or built them were fighting for their right to exist.”

Expansive VistaVision field of view

Adrien Brody & Alessandro Nivola in The Brutalist. Pic courtesy Lol Crawley, © Universal Pictures

The Brutalist was filmed on 35mm (2-perf, 3-perf, 4-perf and 8-perf) VistaVision, a format shot horizontally for a higher resolution large screen image.

Originated at Paramount Pictures in 1954 and employed by Alfred Hitchcock on classics including North by Northwest and Vertigo, VistaVision had become mostly obsolete in the 1960s, as CinemaScope and 70mm rose to prominence as dominant wide-screen formats. The last American production to film entirely in VistaVision was Marlon Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks in 1961. But the format was employed in international productions throughout the ‘70s and into the 2000s, on Nagisa Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses (1976), Shohei Imamura’s Vengeance is Mine (1979), and Kim-Jee Woon’s A Tale of Two Sisters (2003), while also being used for special-effects sequences in everything from the original Star Wars movies to Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things in 2023. 

Corbet and cinematographer Lol Crawley BSC were drawn to VistaVision both for its mid-century origins, and its expansive field of view, which they studied prior to production by analysing a sequence from Vertigo incorporating a wide expanse of the Golden Gate Bridge. 

“Its field of view is extraordinary — you could be right up against the side of a building with a 50mm lens on the camera, what you’d normally shoot a human face with, and you can see from the cement to the sky because the field of view is so immense,” says Corbet. “For architecture it’s great because you can be physically close to the structure you’re filming and experience all the details — you can see the minerality of the concrete and at the same time capture the entire building inside your frame.”

The drawbacks of shooting in VistaVision included very few cameras left in existence — Paul Thomas Anderson used some on his forthcoming feature The Battle of Baktan Cross after The Brutalist wrapped production — not to mention the overwhelming bulk and weight of the remaining cameras. 

“It’s a large format, and quite finicky, which requires technicians who know how to work with it,” says Corbet. “There’s still a culture of shooting on film in Hungary, unlike much of the rest of the world. For us this was a big coup and one of the major reasons why I wanted to film in Hungary again.” 

For scenes in the quarries of Carrara, Tuscany, where László and Van Buren travel to source marble, the filmmakers wanted to bring to life the devastating reach of capitalism into every corner of the globe. 

“Carrara for me is indicative of the way capitalism has been so harmful to the planet, so the landscape mirrors the characters’ interiority,” Corbet explains. “The whole movie is about my characters’ interiority, which is manifested in the spaces László is creating in the movie, and the spaces he inhabits.”

Processing, post-production and digital

Pic courtesy Lol Crawley, © Universal Pictures

Not quite all of The Brutalist was shot on VistaVision. An aerial shot of a train crash was captured digitally on Alexa processed with grain to blend into the film’s aesthetic. Parts of the epilogue were shot on Betacam to achieve an authentic 1980s look. All the material was scanned directly to 4K (and 6K for VistaVision) using a DFT Scanity scanner, resulting in 700TB of data. The film was developed and scanned at the Budapest NFI FilmLab, with the digital dailies processed through Post Office Films, a post-production company Jancsó co-founded over a decade ago. 

“When I started out editing I got really tired of having to cut in basements so I banded together with a couple of other editors and we formed a post-production company that now has expanded into dailies and DI,” Jancsó explains “It's become an institution in Hungary. And being a partial owner of it, we could get away with a lot more. I have very good relationships with the film lab here so we got an extremely good deal from them. I mean, they actually asked us not to ever mention the great deal that they gave us for this film because we got everything that you would for a 200 million dollar film budget.”

Jancsó’s deep knowledge of celluloid filmmaking helped Corbet and Crawley develop peace of mind during the film’s 18-month post-production process.

 “Very few people are as dialled into the analogue post-production process as David is,” commends Corbet. “David handled everything with expert gloves.”

All of editorial was performed in 4K. Finishing colorist Máté Ternyik applied a 'best light’ grade to the dailies, ensuring a high-quality visual reference during editing.  While the various formats were initially ingested at their native resolutions and aspect ratios, the final film was standardised to a 1.66:1 aspect ratio through a combination of aspect ratio adjustments and matte applications. However, the film’s release was not limited to digital formats. It was also recorded back to 65mm and 35mm film, with tailored masking applied for each specific output format. 

Pivotal conversation

For all the beautiful landscapes, and careful positioning of the camera to capture the scope of the architecture, the centrepiece of the story is a monologue from Van Buren to László over a post-dinner brandy. On screen the scene last about 10 minutes.

“That was the scene we went back to the most because that is the pivotal moment of the film. That is what gives you all the clues of what Van Buren is like,” Jancsó says. “It tells you why he's creating this institute, what’s the driving force behind these two characters, and it’s also why we've made this film. Whenever we touched a part of the film, we always went back to see what are the implications of that scene were compared to what comes before or what comes after.”

The previous dinner party scene shows László being grilled for his experiences in the war by guests who couldn’t be more unwittingly gauche if they’d tried.  “Very few people notice that the music we play in the background is by Wagner who, of course, is a totemic composer for the Nazis. Just having that music under László’s dialogue talking about his plight in in the Holocaust, while everyone else is oblivious to any sensitivities they are inflicting, felt pivotal for us too.”

Intermission 

Adrien Brody & Felicity Jones in The Brutalist. Pic courtesy Lol Crawley, © Universal Pictures

If you see this film in the cinema there will be a 15-minute intermission created to give breathing space and to hark back to theatre screening of the ‘50s and ‘60s. It’s a screened intermission too, in which the film still rolls (albeit blank) without the curtains closing.

“We knew the film was going to be long and since Brady and I are hardcore moviegoers we know it's good to allow the audience time to go out,” Jancsó says. “In my case, to have a cigarette. The length of the intermission was a question up until the very end. We discussed, five minutes, seven minutes, 10 minutes and ultimately landed with 15 primarily because that’s the length of a film reel. But we wanted to create an event out of this too. There was talk of having live music for the premiere during the intermission but that never happened. Editorially, the intermission marks a division between two parts of Laszlo's life.”

The film does not use on-screen titles for dates or places so viewers should listen out to auditory cues for changes in time period.

“If you pay attention, a radio that you hear in the background indicates an amount of time has passed. But we didn't want to overdo this either. We were trying to retain the mystery, for you to lean forward and keep being engaged. You should be asking what just happened? and where are we? If certain time has passed, you will find your cue of where we are and even if you don't, there's a scene right after where you will. Even if this approach disengages you for a second, you will be pulled back in. We trust the audience to understand.

“We knew we were making a long film and were very conscious of the pacing of the whole film. The music [by British experimentalist Daniel Blumberg] was recorded prior to filming and was played back on set. So, we’d already sort of choreographed scenes to the music.”

The film ends in an epilogue set in 1980. To create the sound of this new era, Blumberg travelled to New York to collaborate with Vince Clarke of ’80s synthpop fame (Depeche Mode, Yaz, Erasure). Peter Walsh mixed the score and co-produced with Blumberg.

Cine literate layers 

Writer-Director Brady Corbet on set in Budapest. Pic: Marius Captare

Consciously or not the film's ambitious, single-minded protagonist and narrative arc has echoes of Citizen Kane though this was one of many references for the cinephile filmmakers. 

“Brady is extremely literate in film history and I’m also a film buff. I come from a filmmaker background too. That intrinsically affected how we were going to treat this film.”

Jancsó is the son of lauded filmmaker Miklós Jancsó, who achieved international prominence in the 1960s for his historical allegories featuring long-sequence shots; his mother, Zsuzsa Csákány, edited 1981’s Best Foreign Language Oscar-winning film Mephisto. 
 
“We took from the nouvelle vague and Italian realism (Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist, “with memories and flashbacks woven seamlessly into the present”) and Citizen Kane, The Godfather (“the ability to slowly build tension within quiet, emotionally charged scenes”) and even JFK. We tried to be cognisant about these elements in the film but also allowed the film to breathe on its own.”

Subtle and sensitive use of AI 

Much of the film’s dialogue is in Hungarian, the filmmakers went to great lengths to make it as accurate to a native speaker as possible. This included judicious use of AI from the Ukrainian specialist Respeecher.

Jancsó explains, “I am a native Hungarian speaker and I know that it is one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce. Even with Adrien's Hungarian background - (Brody’s mother is a Hungarian refugee who emigrated to the U.S in 1956) - it's not that simple. It’s an extremely unique language. We coached [Brody and Felicity Jones] and they did a fabulous job but we also wanted to perfect it so that not even locals will spot any difference.”

Tweaks were needed to enhance specific letters of their vocal sounds. “If you’re coming from the Anglo-Saxon world certain sounds can be particularly hard to grasp. We first tried to ADR these harder elements with the actors. Then we tried to ADR them completely with other actors but that just didn’t work. So we looked for other options of how to enhance it.”

Brody and Jones were fully onboard with the process guided by Respeecher which started with recording their voices to drive the AI Hungarian delivery. Jancsó also fed his voice into the AI model to finesse the tricky dialect.

“Most of their Hungarian dialogue has a part of me talking in there. We were very careful about keeping their performances. It's mainly just replacing letters here and there. You can do this in ProTools yourself, but we had so much dialogue in Hungarian that we really needed to speed up the process otherwise we'd still be in post.”

GenAI is also used right at the end of the film in a sequence at the Venice Biennale to conjure a series of architectural drawings and finished buildings in the style of the fictional architect.  The overall effect is so impressive you might find yourself headed to Wikipedia to double check that László Tóth existed.

“It is controversial in the industry to talk about AI, but it shouldn't be,” he acknowledges. “We should be having a very open discussion about what tools AI can provide us with. There’s nothing in the film using AI that hasn't been done before. It just makes the process a lot faster. We use AI to create these tiny little details that we didn't have the money or the time to shoot.”

Architecture and filmmaking side by side

Lol Crawley BSC on set. Pic: Bence Szemerey

The film is about many things, including building a building, but it’s also a movie about making a movie, according to Corbet. “Architecture and filmmaking have a lot in common because it takes roughly the same amount of people to construct a building or make a movie. The Brutalist for me was a way of talking about the more bureaucratic aspect of the artistic process.”

Jancsó concurs, adding, “This is a story of a struggling artist, which you could say is Brady's story too, especially with his experiences on [2018’s musical drama] Vox Lux. He and Mona succeeded in creating a universal character. This is not necessarily just an American story, it's a global story. This is not just an American epic, this happens to immigrants in Europe and Asia in Africa and Australia. It’s about what it is to be an immigrant and what it is to try to be a part of a society that just does not accept you.”