Brutally Dishonest
The beleaguered American film industry and its discontents
The Present
The Brutalist is rare: a nearly four-hour-long movie that appeals to both the pretentious aesthetes of Film Twitter and the middlebrow tastemakers of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Just one bite of this veritable layer cake gives you every Big Theme known to…well, not man, but certainly postwar Western culture.
It’s epic! It’s a period piece! It’s about the Holocaust! It’s about Israel! It’s about being an artist in a crudely capitalist society! It’s about the quixotic pursuit of the American Dream! It’s about the travails of being a man and holding a family together! Strangely, though, The Brutalist only buckles slightly under the anxiety of influence. It’s a very good movie, all things considered, and rarely boring.
Most surprisingly of all, its director, Brady Corbet (rhymes with “sorbet”), is a thirty-six-year-old American. What kind of investor gives a thirty-six-year-old American filmmaker a blank check to make a sweeping epic with dubious commercial prospects, especially after the death of Hollywood? Sure, there was Beau is Afraid in 2023, directed by Ari Aster—I’ve admittedly never seen it—but that was a carrot-on-a-stick, a studio rewarding an auteur for a couple of commercially successful horror projects. Corbet has had no such mainstream successes.
It all becomes a lot easier to understand when you realize that Corbet has strong ties to Europe. His wife is Norwegian, he’s acted in films by Michael Haneke, Ruben Östlund, Lars von Trier, and Mia Hansen-Løve, and indeed, The Brutalist was a co-production of the U.S., the U.K., and Hungary. But even with European backers, par for course in the rarefied world of arthouse cinema, Corbet was not strictly basking in luxury. With a paltry $10 million budget and 34-day shooting schedule, this was a formidable exercise in cinematic frugality.
[SPOILERS to follow for The Brutalist and There Will Be Blood.]
The Brutalist, which I saw in theaters a few weeks ago, is not quite among my favorite films of the year—those honors would go to Anora and Furiosa—but I was still impressed by it.
Adrien Brody did a commendable job as architect László Tóth; he deserves a second Oscar. Some reviewers I trust implied Felicity Jones gave a weak performance as László’s wife, Erzsébet, but I thought she was great, too. And Corbet’s largely handheld camerawork is studied and precise. In the end, I didn’t have to imagine a counterfactual in which Corbet had time for more sophisticated setups. The movie largely works, the low budget keeps it humble, and I even enjoyed the occasional collages of archival footage that could’ve been ripped from an Adam Curtis documentary. You can feel the homages paid to the great masters, and Corbet doesn’t seem particularly interested in architecture per se (we’ll get to that later), but I was fully engaged throughout.
I have to say I prefer The Brutalist to Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. The two films share a few similarities—both are strenuous attempts to emulate Kubrick and Welles, though Corbet’s film is richly novelistic where Anderson’s is pretentiously elemental. Guy Pearce plays a testy industrialist named “Harrison Lee Van Buren” who is essentially a rejiggered Daniel Plainview, with man-on-man rape in the place of bowling-pin murder. And yet Van Buren’s gratuitous “big moment” feels a little more earned than Plainview’s, the latter merely a culmination of what we already knew about the character rather than an additional dimension. I ultimately think Corbet succeeded more than Anderson did in this “classical” “epic” mode, bringing more complexity and depth to the table.
The Brutalist is not without flaws. Oddly for a movie this long, some plot points feel rushed, radically reshaping our understanding of certain characters all too hastily: László’s cousin falsely accusing him of making a pass at his wife, the sudden deaths of two workers during the construction of László’s magnum opus, and to a lesser extent, the much-discussed rape of László by Harrison Lee Van Buren. But all is forgiven. This is a dying gasp of “art for art’s sake,” majestic and far-reaching in the age of TikTok hyper-individualism, made by a filmmaker who cites novelists like W.G. Sebald and Robert Musil as influences in interviews. Beyond his self-confidence and ambition, Corbet also comes across as an enormously likable person.
The Past and Future
I’ve recently started to wonder if we might see another Corbet ever again. Film is to art as Formula One is to sport: it’s the province of the rich and determined. Just look at the grid of drivers—Lance Stroll is the son of a billionaire and part-owner of Aston Martin’s racing team; Carlos Sainz Jr.’s father was a two-time World Rally champion; Lewis Hamilton’s middle-class father worked four jobs to ensure his son was able to pursue his dreams. The price of equipment, race entry fees, travels to competitions around the world, training, and the need for a large support system are collectively ridiculous. Hollywood’s “nepo baby” discourse brings to mind similarly insuperable barriers to entry.
What is the state of the American film industry in 2025? The rise of streaming, corporate mergers, and shifting audience preferences have made feature films like The Brutalist very difficult to realize. Corbet would be the first to acknowledge these factors. Further, marshaling a team of cameramen, sound recordists, editors, VFX artists, touchy actors, and others—all carrying expensive equipment and all of whom must be paid if the filmmaker is serious about their craft—is a doozy. Add location permits, and reshoots, and a thousand-plus other expenses, and you start to understand why people abandon this industry just as often as they blindly, stubbornly stick with it. The Harper’s article I linked to earlier paints a very bleak future for anything other than the most mainstream of American film and TV productions.
“What about Robert Rodriguez and Kevin Smith?” you might ask. “They had no connections,” or “They maxed out their credit cards to make Clerks and El Mariachi,” you might say. Rodriguez and Smith had great returns on their investments thanks to the nineties’ booming home video market (which Ben Affleck and Matt Damon have acknowledged over and over again), which helped sustain a thriving independent film culture and slightly more meritocratic recognition of emerging talent. No more.
It’s an open secret that a lot of entry-level entertainment industry professionals are A) subsidized by their parents as they work low-paying gigs or B) have parents already in the industry who make the red tape substantially easier to cut. In the first category, we have…well, it’s not entirely clear, for obvious reasons, but Chloé Zhao, Sean Durkin, Emerald Fennell, and the Safdie brothers are probably in it. In the second category, we have Gia Coppola, Oz Perkins, and Zoë Kravitz, among others. I’ve spent a lot of time around film students and cinephiles, and I’ve met numerous people in both categories A) and B); as for myself, I once harbored dreams of becoming a filmmaker, but for reasons which should be clear by now, I’ve mostly written them off.
“I hate to break it to you but this is why the film industry is so brutal,” a Reddit commenter states on an /r/Filmmakers thread titled “It is hard to compete with rich people.” “People that can afford not to have a paycheck can stay in the industry indefinitely. Everyone else will be clawing to make a living.”
How, then, did Brady Corbet make this movie at the (relatively) young age of 36? By being a former child actor—an edge case of category B). Granted, Corbet doesn’t have the glitzy, nepotistic background of some of his contemporaries: he was raised in Colorado by a single mom who worked in the mortgage industry. But he was discovered by a local casting “hub” at a young age, dispatched to star in future classics like Mysterious Skin and Funny Games, and was able to build up considerable career capital before making his auspicious directorial debut with The Childhood of a Leader at the age of 27. That kind of trajectory is totally out of reach for many young aspiring filmmakers today. Corbet has suffered for his art, to be sure—he recently stated on Marc Maron’s podcast that he had made zero dollars from The Brutalist, and had only recently directed three ads in Portugal to help pay the bills. “I’ve spoken to many filmmakers that have the films that are nominated this year that can’t pay their rent,” he went on to say during the same conversation. “I mean, that’s a real thing.”
Corbet talks a big game about artistic integrity, so it initially seemed puzzling that he cut corners by using artificial intelligence on The Brutalist—to not only modify the Hungarian accents of Brody and Jones, but also (allegedly) to generate architectural drawings in a brutalist style. It’s the closest thing to a controversy this film has had this awards season, and many people are justly upset about it. This was a movie supposedly about the struggles of an artist in the modern world—granted, it was also about ten other things, but it paid a great deal of lip service to László Tóth’s uncompromising, totalizing architectural vision. Why would Corbet deign to use AI in service of that vision? How could that be anything but disrespectful to his own themes?
The AI controversy added to the accusations of hollowness from the film’s detractors—indeed, Corbet didn’t really seem to care much about brutalism as an architectural style, or perhaps even architecture at all. Not any more than Ayn Rand did, at least. “The architecture world hates The Brutalist,” architect Oliver Wainwright wrote in The Guardian, accusing Corbet of travestying the work of the real-life modernist architect Marcel Breuer. Three prominent American architecture critics recorded a podcast series called “Why the Brutalist Is a Terrible Movie.” (I won’t paraphrase too much—there’s a ton of detail to their criticisms, which you can discover for yourself.)
The scope of The Brutalist’s AI use is somewhat unclear. The film’s editor, Dávid Janscó, recently revealed that AI was used to “tweak” Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones’s Hungarian accents. “I am a native Hungarian speaker and I know that it is one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce,” Janscó said. “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.” Janscó stated that they employed AI after other non-AI methods, such as ADR, failed. He stressed that the team was “very careful” about preserving the integrity of Brody and Jones’s performances. In one sense, Janscó didn’t do anything “new”—fixing acting performances post hoc has always been a thing, and Brody noted it was “quite a typical post-production process”—but it’s not hard to see why many cinephiles considered it a cheat. AI is a bit of a boogeyman right now.
After this news broke, Film Twitter unearthed a a 2022 interview with Brutalist production designer Judy Becker from Filmmaker magazine, revealing that architecture consultant Griffin Frazen “used Midjourney ‘to create three Brutalist buildings quite quickly’ by using references to key figures in the movement along with other architectural terms.”
After some furor, Corbet defended this use of AI in a statement to Deadline:
Additional generative AI usage is also utilized to conjure a series of architectural blueprints and finished buildings in the film’s closing sequence, to which Corbet says: “Judy Becker and her team did not use AI to create or render any of the buildings. All images were hand-drawn by artists. To clarify, in the memorial video featured in the background of a shot, our editorial team created pictures intentionally designed to look like poor digital renderings circa 1980.”
“The Brutalist is a film about human complexity, and every aspect of its creation was driven by human effort, creativity, and collaboration. We are incredibly proud of our team and what they’ve accomplished here.”
Setting aside artistic concerns, generative AI is trained on unlicensed, copyrighted work, and I find that immensely frustrating and unethical. George Miller used AI on Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga to gradually shift a child actor’s face (as young Furiosa) into Anya Taylor-Joy’s, but that wasn’t generative. The AI used to create these “poor digital renderings” Corbet referred to, by contrast, was undoubtedly trained on similar images and is not fair use.
I almost want to be annoyed—I’ve already written about some of generative AI’s ills. But in light of Corbet’s comments on how nearly impossible it is to pony up the funds to make a film like this, you almost want to have pity for him. Can we fault Corbet for resorting to a controversial new technology to save money?
At the end of the day, The Brutalist is original, and Corbet and his wife, Mona Fastvold, clearly toiled over their screenplay: the indexical significance of the human creator is there, and film is all the more powerful for it. And current-day LLMs, of course, cannot create a festival-caliber feature film from scratch.
Should that become possible one day, we should be deeply concerned. When Paul Schrader excitedly wrote on Facebook about how he was able to generate “good,” “original,” and “fleshed out” ideas for Paul Schrader films using ChatGPT, it’s hard not to be worried about the future of human artistic output. Having AI automate all higher-order imagination would be a catastrophe for cultural production and contribute to our gradual disempowerment. It would also serve as a spiritual death for the arts.
In the meantime, can we liberate a generation of working- and middle-class artists with AI? These conversations don’t take precedence over the mass theft of unlicensed work. But it will be an interesting discussion to have one day, if we’re still able to have it.
Could we see ten, twenty, fifty new visionaries—Apichatpong Weerasethakuls, Leos Caraxes, Lynne Ramsays—unbound by the studio system’s close-mindedness or the caprices of independent financiers? Filming in real life, on ultra-low budgets, but cutting post-production costs dramatically using AI and attaining previously unattainable nexuses of space, time, light, and sound?
Film is possibly the most expensive artistic medium, and AI could either kill it or offer it deliverance.