Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic What compels a Catholic-school-educated millennial ex-actor born in Scottsdale, Arizona, to devote seven years to a film about the tribulations of a postwar Hungarian-Jewish \u00e9migr\u00e9 architect?\u00a0This is the question foremost in my mind when I meet Brady Corbet, 36, on a concrete-grey day in a hotel suite in central London. He greets me warmly and talks expansively, but his dark glasses and beanie stay on, giving the impression of someone both approachable and faintly guarded \u2014 an open book just out of reach.Certainly, Corbet\u2019s CV suggests an enigma. Following early appearances as a cherubic child actor in TV sitcoms and serials, his 2007-14 film acting credits read like a who\u2019s who of uncompromising European auteurs: Lars von Trier, Michael Haneke, Ruben \u00d6stlund, Bertrand Bonello. This echt art-house exposure clearly rubbed off on the young thesp. He began writing, made a short film and in 2015 delivered his first feature as director.A light, whimsical American indie of the Sundance kind? Not for Corbet. Instead, The Childhood of a Leader was a glowering account of a fictitious proto-fascist\u2019s formative years in interwar Europe. It dripped with \u201cgrandeur both classical, or mock-classical, and ferocious\u201d, as the FT\u2019s Nigel Andrews put it. Europe\u2019s most august cinematic institutions took notice. The Venice Film Festival awarded him the Lion of the Future award and invited him back in 2018 to present Vox Lux, which potently mixed Natalie Portman as a Gaga-esque pop diva, a beachside terrorist attack and a school shooting.Corbet\u2019s Oscar-tipped new film The Brutalist is strong meat too, its title not just an allusion to the architectural style purveyed by its protagonist but a double entendre. Everything about the film is hefty, from its three-and-a-half-hour\u00a0run-time and maximalist VistaVision format to its decades-spanning timeline and bitter interrogation of the American dream. Yet its budget was an extremely modest $9.6mn and it was shot without studio backing in just 34 days. It has drawn comparisons to There Will Be Blood and Citizen Kane and, earlier this month, its status as an Academy Awards frontrunner was cemented with three major wins at the Golden Globes.\u00a0A lot of postwar and Holocaust dramas are inadvertently dehumanising in portraying victims of extreme trauma as if they\u2019re angels\u2019\u2009I begin by asking Corbet: why architecture? \u201cBecause of how similar the process of making a movie is to building a building,\u201d he says. \u201cIt requires the same amount of personnel, roughly it\u2019s about 250 people to make a movie and 250 people to build a building of scale. My uncle is an architect, and whenever we chat, we have a lot of the same gripes and experiences\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009so this was a way of my wife [Norwegian filmmaker Mona Fastvold] and I writing something that we were extremely familiar with.\u201dAdrien Brody stars as L\u00e1szl\u00f3 T\u00f3th, a Holocaust survivor who flees war-scarred Hungary for the US in 1947, settling initially in Philadelphia. His story shares biographical details with real-life luminaries such as Marcel Breuer and L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Moholy-Nagy, but T\u00f3th is a fictional figure. As with Corbet\u2019s previous films, The Brutalist is an imagined history.\u201cI find it to be a slightly more honest contract with the viewer,\u201d he explains. \u201cI struggle with biopics because when you have two characters talking in bed, you know that no one was present for that conversation. Once you start writing, it all becomes fiction. So it\u2019s a way of evoking real stories, people and happenings, but it\u2019s not mired in: is this accurate?\u201dWatching Brody embody an artistically gifted Holocaust survivor, it is impossible not to be transported back to Roman Polanski\u2019s The Pianist, for which Brody won the Best Actor Oscar in 2003. Corbet insists that this was not a factor in casting Brody, though it did help inform his performance. \u201cAdrien says he spent so much time with [Holocaust] survivors when he was preparing for The Pianist that it was easy for him to draw from that experience.\u201dBrody\u2019s connection to the material ran deep. His Budapest-born mother Sylvia Plachy, a well-regarded photographer, fled the Hungarian revolution of 1956 as a teenager. \u201cAdrien especially was able to bring so many mannerisms of his grandfather,\u201d Corbet says. \u201cAnd a sort of central European stubbornness \u2014 things that he was able to tap into with good humour and affection.\u201d Both men were determined not to make this just another portrait of saintly immigrant suffering. \u201cL\u00e1szl\u00f3 T\u00f3th was written to be something of a bastard,\u201d Corbet says. \u201cI thought it was important to not be patronising when dealing with the immigrant experience. A lot of postwar and Holocaust dramas are inadvertently dehumanising in portraying victims of extreme trauma as if they\u2019re angels\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009L\u00e1szl\u00f3 is stubborn. He loves his wife but he\u2019s also a bit of a philanderer. All of these things make him much more human. For me, it\u2019s a more dignified portrayal of an immigrant.\u201d\u00a0For Brody and Felicity Jones, who plays L\u00e1szl\u00f3\u2019s physically compromised but unshrinking wife Erzs\u00e9bet, the film presented a considerable linguistic challenge as well as an acting one. Both speak in thick accents and deliver long tracts in Hungarian, a notoriously difficult language to master. Even Guy Pearce, playing patrician industrialist Harrison Van Buren, who becomes T\u00f3th\u2019s exacting patron, did not get off lightly.\u00a0\u201cYeah, Guy\u2019s monologue at the Christmas party is 11 pages or something,\u201d notes Corbet with some relish.Does he enjoy torturing his actors? \u201cDefinitely not,\u201d the director chuckles. \u201cBut you know what I do love? When you start out the day and it feels like there\u2019s no way that we can possibly land on our feet. And then, when you do, it\u2019s such a rewarding experience.\u201dHe cites a climactic scene in which Erzs\u00e9bet confronts the wider Van Buren clan at dinner. \u201cThat took an entire magazine of film. We would shoot from the very nose to the tail every time we did a take. There was so much dialogue and a stunt in the middle of the shot. There are 1,001 things that can go wrong and did go wrong, frequently. But when suddenly all of the dominoes get knocked down, it\u2019s a really rewarding feeling for everyone.\u201dI\u2019m concerned for America, for western Europe, for the world. I did not anticipate seeing such blatant neo-fascist rhetoric becoming so normalised\u2019Such moments of triumph were needed during an unusually demanding shoot in Hungary and Italy using cumbersome 1950s VistaVision cameras. For Corbet, who spent seven years developing and making the movie, it was clearly a labour of love.\u00a0But why? Why was an American so compelled to tell this difficult tale of European striving?\u00a0\u201cI\u2019ve spent about as much of my life in Europe as I have in the US,\u201d he says. \u201cMy wife is Norwegian, we had our daughter in Oslo. I\u2019ve lived in France, Norway, Hungary, Belgium \u2014 all over the place. And I moved around so much as a kid that I don\u2019t really feel that I belong to anywhere.\u201dDoes he have any Jewish background? \u201cVery distant Ashkenazi. But I grew up going to a Catholic school in Colorado. My mother\u2019s side is a mix of eastern European and Irish Catholic. My father\u2019s, I don\u2019t know. I don\u2019t have a relationship with him. So that\u2019s the other thing in terms of not feeling like I\u2019m from somewhere.\u201dThe closest place to home is New York: \u201cI\u2019ve at least had a foot there since I was 17.\u201d He, Fastvold and their 10-year-old daughter now live in Brooklyn. Still, national pride is \u201cnot something I relate to at all\u201d.\u00a0National pride may be even harder to muster of late for someone sensitive to the plight of immigrants, given the incoming US administration\u2019s promise of \u201cthe largest deportation operation in American history\u201d. How does he feel about a second Trump term?\u201cI wish I could say that I was at all surprised about the results of the [US presidential] election,\u201d he says. \u201cBut I was also in France this summer when the [far-right] Rassemblement National was leading in the polls and made a lot of headway. They lost the battle but probably not the war. So I\u2019m concerned for America, I\u2019m concerned for western Europe, I\u2019m concerned for the world. I did not anticipate seeing such blatant neo-fascist rhetoric becoming normalised to the degree that it\u2019s become.\u201dBut he adds that leftwing Americans \u201chave some real soul-searching to do\u201d. And here he includes himself as a filmmaker. \u201cWe have a problem with representation that no one\u2019s really talking about\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009I can\u2019t think of a single portrayal of a character that\u2019s a far-right voter\/thinker that\u2019s in any way a dignified portrayal, and that\u2019s quite disturbing.\u201dCan he see himself making a film about a sympathetic rightwinger? \u201cI absolutely can. I think it\u2019d be very difficult, but it\u2019s really on my mind.\u201d\u00a0One step in that direction might be Ann Lee, a film about conservative Christians that he and Fastvold have written for her to direct. \u201cIt\u2019s about the origin of the Shakers, emigrating from Manchester to upstate New York in the 18th century,\u201d he says. The twist? It\u2019s a musical. \u201cPeople think of the Shakers as being like the Amish, but what\u2019s so fascinating is that they worship through ecstatic dancing and song . . . So we were like: it has to be a musical.\u201dHe is also embarking on his next directorial project, \u201cabout the history of the industrial wine complex in California.\u201d It seems safe to assume that it will not be a fruity romp through the vineyards of Napa Valley.\u00a0I wonder if he ever dreams about making small, unambitious indie movies. \u201cNo, not really,\u201d he shrugs. \u201cBecause it\u2019s so painful and difficult to make any movie, even a bad one. So you might as well at least strive to make a good one.\u201d\u2018The Brutalist\u2019 is in UK cinemas from January 24 and in US cinemas nowFind out about our latest stories first \u2014 follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic What compels a Catholic-school-educated millennial ex-actor born in Scottsdale, Arizona, to devote seven years to a film about the tribulations of a postwar Hungarian-Jewish \u00e9migr\u00e9 architect?\u00a0This is the question foremost in my mind when I meet Brady Corbet, 36, on a concrete-grey day in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":170579,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-170578","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170578","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=170578"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170578\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":170580,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/170578\/revisions\/170580"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/170579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=170578"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=170578"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=170578"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}