Adrien Brody reveals 'personal connection' to 3½-hour epic 'The Brutalist'

NEW YORK – Adrien Brody is back with a career-best performance.

Twenty-two years after his Oscar-winning turn in “The Pianist,” the 51-year-old actor could very well pick up a second golden statue for his towering work in “The Brutalist,” which bowed at New York Film Festival Saturday. The haunting historical epic clocks in at 3 ½ hours long (with a 15-minute intermission), as it traces a Hungarian-Jewish architect named László Tóth (Brody) who flees to America after World War II and lands in rural Pennsylvania. He struggles to find work that’s worthy of his singular talent, until he meets a wealthy tycoon (Guy Pearce) who commissions him to design and build a lavish community center.

The film is an astonishing excavation of the dark heart of America, showing how people leech off the creativity and cultures of immigrants, but rarely love them in return. Speaking to reporters after an early morning screening, Brody opened up about his “personal connection” to the material: His mom, photographer Sylvia Plachy, is also a Hungarian immigrant.

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“The journey of my grandparents was not dissimilar to this,” Brody explained. As a girl, Plachy and her family fled Budapest during the Hungarian Revolution and took refuge in Austria, before moving to New York in 1958. Like László, her parents had “wonderful jobs and a beautiful home” back in Hungary, but were “starting fresh and essentially impoverished” when they arrived in the U.S.

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“It’s a sacrifice that I’ve never taken for granted,” Brody said. “To be honored with the opportunity to embody that journey that does not only reflect something personal to my ancestors, but to so many people, and the complexity of coming to America as an immigrant – all of these things are so meaningful. I just feel very fortunate to be here.”

“Brutalist” is directed by Brady Corbet (“Vox Lux”) and co-written by Mona Fastvold (“The World to Come”), who drew from a variety of real-life architects such as Marcel Breuer, Louis Kahn and Paul Rudolph as they crafted the character of László. Corbet wasn’t interested in making a biopic of any one person.

“It’s a way of accessing the past without having to pay tribute to someone’s life rights,” the filmmaker said. “There’s a way of evoking the era where you’re less of a slave to those details. And I also think for viewers, it just gets them out of their head, so they’re not going, ‘Is this how it really went down?’ ”

Although the story is massive in scope – spanning multiple decades and continents – the ambitious film was made for a shockingly thrifty $10 million. During the post-screening Q&A, Corbet discussed how he balanced “minimalism and maximalism” through Daniel Blumberg’s arresting score and Judy Becker’s lofty yet severe set designs. Brody and Felicity Jones, who plays László‘s wife, also shared how they mastered Hungarian accents and dialogue.

“My grandparents had very thick accents, not dissimilar to my character’s,” Brody said. “I was steeped in it through my whole childhood. … I remember very clearly the sound and rhythm of speaking beyond the dialect, and I think it was very helpful for me.”

Following the movie's critically lauded debut at Venice Film Festival, where it won best director, “Brutalist” is now shaping up to be a major awards season player in categories such as best picture, actor and supporting actor (Pearce, a deliciously funny yet terrifying scene-stealer).

The film will be released in theaters Dec. 20.