Brady Corbet is nearing the conclusion of a seemingly interminable press schedule for his soon-to-be Oscar-winning opus The Brutalist – much to his relief. “The first two months felt very familiar, and then the following three to four [have been] another story,” he quips, gratefully handed a cup of what looks like strong black coffee by an out-of-shot publicist. “I’m starting to run out of gas for sure. The film is grappling with such heavy themes that every conversation is a very intense one that requires real focus. Then of course I’m just a little bit sick of the sound of my own voice.”

Success comes at a price, after all, and the actor-turned-visionary filmmaker has found plenty of that with his third full-length picture. Still, Corbet, a breezily concise and piercingly friendly conversationalist, emits an attentive radiance when we catch up on a sour Tuesday morning towards January’s climax. We begin with his somewhat unconventional transition from childhood thespian to one of his generation’s most decorated New Wave American directors. He was a cinephile before he could spell such a sobriquet, and just six years old when he found his way into an audition for his own debut acting role. “Prior to the way that casting is done nowadays – online – there used to be these [casting] hubs around North America,” he remembers, bouncing freely down memory lane with a nostalgic grin. “In Florida, Texas, or in my case Colorado. And whenever there was a movie that was looking for an unknown actor they would reach out to these regional agencies. It just so happened that I moved to a small town in Colorado with a population of 10,000 people, and a family member of mine suggested that I go to audition for a film that was being advertised in the local paper.”

Although he didn’t get that first role, a young Corbet reached the later stages of the process, and so – somewhat serendipitously – emerged with both a manager and an agent. An only child to a single mother, she was, at first, hesitant about professionalising her boy’s burgeoning flair for the craft. “She was initially a little bit nervous,” he says. “It was one thing for it to be an extracurricular activity like [being in a] swim team or a band, but when it was something that was a little bit more real than that… I think she was like, ‘Look, you can do this if you want to, but just do the things that you actually want to do.’ Luckily I had her as a very pragmatic guiding force in my life, and it was just the two of us, so when [the acting] did start taking on a life of its own and I started to actually work quite a bit when I was 11 or 12, she was able to be relatively flexible.”

By his early teens, Corbet had made his major silver-screen debut in Catherine Hardwicke’s coming-of-age cult classic Thirteen, followed by a layered turn in Gregg Araki’s unsettling teen gem Mysterious Skin. He’d worked with two of experimental cinema’s most potent players – Michael Haneke on Funny Games and Lars von Trier for Melancholia– by the time he’d reached his twenties. His career as an actor appeared to be heading towards striking and experimental heights, but outside of the camera’s eyeshot, his perspective had shifted. “I realised that I wasn’t a natural-born performer,” he shrugs. “That’s what’s so tricky about doing these press tours too: I have a lot of social anxiety and I do struggle with speaking in public. Every time you speak in public, you are being judged. The amount of times that you are on stage doing a Q&A and you just hear someone say, ‘Wow, what a cunt,’” he laughs. “It’s human nature so you can’t really take it personally. But I realised [performance] really wasn’t for me.”

Thankfully, life behind the lens had long held a vastly different allure. He made his first short film at 10 years old and his first “legitimate project”, enigmatic and off-kilter short thriller Protect You + Me, aged just 17. Shot by Darius Khondji, the cinematographer for Funny Games, David Fincher’s Seven and a further plethora of acclaimed work, the piece premiered at London Film Festival and went on to win Corbet an Honourable Mention in the Short Filmmaking Award category at Sundance. “Then when I was 18 or 19, I started raising money for [my inaugural full-length film, 2015’s] The Childhood of a Leader, for which I was seeking about $3 million to make. [In the era it was made], that was on the high side of a low budget for a first film,” Corbet highlights. “So it actually took me years and years to cobble that money together.” Six or seven years in fact.

Steadfast in his vision, Corbet hustled and pleaded, itched and scratched until he could make the film he wanted – an odd and sombre arthouse odyssey about the rise of racism and autocracy in the 20th century. Such tenacity set the tone for what was to come. Corbet had continued acting until 2014, mostly to make ends meet, but wouldn’t return following The Childhood of a Leader’s release. Three years later he shared his sophomore feature, the Natalie Portman-starring, genre-criss-cross Vox Lux. The film surveys stardom and populism from a sardonic, satirical and often vicious viewpoint, with a provocative thematic focus on school shootings and impossible beauty standards, becoming as divisive a picture as those of the visionaries its maker worked under in his early acting years. “It’s funny because I wouldn’t say that I’m particularly brave in my personal life,” Corbet ponders. “But I think when it comes to my films, it’s a space where I feel emboldened and I’m not entirely sure why that is. I think perhaps it’s just because it’s a language that I feel I speak more or less fluently. I’ve been in the film industry for 29 years. And I’ve seen so many films because I’m, first and foremost, not a film director but a film viewer and a filmgoer. So it’s one of the very few subjects that I have special expertise about. That has given me a foundation to really stand on. And I don’t too frequently second guess myself in that process.”

After Vox Luxcaused a cinematic stir, Corbet lit the fire of The Brutalist – the embers of which had already been subtly glowing for years. The concept for the immensely ambitious and singular spectacle – the kind you’d expect from a filmmaker many decades into their tenure, not a third outing from a left-field newcomer – is a decade old in some form. Clocking in at a sprawling run time of upwards of three and a half hours, including a 15-minute intermission, the period piece gives the false veneer of being a biopic with its fastidious and vivid depiction of the life of László Tóth. The fictional Hungarian-Jewish architect is anchored in real-life events as a Holocaust survivor who migrates to America following the war in hopes of a fresh start for himself, his wife and niece. The troubled but erudite lead was played with gargantuan gravitas by a career-best Adrien Brody. Quite simply, the film’s a masterpiece, and for many critics the best of 2024. Corbet and his wife, Mona Fastvold, wrote the script together, just as they had The Childhood of a Leader, Vox Lux, and Fastvold’s 2014 directorial debut, mystery noir The Sleepwalker. “We’ve been working together for years, we were friends and wrote together before we had a child together,” he says. “We don’t really know another way of being together, to be honest. We’ve written six produced screenplays together, maybe seven. I can’t remember. And 25 or 26 screenplays over the years for various production companies, ghostwriting jobs, and things like that.

“We’re a good team. I think we’re complementary to one another. Mona has something very classical that she brings to material. She comes from a family of writers, her mother is a novelist and her sister is a novelist and a socio-anthropologist, and she has this mind’s eye for classical structure and character. For me it’s a very formalist, very jagged architecture that I have in mind when I’m writing, so it’s interesting how the two of us interface and intersect in each of the films.”

When it came to actualising their scripting, there was no excess. “I think the film is almost exactly what I expected it to be,” he says – all 170 pages of it. The shooting process, primarily in and around Budapest, incredibly only lasted 33 days, thanks to Corbet’s rigidity. “I don’t do hardly any improvisation on set with dialogue or anything like that. It’s hard to improvise when you are doing something that has a very specific cadence and rhythm from a very specific decade like the 1950s. So what I always encourage everyone to do is bring me ideas and thoughts in the pre-production.Then the boutique is open. But on day one, as soon as we start shooting, the boutique is closed and that is because my job is to execute the plan.”

A question had plagued my thinking in the run-up to our interview, and has only been reinforced by hearing Corbet speak: how did he actually get this film over the line? In a business that often restricts the avant-garde to the margins whilst advocating formulaic, seemingly easy wins, how did a third-time mid-thirties filmmaker create such a stunning, spectacular and revolutionary colossus about an architect, shot mostly on 35mm film? “It was a bit like smuggling a baby across the border,” he smirks. “I think every radical film is. It was very difficult at times, we faced a lot of adversity. We edited the film very quickly, but the rest of the process was very slow. We graded the film for 39 days. The visual effects, though extremely minimal because we did a lot of practical effects, took an extremely long time. The mix took a long time because the score is 110 minutes of music so that was in and of itself its own production. It took us about 22 months to finish the movie.”

In the last year of that process, sitting on a mammoth motion picture that simply had to be successful, the pressure intensified. Initial feedback from partners on the film was poor, and there was a grey cloud hanging over Corbet and co for much of the final months of post-production. He felt there was only one thing to do. He had to prioritise the film above everything else, including his own well-being. “We essentially had to continue working on the movie, even though essentially this Sword of Damocles was hanging above our head,” he says. “Of course, it was very distracting and a very difficult way to work. But, at every turn, you just had to put the movie first. I put it before my own personal comfort and sanity, so when the film was received how it was received, it was of course a huge relief of unburdening.”

Yes, the film has been loved by audiences and lauded by critics. Yet for its maker, the act of finishing this Brobdingnagian work that had seized so much of the last decade from him was the blue ribbon. Anything that followed was a mere bonus; which, in terms of financial gain, is said to be very limited for Corbet himself, who recently spoke out about earning “zero dollars” from the project. But he made exactly the movie he wanted to make; a project of endearing and everlasting passion, without the pretense of monetary prosperity or a lust to rise a notch or two higher up the industry’s stepping-stone stratum. “At a certain point, I was like, ‘I don’t care if the movie opens in one theatre in North America, this is the movie that we intended to make, and if people are not feeling it in the year 2025, hopefully they’ll find it in the year 2050.’ And that’s really the way that I try to approach every project. It’s not a flavour of the week. You want that continuity of vision, that continuity of tone. You want that consistency because you’re there for that voice.”

My only remaining question might be – where can Brady Corbet go from here, having made one of the most enterprising, epic and eulogised films of the 21st century? “The only thing I’ll say about that in closing is that it spans 150 years,” he says about his next movie, the excitement of a new epoch twitching the corner of his lips into a secretive smile before he’s rushed off to continue an unrelenting affair with the press. “So yeah, it’s pretty ambitious.”

The Brutalist is available to rent digitally now and out on DVD & Blu-ray