Discourse Around Film Runtimes Is Silly

Brady Corbet, who is premiering his three-and-a-half hour historical drama “The Brutalist” at Venice Film Festival on Sunday, is shrugging off discourse around movie runtimes being too long.

“This film does everything that we are told we are not allowed to do,” the director said during the film’s press conference. “I think it’s quite silly actually to have a conversation about runtime because that’s like criticizing a book for being 700 pages instead of 100 pages.”

He continued that for him, it’s more about “how much story there is to tell.”

“Maybe the next thing I make will be 45 minutes and I should be allowed to do it. We should all be allowed to do that. The idea we have to fit into a box is quite silly,” he said. “We should be past that, it’s 2024. As Harmony Korine once said, cinema is stuck in the birth canal. And I agree with him, so we should help it out.”

Corbet choked up a few times during the press conference, saying at one point: “This was an incredibly difficult film to make. I’m very emotional today because I’ve been working on it for seven years and it felt very urgent every day for the better part of a decade. I’m just really grateful to anyone who spent three-and-a-half hours with it.”

“The Brutalist” follows 30 years in the life of László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a “Hungarian-born Jewish architect who survived the Holocaust,” according to its synopsis. “After the end of World War II, he emigrated to the United States with his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), to experience the American dream. László initially endures poverty and indignity, but he soon lands a contract with a mysterious and wealthy client, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), that will change the course of his life.”

Brody turned to his mother, the photographer Sylvia Plachy, for inspiration, saying his character is “one that I felt immediate kinship and understanding for.”

She “fled Hungary in 1956 during the Hungarian revolution and was a refugee and immigrated to the United States, and much like László, started again and pursued a dream of being an artist,” Brody said. “And I understand a great deal about the repercussions of that on her life and her work as an artist, which I think is a wonderful parallel with László’s creations and how they evolve and how post-war psychology influences your work.”

The cast also includes Joe Alwyn, Alessandro Nivola, Jonathan Hyde, Isaach De Bankolé, Raffey Cassidy, Stacy Martin, Emma Laird and Peter Polycarpou. In addition to directing the film, Corbet also co-wrote the script with his wife Mona Fastvold (“The Sleepwalker”).

Actor-turned-director Corbet has premiered films at Venice twice before, with his 2015 directorial debut “The Childhood of a Leader” earning him the Luigi De Laurentiis award for best debut film and the Horizons best director prize and 2018’s “Vox Lux” competing for the Golden Lion. “The Brutalist” is also in the running for the festival’s prestigious top prize.