My name is Brady Corbet and I am the co-writer and director of “The Brutalist. For the cantilevered floors, we plan to use upside down T-shaped beams integrated into concrete slabs down here. This is a sequence in which Adrien Brody’s character, Laszlo Toth, defends his project to a group of local community advocates and financiers who have brought in a local architect to evaluate his plans for the project. We shot this sequence on the outskirts of Budapest in a granite quarry, because we couldn’t afford to build a set, frankly. I mean, we had big ideas about what this location could be and simply just to dig a hole in the ground that is this significant is quite expensive thing to do. So this quarry was perfect in terms of the scope and scale, and we dirtied it and muddied it to make it into a set where these characters are able to have a 3-minute conversation because there’s one edit in the sequence, but it’s all the same shot. The one cut to this overhead in the middle of the sequence was actually just for the sake of orienting viewers. But the scene is one shot and it’s one take, which is usually how I shoot everything. The reason that we shoot everything in one take is not just for formal reasons, but it’s also just for scheduling reasons. “Laszlo has offered to personally offset these costs.” “No, I’m sorry, but you have asked me to come here to tell you what it is that we do not need. Plain and simple. The one thing we do not need is this guy.” It is much easier to set up a shot and do one thing over and over again and do it well, than shooting coverage like you would on most television shows of every single performer. Philosophically, you’re only cutting if there’s a reason to cut. Otherwise, it feels like what it often is, which is just a Band-Aid on a project where you’re just mopping everything up. “Everything that is ugly, cruel, stupid, but most importantly, ugly, everything … is your fault.” And so, for me, I think that sunlight-in-a-box feeling that you have, that you’ve captured this ephemeral thing. It only occurs in sequence takes. And it’s because viewers, we all know enough about the process that if you start cutting around, it somehow feels inauthentic. “He hit me.” “I trust you.” So I think that there is really something to be said for doing everything inside of one frame.
Content Source: www.nytimes.com