To see what could be built without having it exist already, it’s naturally part of the job of being a filmmaker to be a bit of an architect already, which has always been a little more true for Judy Becker than most when constructing sets as a production designer. It also was a part of her heritage.
“I had an uncle who was a Danish modernist architect who was married to my biological aunt,” recently recalled Becker, the Oscar nominee for “American Hustle.” “My aunt died when I was eight, which was really sad because she was one of my favorite people in the world, but they were both so cool and their apartment was amazing. I’ve used it as an influence for some sets I’ve done because it made such an impression on me and I’ve occasionally seen some furniture that my uncle designed, [as well as] a big hotel in Indonesia. He had models of buildings he was designing and would always say that when he was done with them I could have them to play with as dollhouses, so that was my big memory of him.”
Becker has since become a legend in her field for building magnificent playgrounds for others, having an extraordinary touch when it comes to recreating uncanny American milieus across time in such films as “Carol,” “Battle of the Sexes” and “Brokeback Mountain,” and her work on “The Brutalist” may be her most impressive feat to date, with the film’s credibility entirely dependent on how she executes the vision of its central character László Tóth (Adrien Brody), a Hungarian architect who had to leave his practice behind as Nazism spread across Europe. A student of the Bauhaus movement in Germany, Tóth is dedicated to the notion of form meeting function to an extreme degree and has no reason to believe he’ll ever design a building again upon resettling in Pennsylvania where his brother Attila (Alessandro Nivola) runs a furniture store until an odd job redecorating a library for a wealthy benefactor named Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce) leads to a commission of a compound known as the Institute, intended to show off his devotion to Christianity.
Well before the building can be completed, one is compelled to bow down before what Becker brings to “The Brutalist” on a scene by scene basis when the past isn’t afforded the reverence it usually is in period pieces, instead feeling lived-in as the product of the eras that have come before it and reflect a hold that it continues to have on its characters. However, in coming up with Tóth’s professional designs for both the library and the Institute, Becker wasn’t only responsible for reflecting what Tóth is up against in every room he enters as an immigrant, but integrating his feelings towards the world in what he eventually ends up constructing, finding innovative ways to bring light into spaces built with concrete and the most utilitarian of supplies in the Brutalist fashion. When Corbet had to be resourceful himself to pull off his vision for the three-and-a-half-hour drama uncompromised, Becker was working within an even greater set of constraints than Tóth imposed on himself with a spartan budget to realize the architect’s work and summon the American Northeast in the hills of Hungary where the epic could be achieved at a price.
Recently, Becker spoke about how she pulled a career’s worth of knowledge to make her work on “The Brutalist” even possible after keeping tabs on Corbet since his directorial debut “The Childhood of a Leader,” reflecting a world as it was rather than what its characters would want it to be, and the practical demands of the job, such as sweating out a shipment of furniture for a set mere days before film was set to roll.
Surely the script must’ve given some impression of the kind of architect László Toth was, but how much leeway was there to determine who he was for yourself when you were executing the designs?
It was a combination. Brady gave me a lot of freedom and it was really wonderful working with him and it was one of those situations where everybody’s creativity feeds the other person, so it was more than just respectful. It was actually a dynamic collaboration. Some of the [the architecture in “The Brutalist”] was scripted, but not a huge amount and what was scripted what I didn’t always follow literally [yet] I would discuss it with Brady how important what he [and Mona] wrote was and what wasn’t. I used everything that was scripted for the Institute, like the the references to the concentration camps, [which] obviously were an important aspect of it and very difficult to think of. The Institute was one of the first things I worked on, and everything that’s really specific about the Institute, like the reflection of light forming the cross, and the monumentality of it in the brutalist style, was scripted.
The way the library turned out wasn’t really scripted that way, so a lot was driven by either my imagination or by locations. In the script, there was this old library, and it wasn’t really described, but we all thought of it as a traditional man’s library room with the leather chairs. Then the movie was going to shoot in Poland when I came on to it, which was maybe in the early spring of 2022 and there was one big mansion there that was pretty traditional looking. Then that fell through and the movie pushed and when it started coming back together in the fall of 2022, it was shooting in Hungary and there was really one main mansion that they thought could work. We went and scouted for a week in November of ’22 and [in this mansion], the room that worked was a glass winter garden. All the walls were glass except for the entrance, which we were standing in that led to the rest of the house. It seemed really perfect for the library, but I was looking at it, thinking how am I going to do these shelves on a glass wall?
I was really a little confused and what they wanted to do wasn’t very specific, but the process was described as the new shelves are lying down on the floor and then [when you] pull ropes, they open up like a flower. It was very abstract, but I had this idea of the flower and I’m staring at [this space] a while we were scouting, and I just got this idea of these cabinets making this false perspective going towards the back and they’re floor-to-ceiling, so they’re hiding the glass, and then they open up. It just came to me while we’re standing there, which really is rare to get that kind of inspiration on the spot when everyone’s staring at you and asking how you make it work. But I did a little sketch and then that was the idea.
Then when we came back to Hungary in January, the first thing I did was was have my art directors make up paper models of it and it looked great. The hardest part was the execution because it’s this real centerpiece of the movie. It’s the first time you realize [László] was really talented, and it’s so minimal and hard to make that look perfect, so it was really painstaking and stressful to [think about things like] how do you see the woods? They don’t make wood boards that long, at least not in Hungary. [What we needed were] 15 or 20 feet long, so how do you seam it together and have it look perfect? And then do you want to do an inlaid piece of metal or a wood strip on it? We didn’t have a lot of time to do it either, so the hardest thing probably in the movie for me was doing those cabinets, but I was so happy when I saw the final movie because it looked beautiful.
Another scene that was probably easier to pull off, but really shows a certain mastery of how little you need to convey a mood is the diner scene where László is at his lowest, covered in soot as he sits for lunch with Harrison Van Buren before he offers him a job, and the red formica table and green walls of the restaurant really bring out contrasts. What that was like to think about?
Aesthetically, that wasn’t so hard because I have a lot of references for that period and that urban diner feeling, but what was hard was finding a location that would feel appropriate for that. Every movie I’ve ever done that is set in the ’50s, the diners [the location scouts] show me have checked floors and very contemporary, fake retro diners [feel]. I’m not blaming Hungary for that. It’s happening everywhere. But I was thinking of that Hopper “Nighthawks” painting, looking for a corner-shaped building that we could shoot [where] the windows would give us some outside onto the street. Finally, we found one and it was basically an old sweatshop. It was empty and we went upstairs and there were all these sewing machines everywhere and the guy was selling the building. It was triangular-shaped in the front and had all these windows and I [thought], “This could be great.” So we put some wood wainscot up there and painted it and we made the tables because we couldn’t find them. It was good for that scene because it was in between a restaurant and more of a workers’ luncheonette in that place [where] you could imagine Harrison going there but maybe anything a little more down he wouldn’t go to, so it was a good compromise.
In general, what was it like to source furniture, particularly for the Van Buren house. I was a bit obsessed with this couch that Guy Pearce sits on where the arm has an art deco touch that you’d never see today, but it indicated the period it was from.
That was deliberate because instead of going in that traditional English-traditional, leather chair [style], I wanted his furniture to feel dated in a different way. I [thought], “Why doesn’t he have art deco furniture?” Because for the ’50s, that would be old and out of fashion and let’s just do that instead of going in this boring “every guy has leather club chairs in his library” [direction]. Let’s make his house more art deco. He’s rich and he would have been up to date 20 years ago and we can find that furniture in Hungary.” It was really fun and more interesting to do that. My decorator Patty [Cuccia] was really into it. She found beautiful stuff that was more in line with him being someone that liked to have the best and who was a collector who wanted to have people think he had good taste and was an intellectual. I didn’t channel Harrison, but I was interested in what he as a character would be because I always like to think about realistically who is this person and what would they have in their house?
Is it true that the shipping container for the most of the furniture arrived only the day before filming?
That was for the furniture store because that was real American furniture, and that wasn’t really scripted, but I really wanted it to look like Attila [played by Alessandro Nivola] had a hundred percent gone over to the other side with this American colonial [furniture]. Now he’s American, and even though he makes that furniture, he’s making it in the American style and has left the old country behind. We made an effort to find it in Hungary, but it didn’t exist and they kept showing us Hungarian country furniture, which had some things in common with it, but it wasn’t it. You know that when you see it. Patty [ended up] finding all that stuff for under a thousand dollars, but it was the shipping that was expensive. And the container was probably supposed to arrive two weeks before we needed it, but she left plenty of time for mistakes to happen — and those mistakes happened. So it was two days before [when it finally arrived]. We had wallpaper in there that we used in Attila’s apartment and we managed to get it up. we did have to prepare some contingencies at the last minute, and it was a really horrible thought, but thank God, it worked and I was I was really happy with it.
“The Brutalist” is now in theaters.