12 min.
THE ARCHITECT’S ARCHITECT
In the months leading up to the production of The Brutalist, writer-director Brady Corbet texted his leading actor, Adrien Brody, from Italy, where the filmmaker was struggling to find a location he had envisioned. In a key sequence in the film, Brody, as Jewish Hungarian refugee architect László Toth, travels with his wealthy patron, played by Guy Pearce, to obtain white marble from quarries carved into the mountains of Carrara, Italy. Corbet and his co-writer and romantic partner, Norwegian filmmaker Mona Fastvold, had written the dramatic landscape — where Michelangelo got his marble — into their 168-page script to supply an emotionally resonant backdrop for a dark turning point in the story, but Corbet couldn’t locate a spot for filming until Brody intervened. “I texted him back, ‘I got you,’…