Adrien Brody on His ‘The Brutalist’ Accent, Being “A Bit Concerned” About Filming in VistaVision and If He Will Direct

Adrien Brody says that while he’s “receptive to working with a variety of material” as an actor, taking on the title of director is “definitely not” in the cards for now., but possibly in the actor’s future.

The film’s Oscar-nominated star told “Reel Pieces” moderator Annette Insdorf Sunday night at The 92nd Street Y, New York that the reason he’s swearing off the creative hat — including potential co-directing collaborations — is due, in part, to the prowess of filmmakers like Brady Corbet. “It is kind of intimidating when you work with someone like Brady,” he told the crowd. 

He will continue to prioritize working in film, however, with the actor sharing that even after enjoying the challenge of his performance in his London theater debut, The Fear of 13, last fall, he “loves the permanence of film.” 

“It’s hard to do a play. I was doing eight shows a week. I was doing a play with no intermission, and promoting a film with an intermission. I was flying back here. I flew to attend the Governors Awards in L.A., got on a plane, landed, went straight to the theater and did a show, and did seven more shows that week,” Brody recalled. “I had a wonderful, very supportive cast, and the writing was beautiful, and it was very well-directed and so it was very exciting. Long story short, I would probably consider it again, I’d just like to find another great film to work on.”

He added, “As I said earlier, I like the ability for very intimate moments — to be alone with the character and experience those in the darkened room, and I love the permanence of film. It’s something great. It exists, it lives on.”

Sometimes those characters can live a little too long inside an actor, with Brody noting that stepping out of a role can be tricky for him on-stage or on-screen. The actor — who has previously spoken about developing anxiety and insomnia on certain projects — told Insdorf about performing The Fear of 13, where “I would just wake up eight to 10 times a night, uttering dialogue.” 

He described it as only one of two times he had “complete insomnia” while performing a role, with the second while filming the big tentpole, King Kong. “I had many sleepless nights,” he said. “One was shooting three weeks or so nights for Peter Jackson on King Kong, which was insane.”

For much of the remaining hour, Brody broke down his, Corbet’s, and other creatives’ approach to filming The Brutalist. That included his accent work and vocal performance, which has garnered acclaim, with Insdorf at one point sharing praise from a New Yorker review of the film. But it caught attention for a different reason last month after the film’s editor revealed he had fed his and the actor’s voice into AI voice-generating tech to enhance Brody and Felicity Jones’ pronunciation of words in Hungarian. 

The discussion did not address the controversy, but Brody did expound on how dialect coach Tanera Marshall and familial inspirations, specifically his grandfather, shaped his vocal characterization of László Tóth, the film’s fictional Hungarian-Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor. 

“I was searching for a source with a formality of speech of that era — the era my grandfather had immigrated, and I found one who was a Holocaust survivor. I spent every day and night recounting his stories and listening to the nuances in the way that he spoke and always would draw back to certain things — how my grandfather would express himself. That is just in me. It was both a real luxury to have this and also an opportunity to honor his hardships and their hardships and sacrifice,” Brody explained. 

The discussion also spanned Corbet’s decision to shoot The Brutalist on VistaVision, a widescreen format Insdorf noted “has much sharper images than digital” and was last used in the early 1960s. Brody noted that the format is an impressive choice, particularly for an indie film on a $10 million budget. But he also expressed he “was a bit concerned with it because these are antiques.”

“VistaVision is a horizontally-mounted magazine, so it is giving additional image exposure. It’s quite loud. It sounds a bit like a sewing machine. It feels very brutalist. And [cinematographer] Lol [Crawley] and Brady implemented the cameras in a way that I don’t believe has been used in these other films. It’s also period-specific,” Brody explained. “It has a very unique look and feel, and what it does, it doesn’t alter the image. It’s quite a great depth of field… It also is quite wonderful for intimate close-ups. At times, they were using it as handheld [for] these very intimate scenes. It felt very of another era.”

He continued, “It’s a rarity, especially on smaller independent films because it’s not just more costly than digital, obviously, for printing, it’s just much more cumbersome. It takes time. You have to load magazines. You have to wait for that to be reloaded, and you have a finite amount of film to use, really, for your day-to-day, so that restricts how many takes you can do. But it was quite wonderful.”

Brody also opened up about filming The Brutalist in just 33 days. “To give it perspective, not to digress too much, but when we made The Pianist — six weeks of the filming, six days a week, I shot with just myself and the crew. I think this movie was made less time than that in its entirety,” he said. “That’s a real achievement for a filmmaker, for all the heads of departments, for the crew who work so hard, and obviously, for the actors to be present with one another and really not let any moment slip by.”

The actor added that the nature of how the film was shot added pressure to an already intense process, but celebrated how his fellow cast members, Corbet, and the crew came together. “Filming is permanent. It’s a lot of pressure because it’s permanent, and you don’t want to let all the nuance that should be existing in these moments slip off,” he said. “It’s really a testament to everyone lifting each other up and all of the creative contributions that everyone made under extremely difficult circumstances. Judy Becker, our production designer, made these incredible structures from scratch, and invented them with very little resources.”

Overall, Brody expressed gratitude for the way the indie film had been embraced by The Academy and noted what its success might say about audiences and the industry at large. “The beauty of these moments where the work is championed and highlighted by the Academy just creates such awareness for this film,” he said. “People throughout the world will say, ‘I would love to see that movie.’ That is really special and that’s what we needed, and I’m really grateful for that.”

“It’s so beautifully written, it speaks to so much that we all must contemplate, and it’s an artistic work. It’s not a commercial venture,” the actor told the 92NY crowd at another point in the discussion. “I’m so grateful that A24 has done such a wonderful job distributing this and believing in Brady’s vision, that this is an art film that works as a commercial film. That says so much, and it’s so healing, not only for myself and my own creative journey, but for what this industry needs; to prove that audiences are intelligent enough and crave material that feeds them in other ways than they’re typically expecting to receive from a theatrical exploitation.”