Brady Corbet, director of the 215-minute film The Brutalist, in Venice: Discussing the film’s duration is ridiculous

According to cinemadrame, Brady Corbet, the director of The Brutalist, at the press conference of the Venice Film Festival, stated that the discussion about the duration of films should end: “It’s 2024.”

The film The Brutalist, which was co-written by Corbet and Mona Fastvold, tells the story of an architect named Laszlo Toth, played by Adrien Brody, and his wife, played by Felicity Jones, who come from post-war Europe to modern America. However, their lives are forever changed after encountering a mysterious and wealthy man, played by Rhys Ifans. The film also stars Guy Pearce, Joe Alwyn, Emma Lord, and Alessandro Nivola.

Corbet says about this three-and-a-half-hour film: “Honestly, I think it’s ridiculous to discuss the duration of a film because it’s like criticizing a book for being 700 pages instead of 100.”

He continues by emphasizing the importance of “how the story is told”: “Maybe my next film will be 45 minutes, and I should have the ability to make it. We all should have that ability. The idea of being limited is ridiculous. We need to move past this discussion; it’s 2024. As Harmony Korine once said, cinema is stuck in the birth canal. And I agree with him, so we need to help it.”

Corbet gets emotional several times during the conference and at one point says: “Making this film was incredibly difficult. I’m feeling very emotional today because I worked on this film for seven years, and for most of the past decade, every day, it felt like an incredibly necessary film. I’m truly grateful to everyone who is spending three and a half hours on it.”

Brody adds that he was inspired by his mother for his role in the film, who emigrated to the United States after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and, like his character in the film, forgot “the dream of being an artist.”