Inside’‘The Brutalist’ Opening: Creating the Incredible Scene Pulling into New York Harbor

In our introduction to László Tóth (Adrien Brody) in “The Brutalist,” he is jostled awake in the dark hull of a ship as it pulls into Ellis Island and thrust into the chaos of thousands of immigrants jockeying their way to the front exit, emerging in the broad daylight with the Statue of Liberty hovering overhead. While on IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, director Brady Corbet talked about how he wanted the two-and-half-minute opening to be an unexpected, euphoric crescendo that would propel the slower-paced first hour of the film.

“I think that I’m constantly thinking about the dynamic range,” said Corbet on the podcast. “You’re constantly thinking about peaks and valleys because, for example, if the film was 215 minutes of the sort of euphoria of Adrien arriving on the deck of that boat and discovering the Statue of Liberty, at the end of this long sequence shot, it would stop being effective.”

As Corbet discussed on the podcast, much of the movie is designed to keep the audience waiting for big payoffs, so he wanted to play off the viewer’s expectations. Part of this was busting out all the tools of cinema in this opening that leaves the viewer yearning and anticipating the next moment of release. The backbone of this unexpected balance of peaks and valleys of the film would stem from Corbet and composer Daniel Blumberg‘s years of work prior to production on the film’s score. And once production started, the director and composer lived together, continuing their collaboration in off hours. Blumberg joked that Corbet’s assistant would often knock on the door, reminding the director he had to be up in a couple of hours for the next day’s shoot.

“When I would come home from shooting, we would then start working on demos for the score, frequently because there would be an upcoming scene that I wanted to be able to shoot to the demo,” said Corbet. “The best example of that being the opening on the ship, where we actually shot that entire sequence with demos being played on a loudspeaker for everyone to hear.”

The Ship

“The Brutalist” team found a boat just north of Budapest (where they were shooting), moored on the Danube River, that could stand in for the interior of the ship. The boat was in the process of being renovated to become a floating nightclub, and production could have free reign over it for a couple of days.

“Brady and [production designer] Judy [Becker] said, ‘We’re not really going to do a huge amount of design in here, we’re going to install the bunk beds and repaint, but we’re hoping that a lot of the success of this is going to be the denial of light,’” recalled cinematographer Lol Crawley.

Producer Trevor Matthews told IndieWire that the scene was the perfect example of how Corbet created a sense of scale by knowing what he could get away with the audience not seeing but implying through sound and cinematic language. The trick for Crawley, though, was once light starts bouncing around an interior, like the low-ceiling hull of a boat, it spreads fill and ambient light, making it hard to maintain distinct areas of darkness to hide the lack of production design. Crawley solved the problem using small tungsten or LED spotlights to stand in for small portholes by casting small pools of light for Brody and the camera to cross through, but kept the vast majority of the space in a moody darkness.

Sensory Overload

Between the chaotic movement through darkness of thousands of desperate passengers trying to get off the boat, the bombastic score, and László’s wife Erzsébet voice over (Felicity Jones, reading a letter) detailing the horror she and their niece survived at the hands of the Nazis, there is an intentional sense of sensory overload.

“The sound design, the sound environment, the score, even sound levels, it’s all kind in Brady’s brain swirling around, and it’s on the page throughout the screenplay, references to the score swells or these bombastic sounds,” said producer Nick Gordon. “He would press play and the music would create a sense of pacing and timing [on set], and this very complicated choreography of bodies and sound comes out of that chaos.”

Added Blumberg, “Brady wanted to shoot to this overture demo I’d made so there’d be this meeting of departments, so that Lol could move to it, and Adrien and the choreography of the scene could be connected to the score.”

Choreography

Normal extras were not going to cut it. Corbet knew they would not have time to get the complicated coordination of movement right — time being a commodity the 215-minute movie, with a 33-day shoot, didn’t have.

“We’d hired many dancers for that sequence,” said Corbet. “We only had a few hours to get that choreography right, and we knew with a dancer’s training that they would be able to really hit their marks because we only had about 150 people, and it’s suggestive of thousands of people on that boat.”

‘The Brutalist’A24

Crawley would not use the large VistaVision camera (the movie’s principal camera) to shoot underneath the boat. Working with a lighter-weight camera and a shorter 400-foot magazine, the cinematographer was handheld following Brody from the bunk bed to weaving around the well-choreographed dancers.

“I just followed him through the bowels of the ship, twisting through the extras crossing the frame, or crossing in front of both of us to try and disorientate and make his journey less easy,” said Crawley. “And then as he ascends the staircase, I’m pulling myself up with one hand, because on a ship the staircase is a much steeper incline, and I’m pulling myself up and operating. And then we get ejected out into this extreme light, and they’re celebrating. We don’t know this yet, but we’re in New York harbor, and then there’s a stitch [masked edit] to some photography that we shot in VistaVision in New York, so you get this wonderful, tumbling Statue of Liberty above us.”

Crawley said the two-and-half minute shot was designed and shot to be an uninterrupted oner until the stitch cut to the Statue of Liberty, and it could have played that way in the finished film, but the cinematographer was impressed by how Corbet and editor Dávid Jancsó mixed and matched shots with additional stitches.

“That sequence is an amalgam of takes,” said Crawley. “David and Brady sort of flipped some of the takes. I remember I was watching the other day and I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s weird. Why is Adrien going that way? That wasn’t the right direction.’ So it definitely is very cleverly edited. It disorientated me, so it did what it was supposed to do.”

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