An Evening with ‘The Brutalist’ Stars Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce is Anything But Brutal

“The Amazing Adrien the Magician” and “Junior Mr. Victoria the Bodybuilder” have come a long way since their early brushes with fame. Jointly awarded Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s Cinema Vanguard honors Thursday night at the Arlington, the careers of Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce —  the stars of the Academy Award nominated Best Picture The Brutalist and both individual Oscar contenders — are on fire right now thanks to their involvement in Brady Corbet’s ambitious, three and a half hour epic period film. 

It’s an admittedly uncommercial-sounding story, following a postwar Hungarian architect (Brody) as he deals with a demanding American patron (Pearce) and navigates his own complicated relationship with his equally compelling wife (Felicity Jones, who also got an Oscar nomination). 

Reportedly shot in just 33 days, with a low budget of about $10 million (for comparison, the nearly three-hour, also Oscar-nominated Wicked Part 1 had a $145 million budget), both Brody and Pearce said that making The Brutalist really felt like they were working on a small, independent film, despite its ambitious scope. 

As to the film’s success, Pearce, an Aussie who first came to international fame for his breakout roles in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) and L.A. Confidential (1997), said, “It’s very meaningful. I’m really grateful for this moment.”

He continued, “We both knew we were working on a really wonderful piece. … When we watched the finished film at the Venice Film Festival last year, we were really stunned at how good it was.” 

The relationship between the two characters is the heart of the film, and as Brody told moderator Pete Hammond, “I love the dynamic between Van Buren and László [their characters]. Guy’s performance brings such a nuance to it. No one is free from insecurities. The beauty of being an artist is that you can apply and work past them. If you can find fulfillment in life and light in so much darkness, that’s a powerful thing to behold.”

That notion of pairing light and darkness was a theme throughout the night, as they explored both actors’ work through a series of paired clips. First up for Brody was his Oscar-winning turn in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (a true story about a celebrated Jewish composer and pianist who survived the Holocaust and saw his family perish), followed by scenes from Wes Anderson’s comedy The Grand Budapest Hotel. 

“I’m so confused,” quipped Brody. “You can’t play those two scenes back to back.”

“It’s the Santa Barbara International Film Festival — that’s what we do,” laughed Hammond, who’s been doing these tribute evenings for 23 years, and whose esoteric knowledge and affection for cinema soars high, even in our ocean full of film geeks. 

Of his experience on The Piano, Brody said, “I just knew that it was one of the most meaningful roles that I was given the opportunity to do. It was the opportunity to understand things on a level that I hadn’t before. I understood hunger on a level I never knew after making it. I gained an understanding of the hardships many people endure. That sense of loss and suffering that is pervasive in this world.” 

The 6’1” actor said he got himself down to 129 pounds for the role. Now 51, Brody was 29 when he won his Oscar for The Piano. 

(Fun fact: Brody is still the youngest man to win the Academy Award for Best Actor, but his fellow 2024 nominee Timothee Chalamet is 29 now with a December birthday, so if he wins the Oscar this year for A Complete Unknown, he’ll break Brody’s record by a few months. Read about Chalamet’s SBIFF tribute here.) 

“I always look at that experience as opening up a portal to experiencing life as an adult,” said Brody of working on The Piano. As for working with Wes Anderson, “It was an amazing life experience,” he said. “He’s such a unique filmmaker — you look at one frame and know it’s a Wes Anderson movie.”

LA Confidential and Memento were one of Pearce’s sets of paired clips. “Working for him really was like film school,” said Pearce of his LA Confidential director Curtis Hanson, the renowned filmmaker who made Eminem’s 8 Mile and the Michael Douglas film Wonder Boys (from Michael Chabon’s terrific novel), among others, before he passed away in 2016.

“Masterful,” was how Brody described Pearce’s performance in Memento, a 2000 neo-noir psychological thriller film written and directed by Christopher Nolan. Of that role, Pearce said, “I understood the emotional center of it. There was a real sadness hanging around my character’s neck. This was a movie where you have to let everything go to focus on the scene at hand.”

Among the others of Brody’s films they discussed were Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (Brody plays Salvador Dali); King King, directed by Peter Jackson; Houdini, and Predators, as well as Pearce’s experiences on The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Prometheus and The King’s Speech. 

Brody summed up their collaboration with his thoughts on how relevant The Brutalist is to what’s going on now in the world. “When you make a film, you want it to speak about what’s going on today. The beauty of film is that it’s a subversive experience. It’s about bridging the divide and I feel such a privilege to be part of this movie. I love that this artistic work can evoke an understanding of hardships that others face. The world feels very complex right now and to do work that speaks to that — it’s a beautiful thing.”