‘The Brutalist’ Always Had an Intermission: ‘I Have a Hard Time Sitting Still for 3 and a Half Hours,’ Brady Corbet Says

Brady Corbet took the 2024 Venice Film Festival — and the nascent Oscar season — by storm with his three-and-a-half hour epic “The Brutalist,” starring Adrien Brody. With the exception of Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” it’s one of the longer films to be in serious Academy Awards contention in recent memory.

But unlike “Flower Moon,” which clocks in just shy of the Corbet film’s 3:35 runtime, “The Brutalist” at least comes with an intermission. And while Scorsese didn’t want one in his film, Corbet clarified the intermission was an intentional choice on his part along with co-writer Mona Fastvold — and not the result of any outside pressure.

“It was always scripted, the intermission,” Corbet told IndieWire on the red carpet of the 2024 Gotham Awards on December 2. “It’s funny, it’s gotten more attention in a way than we expected it to. I personally have a hard time sitting still for three-and-a-half hours, so I needed it. And it was a public-facing decision.”

Scorsese’s choice became its own “public-facing” decision when one cinema in the U.K. showed “Flower Moon” with an unauthorized intermission, something editor Thelma Schoonmaker strongly condemned as “a violation.”

In the case of “The Brutalist,” the film’s intermission is 15 minutes long, with a countdown clock shown on screen. The break comes at roughly the halfway point of the film, between “Part 1: The Enigma of Arrival” and “Part 2: The Hard Core of Beauty.” The 15 minutes is also baked into the runtime of “The Brutalist,” so in that sense, “Flower Moon” is technically the “longer” film at an uninterrupted 3:26.

Corbet and Fastvold’s choice to include the intermission in “The Brutalist” goes against recent tradition in Western cinema. One of the last major titles to have one was Lars von Trier’s “Dancer in the Dark” in 2000. But intermissions were once very common in Hollywood films, from “Gone with the Wind” to “2001: A Space Odyssey” — and they were a staple of the big roadshow musicals and epics of the 1960s. “The Brutalist” harks back to that era of filmmaking with its weighty national themes and rich production design.

“Yeah, we always knew we wanted to have that break in the middle,” Fastvold, who’s married to Corbet and is the director of “The World to Come,” added on the red carpet at the Gotham Awards. “You know, people sit at home and they watch eight to 16 hours of a limited series with little breaks in between, so if you apply that idea to this film, you’re just binging this movie with a little break in the middle. So, don’t be scared of the intermission.”

“The Brutalist” has been likened to a cinematic version of the “Great American Novel” with its story of an immigrant and Holocaust survivor, played by Brody, who settles in America to pursue his career as an architect. As far as casting the film, Brody was their unquestioned choice.

“We don’t really do auditions,” Corbet said. “It’s very rare… maybe we have somebody read three or four lines who are day players we’re casting locally. Because we’ve made three films in Hungary, Mona made her last film in Romania. Those are really the only circumstances that require an audition because generally you know in the first 30 or 40 seconds if someone is right for the role. With Adrian, it’s a no-brainer. His mother fled Hungary in 1956 during the revolution, his heritage, his family history made him really the only option for the role.”