Directing-Writing Duo Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold Discuss Their Novel Approach

Yahoo

11-02-2025

'I grew up working in a bookstore,' says Brady Corbet, who was born in Arizona in 1988 and raised by his mother in Glenwood Springs, Colorado. '[It's] something I fell into between the ages of 7 and 12. This couple took me under their wing and paid me in rare books. And so, by the time I was a teenager, I had amassed an extraordinary collection of first editions.'
With his town serving as a hub for national casting calls, Corbet began acting at age 11 — and went on to star in films Thirteen (2003), Thunderbirds (2004) and Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011), as well as on series 24. However, he met his literary match when his Martha Marcy co-star and friend Christopher Abbott introduced him to Norwegian actress, writer and filmmaker Mona Fastvold.
'We became friends right away,' says Fastvold. 'And then we started writing together. Immediately, we started working on my first feature [2014 drama The Sleepwalker]. Brady was still acting then, so I convinced him to act in it as well, alongside Chris. Then while we were in post [-production] on that, we started writing The Childhood of a Leader together.' The 2015 historical drama, based on Jean-Paul Sartre's eponymous novella about the upbringing of a dictator, marked Corbet's directorial debut — and won Best Debut Film and Best Director when it premiered in Venice.
'Somewhere along that process, we realized that we were already in some sort of a relationship,' Fastvold continues. 'But we were really a professional partnership and friendship, for many years, before we realized that we had fallen in love with each other.'
'I mean, who can resist this?' jokes Corbet, who with Fastvold, shared not only a love of novels but a desire to write scripts that emulate them. 'Mona's mother is a novelist. So is her sister, so she comes from a literary family. And something we personally struggle with about a lot of screenplays is that they're frequently written in a pretty perfunctory way, which we understand. However, we do feel that the novel is so much more advanced than the medium of cinema. Even an airport novel — it's much more advanced than most highbrow cinema in terms of its storytelling and structure and audacity. There's so much more freedom in that medium, which we are trying to invite into the medium of ours as much as we can.'
"The novel is so much more advanced than the medium of cinema. ... There's so much more freedom in that medium, which we are trying to invite into the medium of ours." — Corbet
'Nobody sits down with an author and says, 'Excuse me. By page 25, you haven't reached this certain point in your protagonist's journey,'' adds Fastvold. 'We were trying to have some more freedom narratively, and sometimes we definitely are criticized for it.'
They continued to challenge screenwriting norms with their next film, 2018 musical Vox Lux — which they co-wrote and which Corbet directed, about a rising pop star (Natalie Portman) set against the backdrop of a school shooting and 9/11. 'Vox Lux, we were criticized quite often for missing the second act,' says Fastvold.
'In screenplays, you're always encouraged to only have one perspective that's taking you through that entire arc of a three-act structure — it's a formula that people rehash,' says Corbet. '[With Vox Lux], we wanted to make a film in two acts as opposed to three. And we knew that there would be a jaggedness about its architecture, which would be very challenging for a lot of viewers.' The film invites audiences to fill in a 15-year gap in the story. 'With all the other movies about the rise of fame, we felt that part of the story was really explored,' Fastvold says. 'So I was like, 'Why don't you just fill in those gaps yourself, and then you can get this other part of her life, these two other pieces' — and [I can] give them more space.'
Their latest project, 2024 drama The Brutalist, also defied convention: with a 130-page script (amounting to a run time of 215 minutes, including a 15-minute intermission), and with the decision to shoot on old-school, widescreen VistaVision, using 70 mm film to reference the 1950s time period of the epic that spans three generations. The A24 juggernaut — about a Hungarian-born Jewish architect (Adrien Brody) who immigrates to the U.S. following the Holocaust and meets a wealthy patron (Guy Pearce) who changes his life — scored Corbet the Silver Lion for Best Direction when it premiered in Venice; won three Golden Globe Awards; and heads to the Oscars with 10 nominations (including Best Picture, Director and Original Screenplay).
It all started when Corbet read a book about Hungarian-German Bauhaus architect Marcel Breuer, whose Saint John's Abbey and minimalist-maximalist Brutalist furniture and building designs inspired aspects of Brody's character, László Tóth. 'I just read a lot of stuff,' says Corbet, who studied the link between postwar psychology and architecture through Jean-Louis Cohen's Architecture in Uniform. What was also fed into the film was the duo's own frustrations with art and commerce — the idea of possessing an artist and being slaves to capitalism. 'For me, the architecture of cinema has become pretty homogeneous because there are too many cooks in the kitchen,' Corbet says. 'People are analyzing every possible outcome of how something could be perceived or misperceived, and that's actually very unhealthy for the creative process. You can't be too worried about what people are going to think. You have to let the story tell itself, irrespective of how audiences might receive it.'
While the film took seven years and under $10 million to make, Corbet and Fastvold wrote the script relatively quickly, in six to seven weeks. 'There's a period of research that goes on for usually a year or two before we sit down to execute a draft, so that you're so familiar with that world that it becomes second nature,' Corbet says, noting that because most of their projects are historical, it's hard for actors to improvise and they prefer to adhere to a script. 'But we try to get to a point where we are nimble enough, and we know the vernacular, and the cadence, and the language, and the idioms of the period, and we are able to riff on that. It's a very unromantic process. Our office doesn't look like A Beautiful Mind with Post-its everywhere. We mostly just do a lot of reading and then have a lot of discussions. And then finally, we sit down to write.'
They approach the writing of every film a little differently. 'Sometimes we sit down and physically work on a project together,' he notes. 'Sometimes I will work on something late in the evening, and Mona will wake up early — she's a morning person, and I'm not. So she'll revise something in the morning that I've worked on in the evening.'
'I do a lot of my notes by hand, and I also do a lot of writing by hand in the morning,' Fastvold says. 'But Brady writes like a serial killer. His handwriting is illegible. So, he will make notes on his phone. … We're so in sync now, because we've worked together for so many years, that now, we can write different scenes at different parts of the story — simultaneously, side by side — and then read them to each other. But usually, there's a lot of energy with the first draft and you can't stop yourself. It's fun and so compelling.'
While they write scripts together, they would never direct together — 'you have to have a captain where the buck stops with them,' Corbet explains — and they'll know who's at the helm from the beginning.
'It starts with one of us saying, 'I would like to tell a story about this,' and then [the other will] say, 'I would like to join you in telling that story, as a writer,'' Fastvold says. 'While we were working on The Brutalist, I never felt compelled to direct it. I often felt grateful that I wasn't, to be honest, because it was such an incredibly complicated undertaking. And really, it's a joy to let myself explore someone else's obsession, and something that they desperately want to spend years of their life working on.'
The two have ties to Hungary — Corbet's mother's side hails from Apatin (formerly Hungary) and they spent many years making films in Budapest — and they both have architects in their families. That, coupled with Brody's personal connection — his mother, photographer Sylvia Plachy, is a Hungarian immigrant who fled to America in the 1950s — brings searing authenticity to the film about the struggle to achieve this elusive 'American Dream.'
'In America, I think that regardless of your political or religious beliefs or background, almost everyone in this country has some immigration story in their family,' Fastvold says. 'So the struggles that László and Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) experience, people seem to connect with.'
'In terms of why this particular film is resonating with people, I can only say that I believe that it's because it is truly uncompromised,' says Corbet. 'This is a film that was not made by committee, and I think that is incredibly rarefied. Because the film does so many things that we are told we should not do, I think people are finding that to be a fresh experience.'
"The film does so many things that we are told we should not do." — Corbet on The Brutalist
Fastvold assumed the director's role in the couple's upcoming 2025 musical Ann Lee, which they co-wrote and finished filming in Hungary in December. 'She's an amazing historical figure in America, and very few books are written about her, yet she was a fascinating early feminist,' says Fastvold of the founding leader of the Shakers religious sect, portrayed by Amanda Seyfried. 'Her wild, utopian ideas were just a fascinating social experiment that I think people don't know a lot about. Also, they are musical people — there are over 1,000 hymns in their song books — so for me, it was natural to make it a musical, because they worship through song and dance.'
The film also stars Abbott, Thomasin McKenzie and Lewis Pullman, and features music by Daniel Blumberg (who composed the score to The Brutalist and Fastvold's 2020 film The World to Come). 'I always wanted to bring in my background in dance and movement into my filmmaking more, so this was an incredible opportunity to collaborate more with Daniel and really do a full-on musical together,' she says, 'and also to work with Celia Rowlson-Hall, who's a longtime collaborator of mine [and] an incredible choreographer.'
The Christian group founded in 1747 in England and then organized in the U.S. (two remain in Maine) became known as the 'Shaking Quakers' because of their erratic worshipping behavior. 'Also, how interesting to explore someone who created a sexless utopia, 250 years ago, when we're in this phase in America again where women are going on sex strikes and our rights are under attack?' Fastvold says. 'So it's interesting to think about someone who's like, 'Well, how about we eliminate marriage, family structure and sex altogether, and create a safe haven?'"
"How interesting to explore someone who created a sexless utopia, 250 years ago, when we're in this phase in America again where ... [women's] rights are under attack?' — Fastvold on Ann Lee
Fastvold continues, "And aesthetically, the Shaker architecture: They also worship through creating objects and labor, so this obsessive want and need for perfection in furniture and architecture, obviously it speaks to—'
'There's some overlap in that way with The Brutalist,' Corbet finishes. 'Mona and I wrote it together, but I have more objectivity because I didn't direct [it]. The soundtrack is full of bangers and it's a really cool movie. There's nothing quite like it.'
As viewers, they've recently revisited the work of Sofia Coppola with their 10-year-old daughter and appreciate the types of radical films a formula could never predict. 'How could the algorithms and data that so many of the streamers currently rely on to decide which projects they greenlight ever give us a David Lynch?' Corbet asks. 'There's no way to anticipate a David Cronenberg. These are very, very unique visions. And so, we try to write in a way where we're writing for one another — and we're writing for ourselves.'