The Brutalist

Today on Art of the Cut we speak with Dávid Jancsó, the editor of The Brutalist.

David’s been busy! He also edited last year’s Monkey Man as well as films like Evolution and Pieces of a Woman and the TV series The Crowded Room and Treadstone.

David, it’s so nice to talk to you. Congratulations about all the buzz that this movie is getting. That must just warm your heart to know the way people are receiving it.

Thank you for having me. We’re thrilled we’re getting the response that we’re getting on this film. It is really heartwarming. A lot of dedication went into making it for Brady Corbet, the director. The first time I read his script was six years ago - something like that.

The first shot footage was five years ago. I was there right for that shoot in Venice. The Venice sequence at the end of the film was shot when we were premiering Mona’s film – Brady’s wife’s film - Mona Fastvold’s film, in Venice.

Those are the shots that you see in Venice at the end of the film that was shot back when it wasn’t even green lit. So it’s amazing to see this film come out and for us to be able to present it to the audience and get this feedback.

It’s a testament to the script and to the director and to you that it felt like a true story. Is this a true story? There IS a László Tóth.

It is one of the most common Hungarian names. No, it is absolutely not based on a true story. It is based on many true stories. It could be true. It should be true. It is true. Our characters are all fictional.

It was based on some of the big architects, but it could be based on anybody today that is an immigrant going to the United States, be it today, be it tomorrow, be it 20 years ago, 30 years ago. The experience is universal.

So you’ve obviously been involved in the script and the story for a long time. Did you have discussions about the vibe of the film before you saw dailies? That it was more of a character study than plot driven? What were some of the things that he told you?

I’ve known Brady. I worked on his first film. I know his taste. We did talk about how the film is gonna move forward and look. I know his style. We were going to shoot on film and we were going to shoot VistaVision.

We did discuss about looks. I was there for the prep for when they did the tests for choosing the lens. It’s an incredibly well thought out script. A lot of the decision making process in the edit to not just to shoot what is absolutely required and how to touch a scene and what that scene is about, even though I think that shoot and script is is not about subtext.

It is what’s on the page. I think editing is mostly about what the subtext.

Talk to me a little bit about that opening - the opening music and the opening sound effects and the way the film starts off. You’re also listening to a letter being read.

We already had the music during shoot. In fact, we played it in. It was on the loudspeaker so, of course, the sound was absolutely unusable.

For that sequence - which we had to build up - it was just me and my co-editor that were on this film from the get go. It was a two person editorial team.

Give a shout out to that person.

Ilka [Ilka Janka Nagy] is the absolute best person. She built up the first sound design of it. And our great sound team - Steve Single and Andy Neil - came in very early and provided us with more stems for us to be able to decide what we’re seeing and listening to. So we had the music. We had pre-sound-design for it, and I hope nobody sees the cuts in that sequence.

I was wondering about that, because it does seem pretty seamless.

Let’s just say it’s one shot. If anybody asks, it’s one shot.

What does the editor say it is?

The editor doesn’t say anything. The editor stays quiet.

Just like 1917, for 90 minutes, it’s one shot.

It is. As soon as we come out from the ship, the Statue of Liberty wasn’t there. That is a VFX addition to transition into a separate shoot that was later done in New York.

The flipping of the statue and all, that was also us. It was meant this way from the beginning, and it was probably one of the sequences we’ve worked on the most, believe it or not.

The Statue of Liberty was a huge surprise for me because I figured he was on a train in Hungary or something like that, or he was escaping someplace in Europe through that whole opening.

The whole point of our job is smoke and mirrors. So we did it there. Because we start off with her at the border crossing.

Then cut to a place where you hear waves maybe. And the way you move out, it was, it’s meant to be a surprise and it is meant to jar you in a way that it does.

You’ve got a movie that is quite long, well over three hours. I point it out because there’s a scene early on in New York City where László’s in a brothel. You talked about the value and the reason and the intent of a scene in the movie. What was the intent of that?

I will admit there exists a two and a half hour cut of this film just for us, not for anybody else, because we knew that what we wanted to do with this film - to encompass such vast decades of work - that we knew time does not matter.

Our point is to keep the audience engaged. Doesn’t matter how long it is. Could have been four hours. You do what the project requires. And this project, because of its scale, because of what it’s about, it needed to give the audience time to sit and to allow them to be a part of his journey.

Why did we need to keep the brothel? Somebody who just survived the holocaust is surrounded by people and his friends and arrives to a new place. The brothel is a very specific place, as an immigrant, if you go in, and says who your character is.

Without the brothel, it’ll be just somebody arriving, but we needed to make the audience understand who this person is. Is he a narcissist architect at the end of the day? Is he going to be one? What does that scene give you that you can grasp onto later in the film? That scene would never have been cut.

I think it’s a very European scene - not because it has sex in it - but it’s because it’s almost a reverse “Save the Cat” moment. Usually you have those moments where you think, “I really need to like this character.” And instead, he’s having sex in a brothel immediately after he gets a letter from his wife.

We are leading in from the letter to the wife to the brothel. These juxtapositions are very important in the film because nothing is black and white in our lives - or in this film. It was never meant to be: “This is our main character that you have to love.”

You have to understand the intricate nature of these people. You might like Van Buren for a second, but then you have to understand the evil side of him. It was always nuance. A lot of this film, and a lot of the story, happens outside the scope of the film too. So a lot of it has to be filled in by the audience.

Of course it comes up because it’s a three and a half hour film, so people talk about the runtime, but the runtime is of no importance. It is pacing and rhythm. That’s what we’re we’re talking about. When we’re talking about what do we want to portray with the entirety of the movie.

Based on what you said about the script, I would assume that the archival Pennsylvania marketing film was part of the script, or no?

You’re seeing the story of this person and telling the audience where you are: in Pennsylvania. There were some archival footage. The bus shot there’s a bus shot going over the bridge. That was the archival footage that we had.

That’s the same bus that they actually found and then used for the film, in Hungary of all places. The archival footage was Ilka’s idea. The gems that she found really put us on a different plane because it allowed us so much more to be able to put the audience in this world at the time that we wanted to be.

It’s also this ultra-capitalist advertisement about the industrial power of Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania against Erzsébet Tóth’s letter (László’s wife) and trying to build something that is art and using this hardcore archival advertisement on top of it really helped us drive the whole beginning part of that film.

We start with the archive and we end with the archive before the intermission. So it gave us a really good boost.

Was that archival promotional film something that you built from pieces or something that you found or was that pretty much intact?

It is built up. I hope nobody ever will ever notice - but I know where the bodies are buried, so - there are other bits of it from other places, of course. The audio we used.

Our sound guy Steve Single, said, “If we’re going to use that archival audio, you’re gonna hear what you’re gonna hear. It is what it is.” We didn’t re-record it. We used it as is.

There’s a very interesting montage during the news of the establishment of the State of Israel. Can you talk to me about that montage and when you’re building a montage, what the purpose of it is? How you go about that?

A lot of these montages in the film are to place us in time, historically. That was a very important one about Israel because we had to set up, not only is a holocaust survivor and his Jewish background led him to where he landed and forced him to escape and the whole community, how they handled these immigrants that came at the Second World War.

We had to set up a very strong indication for the audience that this is very important information that Israel is being formed now, and while things are happening around the world things are looking up for him, too. He’s creating something and the Jewish state is being created.

So it was a very strong connection between history and a personal story and it comes back later in the film.

And that plot point comes back later in the film.

Exactly.

It’s always important to set those things up for sure. Talk to me about the vignette nature of the story. There’s so many little moments in time that you’re seeing. It’s a kind of a fractional or fractured storytelling. You explain that the audience is left to fill in some gaps, but then you’re also given very tiny moments that you have to kind of figure out: what are you trying to tell me with this moment in time?

Editing is brutalist architecture. It’s all in the details that you don’t notice. That was our point for this film. And it works. It’s the “less is more” Bauhaus saying that sometimes the story just surprises you in the edit room. It’s the same thing.

In a lot of the places those silences say a lot more than if we would have to expand on certain information that we wanted to make the audience understand.

There’s a great bit of editing where you fractured time. After the two brothers make the deal to build the library there’s a little party with László’s brother and his wife and László. The brother and the wife are dancing and time is fracturing. You’re, you’re not seeing continuous time. Talk to me about building that scene.

That fracturing comes back from time to time. We want it to be very subtle. There was a version where we were much less subtle about it. László is a struggling, addicted person - addicted to whatever it is, be it his work, be it drugs, be it alcohol - at a certain point in the film these time fractures were very important to jar.

Stylistically, they’re very good in terms of the viewer and the audience. Time fracturing is very strongly present in the Italian cinema and the French cinema of, of 60s, 70s. We were very keen on using these type of elements.

We do these extra stylistic elements that help you get connected to this character even if they’re usually used for distancing. I think for that specific dance sequence, it helps you. It puts you into his perspective because everybody’s happy, but something’s off.

Something is always off. And that was very important for us to use those types of elements. László is clearly drunk and so you’ve got that kind of fractured remembering of how something happened.

I don’t mean for my questions to always be about the sex scenes, but did you have discussions with the director about the necessity of the 1930s black and white porn movie that’s in the film?

It wasn’t easy to get that one! Wow, it wasn’t! It was very hard to find. I’m a huge techie. I have to be. When we were talking about creating this theater, I have a 16mm projector and we were trying to find somebody that would give us a 16mm print to be able to project the film on set.

There is none that exists - or people will not give it to you because you cannot create 16mm print anymore. So we were looking at 35mm. Again, not a lot of people wanted to give us license for these. We had a handful of them that we chose.

This comes back to the brothel. If you have the brothel, you need the porn theater. You need to understand his infidelities that are either shown or not shown; that happen while being very dedicated to his wife – intellectually, for sure, but is it physical? It requires you to ask these questions.

That’s another one where the editing was very interesting. There were dissolves in there and fractures of time. I’m assuming that was all you and not the original porn movie.

Those are actually rollouts.

There’s this dinner party where László first gets cleaned up and is presented to this millionaires club and they’re asking him questions about his Jewishness. It’s a very central scene to the movie as I guess all scenes should be. There are really interesting reaction shots through that scene as he’s talking and revealing things about himself and people are maybe questioning who he is and why he’s there, plus interesting insert shots. Can you talk about that scene?

That’s one of my favorite scenes in the film. The music playing in the background is Wagner. Wagner was a serious anti-Semite. These tiny nuances of people’s looks and talk about his Jewishness, talking about where he comes from, talking about being an outsider…

And throughout, you’ve got this guy who – today – would be a billionaire sitting at the top of the table, presenting his trophies. He has absolutely no knowledge of what it means to put on Wagner music while you have a guest that is a Holocaust survivor.

These tiny little nuances make up what the whole film is in that one scene for me.

I have Holocaust survivor grandparents, so I was very emotionally connected to that scene. It’s the scene that leads you into this big monologue too. I’m not saying it’s easy for the audience to keep engaged, but we did everything possible to keep everybody engaged through these reaction shots and sound.

Our sound team - Andy’s work and how Steve managed to make the dialogue deepened it and married it. A lot of what we did in the offline, he transferred so beautifully into the final mix. We dealt a lot with dialogue editing on this film.

A lot of the edits are dialogue editing. That scene is a little microcosm of what the film is about. It’s about the subtext of this film that is built into those scenes.

Immediately after the dinner, there’s this coffee scene and a little montage leading into it. I’d like to hear you talk about that. That conversation starts in slow mo, correct? Or there’s slow mo in that sequence?

There’s slow mo in the sequence. There is an impending doom that we really wanted the audience to feel - that something is off. It’s a juxtaposition against the music that you hear.

It is pulling you into something that feels awkward, and then you listen to the monologue of what it’s about and who this person is. The imagery that was shot for that scene was really helpful.

The sound design - the clinks and the sound of money were very delicately balanced. It is a statement of what it is to be Harrison Van Buren.

Then there’s another archival bit of Pennsylvania footage that goes into slow mo: an architectural montage. Can you talk about that?

That is not archival, actually. We made it look like archives, but our fabulous colorist was able to marry that in. It was completely shot by us – other than a wide shot – and it had to be cleaned up in VFX because of all the air conditioners on the buildings that had to get painted out.

That was just setting up that something big is going to happen. You hear again of the industrial complex of Philadelphia with that pan, then there’s the wide of the bridge, then we go into these tiny details of feet and running.

It is sort of referring to Chaplin while also pushing you towards something is happening, and it’s going to be driving you all the way through to what the next montage sequence is when we start writing the letter to Erzsébet, then things are looking up.

Those were scripted as intercut? The letters?

The letter was always intended over those. Yes. Absolutely. Those were written in English, but that’s in Hungarian, but nonetheless, are verbatim. They were always meant to be there. Yes.

There’s a great slow-mo montage as László writes the letter to his wife. Was that designed as a montage, or had it previously been full scenes that had been accordioned into a montage?

Most of those shots were meant for the montage, and that was always meant to be a montage. There were some problems with the camera and the shoot on certain days, and that was one of them. That was one that needed some reshoots, but those were meant for that montage, and we knew that was going to be a montage.

I wanted to be an architect when I was a kid, so I loved the architectural model-building montage, where he’s gluing the pieces of foamcore or cardboard together.

That was a couple of shoots. Lol Crawley, our fabulous DP, just grabbed the camera and found a wire-frame somewhere, and our second unit DP - who did the 16mm shots - that was a combination of a lot of shoot days and not necessarily all meant to be there.

That sequence was quite different because originally László explained the model first to the Van Buren family, then to the mayor, and then to the people. It was three separate scenes.

Now, it’s not intercut as you would traditionally call intercut, but in a way each of those scenes is built into each other and became one scene that goes into the end montage before the intermission.

Originally there were three scenes of him walking through this model but you get to the point where you’re watching the film and think, “This is a little repetitive. We need to figure out where we can tell the same story and not have it told three times.”

Also we were close to intermission and we needed to go out with a bang because you want the audience not to go out, get popcorn, and go watch another movie.

You want them to come back after the intermission. We had fights against the intermission! We fought back, saying, “That’s staying.”

We needed to pace it up before the intermission - have that emotional arc of him come to fruition - that this building is going to be built and it’s going to look like this. So we needed to slowly speed it up to the point where we go out with that last letter, music, and the archival footage coming together.

As Zsófia is introduced to her new room at the mansion, I loved the sound effects of the wind whistling outside. It gave it an incredible psychological sense of her world.

That’s Andy Neil for you. He has a really delicate touch. The sound for this film is absolutely amazing. The sound team is Australian, but they work out of the UK. We had an Australian Foley team.

We were really a global, international production. You would think that this would be a high budget film. No, it wasn’t. But we were all around the world.

Where were you editing? Where was most of the filming being done?

Most of the film was done in Hungary. I’m in Hungary right now, as we record this interview. It was supposed to be shot in Poland, but then COVID happened and I connected Brady with one of my long time working partner production companies that I started with when I started.

They immediately clicked. He ended up coming back to Hungary to shoot and since then Mona (the director’s wife, who is also a director) also shot her film here this summer.

I think Budapest is one of the only places in the world that has two working film labs, so Brady was very happy. We moved to New York for the edit, because Brady needed to go home.

His family was there, so we went back to New York to edit for quite a few weeks. Then we moved to London because that’s where most of our posts happened. Our VFX were in London, our sound was in London, our composer is British.

We ended up doing the DI in Budapest. So we edited here as well. We were everywhere over two years.

So a lot of cutting on maybe a laptop with Avid or what were you doing?

Never! No! I do not do that. I can’t! I need at least three monitors and my little mix panel and Ilka is the same way. If we’re doing this, we’re doing this professionally, no laptops. Plus we’re cutting 4k. That’s the other thing.

That’ll make a difference. And were you cutting on Avid or Premiere?

Avid. I’m a very strong avid supporter with ScriptSync and all the bells and whistles.

Did you use ScriptSync for this?

Absolutely. It saved our lives! Because of the intention not to cut the picture, and not having too many takes, you’re locked into certain camera movements, but it might not have been the best performance by the actor, but then you can create that performance from their really good audio performances in the other takes, so ScriptSync is an absolute lifesaver.

I’ve been using it ever since they introduced it. “ScriptSync saves lives.” Let’s just state that fact.

There’s some really unusual music underscore. You talked a little bit about some of it. There’s a scene where Zsófia is making guests uncomfortable… and at the picnic there’s some trumpet music or something underneath that. Then the really interesting one was the “Miller and Sons” sequence early in the film where he’s meeting his brother and they’re dealing with his business. It’s like Spike Jones music or something under there that I recognized.

The first one - where they go to the furniture store - that is semi-period music being played around with by our fabulous mixer, Steve Single - how he married it into and how that sounded in that room. It was based on the offline picture cut, but he took it to a level that is incredible.

It felt very diegetic.

Yes, it is meant to be diegetic. That distance, that one step of distance we tried to keep all through the film, the details of the sounds and music and all of this also played a very big part in that.

The picnic was actually Ilka’s find. It was a sound effect originally from a drum sequence that was in an effects library. Daniel said, “Ooh, we’re going to base something off of that!”

“Buttons and Bows” for the dance sequence. That was a given. The music on the top of the crane was also a given.

Using the JFK/Nixon debate was my thing. I wanted in the car.

That was a really interesting one. Tell me about that decision because you’ve got this very dramatic scene going on between two people in a car and instead of having music in the background, you’ve got more talking in the background.

It’s a juxtaposition of the two characters’ conversation that “they do not want us here” while you’re hearing the Nixon/Kennedy debate about how inclusive the United States, but then you have the real life immigrants having the exact opposite discussion.

It’s something that was true then. It’s true now. Hopefully it won’t be true in the future. That should jar you, if you catch it. You don’t have to catch it, but if you catch it, you get an extra layer of subtext that might help. It’s an epic movie.

We wanted to provide people with the ability to rewatch it and find newer and newer things with it.

Were you specifically editing the Nixon/Kennedy debate that’s going on in the background so that certain words from the debate would arrive in between the characters’ words?

Yes. Of course. I didn’t want to edit it too much, so it was more of a timing thing.

I love talking about intercutting. There’s some intercutting of a Jewish service with construction footage Was that scripted as intercut or did you find that intercutting?

I don’t remember, honestly, if that was scripted or not. It came pretty naturally. Composer Daniel Blumberg’s music was also something that we had at our disposal. We knew where we wanted to lead up to.

The help of the music  led us to the grand explosion that explodes everything in their lives. It had to contain a lot of layers of the religious nature of their personal connections. We were driving the audience into a new era that is coming right after that.

There was a very interesting section of unsynced audio. I can’t remember the marble quarry character’s name, but he’s talking and his audio is in sync for a while and then it’s not in sync and you’re also hearing him talk over himself or something like that. Can you describe that and what the purpose of that was?

To put you into a different mental state for the whole Italian segment of the film: that something is happening. Something is off. Something is not going to happen the way you think it’s going to happen.

Using that very Italian style filmmaking at that point seems like a cliché, but it was something that - if you have film knowledge of what we’re doing here - you might catch on to it before we actually show it to you.

That Italian shoot was a little bit difficult in terms of how it was shot versus how we got it in. That sequence was not meant that way necessarily. It is something that formed in the edit.

There’s pounding music that pre-laps from the marble quarry to the building site.

It’s right after they come out of the cave having a discussion of whether László is going to throw up or not on the airplane. We start the music immediately strong, like as with a headache that it has a huge bang, right?

That goes into the construction and we’re coming out of this very disturbing sequence that you have inside the quarry. You come out of that, and you immediately go into what his dream was to start the building of this building.

The juxtaposition of something that we’ve been waiting for to begin, which precluded something that you never even anticipated would happen to him. The strength of how the music comes in, and the time lapse of the building being built.

That sequence was the last thing that we had to touch. We actually edited it in the grading software, I have to be very honest.

You mentioned that there are places where the audience needs to fill in a little bit. One of those places is a fairly big jump in the story between László and his wife in the hospital. What comes immediately after that is that she’s in a walker, and the next thing you know – the next time you see László - he’s an old man. It’s a pretty big leap in the story.

Those last few edits were huge leaps in time. Everything happens up until she overdoses and they go to the hospital. That sequence encompasses days to weeks to months. It is meant as a big jump. We used audio cues to do so.

Editing is mostly smoke and mirrors, so that’s what we did with this one too.

Anything else that you want to talk about in our last couple of minutes? Things you’re proud of?

I’m proud of the entirety of the film. The amount of dedication this whole post crew put into this film… it is so heartwarming that it’s getting so much attention and it’s being lauded by people. We really put our hearts into this film and I’m just happy about the whole thing.

I’m proud of Lol’s work [the DP], I’m proud of Judy’s work [the production designer], I’m proud of Daniel’s work [the composer], Ilka’s work [the additional editor], Steve’s, Andy’s [the sound team].

These people that you’ve lived with for two and they don’t know you, but you know them. You know their every movement. This just fills me with joy to have been able to be a part of this and see it come to fruition the way it has.

David, thank you so much for your time. It was really interesting and good luck during awards season.

I’ve already gotten all the awards I need.