OUTSIDE MAN

How Brady Corbet turned artistic frustration into an American epic.

- ALEXANDRA SCHWARTZ

"The Brutalist" is a nearly four-hour exercise in maximalism. "You really have to dare to suck to transcend," Corbet said.

The filmmaker Brady Corbet lives in New York City, but he is not often at home. He estimates that he has been away for all but five months of the past two years; for reasons both artistic and financial, he prefers to work abroad. On an overcast Saturday afternoon in late September, though, Corbet found himself back in town. His latest movie, "The Brutalist," had just screened at the New York Film Festival, and an after-party was under way at the Leopard at des Artistes, a restaurant near Lincoln Center. Hors d'oeuvres circulated, golden arancini and small white dishes of fregola studded with zucchini and roasted tomatoes; wine was poured, red and white. Adrien Brody, who stars in the film as the eponymous László Tóth, a Jewish Hungarian architect who attempts to rebuild his life in the United States after the Holocaust, made his way through the crowd of well-wishers, holding the hand of his mother, the photographer Sylvia Plachy, who herself emigrated from Hungary following the Soviet repression of 1956.

Applause broke out as Corbet walked in, accompanied by his partner and collaborator, the filmmaker Mona Fastvold, and their ten-year-old daughter, Ada, festive in a pink party dress. The family had returned two weeks earlier from Budapest, where Fastvold had spent the summer shooting her latest feature, only to discover that they had mistaken the dates of their sublet agreement and could not actually go home. After a sleepless period spent crashing with friends"they have toddlers," Corbet explained darkly to the group that had gathered around him they had finally moved back into their apartment the previous evening. Corbet wore a black sweatshirt and Prada loafers; his round face was framed by shoulder-length ringlets. "I've just been scrubbing toilets," he said.