David Jancso is so close with filmmakers Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold that the editor has been by the couple’s side for several major milestones over the last decade, from cutting Corbet’s debut film The Childhood of a Leader and Fastvold’s 2020 feature The World to Come to witnessing the early days of Corbet and Fastvold’s daughter’s life in the pair’s Paris apartment.
“I understand what Brady wants, and his visionary approach to filmmaking is something that you just don’t forget,” Jancso tells Gold Derby.
Neither is The Brutalist, Corbet’s acclaimed new film and one of the season’s top awards contenders, with seven Golden Globe Awards nominations including Best Drama, Best Director for Corbet, and Best Screenplay for Corbet and Fastvold. (The film is also expected to compete in several Oscar categories, including Best Editing for Jancso.) Set in the aftermath of World War II, The Brutalist focuses on a Hungarian architect named László Toth (Adrien Brody) who immigrates to America after surviving the Holocaust and begins to rebuild his life with some big highs and shocking lows. Epic in scope and shot in 35mm VistaVision (with theatrical presentations in 70mm currently programmed in theaters in New York and Los Angeles), The Brutalist is the kind of maximalist filmmaking that recalls the films of Francis Ford Coppola, Sergio Leone, Martin Scorsese, or, more recently, Paul Thomas Anderson. The boldness of Corbet’s vision also extends to the clock: The film is 215 minutes long with a 15-minute intermission.
“We knew it was long,” Jancso says of the film’s oft-discussed running time. “We had to approach it in a way that helped pace the audience and create a rhythm with the film to ensure that they stayed in their seats all the way through it. That’s why you have a very strong sequence going into the intermission. You need to keep your audience engaged.”
Talk to people about The Brutalist and one thing that anecdotally comes up is that the film feels significantly shorter than its three-hour-and-35-minute running time. That’s helped by the intermission, which ostensibly splits the film into two halves — and, as Jancso says, breaks on a high note. However, the editor says neither he nor Corbet ever considered The Brutalist as anything but one cohesive film.
“The first half of it is more linear, and we were jumping a lot of eras in the second one. So, in a sense, it is two different types of storytelling for the beginning and the end,” Jancso says. “But we were dealing with one film, so we had to understand what would happen to it in the back end every change we did at the beginning of the film — even if it was a tiny change. So everything played hand-in-hand with each other. There are a lot of references that not everybody notices. But you can feel it. At the end of the day, there’s a connection from the beginning to the end. It was very well written in the script, and we tried not to destroy it.”
Corbet, 36, started as an actor and worked with several acclaimed auteurs including Catherine Hardwicke, Gregg Araki, Michael Haneke, Sean Durkin, Lars Von Trier, Mia Hansen-Love, Ruben Ostlund, and Olivier Assayas. As a result, Jancso says, the filmmaker is greatly attuned to his performers and their dialogue.
“He is very specific in what he would like to see,” Jancso says. “Most of the edits are ones that people will never see, but hear — or hopefully don’t even hear – because we’ve married them together. Even if it’s a long sequence shot that seems like it doesn’t have a cut, it has way more cuts than you would ever know because of the dialogue edits.”
Jancso says his top job as an editor is to “protect the performances” the actors have given — particularly true in a cast like this, with Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, and Alessandra Nivola among the actors who excel in the film
“But this is a small-budget film, so you don’t have 10 million takes from 10 million angles,” Jancso explains. “You have, let’s say, eight takes and there’s the visual and there’s the auditory that you have to marry at the end of the day, and we didn’t want to over-cut the film. So even if vocally, another performance was better in another take, we had to choose it, because it was the better one for camera movement. So we took whatever was on that take and tried to marry the tone of the actor. So a lot of their fabulous performances we saved from other things.”
Corbet won the Silver Lion for Best Director at the Venice Film Festival earlier this year, and, at 36, would be the youngest Best Director Oscar nominee in this year’s field. “I always knew he was special,” Jancso says of the director. “The first time we met, I came in for an interview and walked out after like, ‘My god. He’s so knowledgeable, and he’s only 40?’ And then somebody told me he was actually 27 at the time. That’s when I knew he was a special person. He’s knowledgeable, knows so much about film, and is very nice. It’s a dream come true to work with somebody like him and to be able to call him a friend.”
The Brutalist is out now.
