Adrien Brody unpacks his performance as a complicated man driven by art in 'The Brutalist'

Transcript

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Amna Nawaz: Now to another look at this year’s upcoming Oscars.

One of the year’s most acclaimed films, “The Brutalist,” received 10 nominations. And its star, Adrien Brody, a winner at last month’s Golden Globes, is a favorite for actor in a leading role.

He recently joined senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Adrien Brody, Actor: May I keep this?

Jeffrey Brown: In “The Brutalist,” Adrien Brody plays Laszlo Toth, a fictional Jewish Hungarian architect, survivor of a Nazi concentration camp, his past always present as an immigrant and outsider in postwar America.

For Brody, it was the kind of deeply meaningful role that comes only rarely in the life of an actor.

Adrien Brody: You are receiving material, interpreting material to the best of your abilities, and sometimes that material comes and it’s incredibly powerful. And, sometimes, it’s powerful. But when you have something that’s incredibly powerful, it really — it’s something.

It was a war on, and yet many of the sites of my projects survived. My buildings were devised to endure such erosion.

Jeffrey Brown: The film, directed by Brady Corbet, is big in every way, big dreams, big buildings, big personalities, a story that unfolds over several decades and runs some three-and-a-half-hours long, including, rare these days, an intermission.

Brody is there for nearly every minute, playing a damaged, complicated man driven by his art and his need to build.

Adrien Brody: Most deeply creative people have moments of, I don’t know, unpredictability. They’re just — they’re consumed with work and ideas and can’t do everything,right?

(Laughter)

Jeffrey Brown: When you get a role, do you immediately start thinking, who is this person, in this case, who is Laszlo Toth?

Adrien Brody: Sure. Sure. I try to — I try to go into any character without judgment and to uncover qualities that are accessible and find avenues into the things that are less accessible.

Jeffrey Brown: Brody made a first big spike-haired impression in Spike Lee’s 1999 film “Summer of Sam.”

In 2003, aged 29, he became the youngest ever to win the Oscar for best actor, playing a Jewish musician in Nazi-occupied Warsaw in Roman Polanski’s “The Pianist.” That role, he says, offered ways toward understanding Laszlo Toth years later. But he also drew on a more direct connection, the immigrant experience of his Hungarian-born grandparents and his mother, Sylvia Plachy, a noted photographer who came to this country at age 15 in the wake of the 1956 Hungarian uprising crushed by Soviet tanks.

How much were you able to mine that, or how much ends up in the characters?

Adrien Brody: A lot. A lot.

Jeffrey Brown: Yes?

Adrien Brody: I think my grandfathers’ struggles assimilating and speaking with a very distinct accent, and in spite of being so gregarious and charming, still being treated as a foreigner and not quite able to excel as much as he could have, and my mother’s journey and my mother’s understanding of loss and her sensitivity to the loss of others and how that’s been very much part of her work.

Jeffrey Brown: Winning the Golden Globe Award in January, Brody paid tribute.

Adrien Brody: Although I do not know fully how to express all of the challenges that you have faced and experienced and the many people who have struggled immigrating to this country, I hope that this work stands to lift you up a bit and to give you a voice. And I’m so grateful. I will cherish this moment forever. Thank you.

Felicity Jones, Actress: Haven’t you told them anything about me?

Actor: Laszlo, how long have you been here now? Four, five years?

Jeffrey Brown: The sense of connecting to, becoming the character is fundamental to Brody’s approach. He said he seeks to — quote — “act less and feel honest in an interpretation.”

Adrien Brody: Acting has some kind of connotation of acting like something, doing an impression of something. Any actor who’s studied has found the greatest sense of connection when they’re able to do a bit less of that.

And the only moments that you are really acting are when you’re not connecting to that. And that is not what one should be doing.

Jeffrey Brown: In “The Pianist,” in which his character has a painful limp, Brody went so far as to put rocks in his shoe.

You made yourself uncomfortable.

Adrien Brody: I make myself feel a bit of discomfort. And I don’t — I’m not required to put something on. I can just kind of experience it and it’ll trigger something else. I think that’s the beauty of being an actor is that you can — you can only get better if you can remain focused and grounded and connected with the work.

Jeffrey Brown: He’s regularly appeared in films and television series, including starring in the 2005 blockbuster “King Kong,” smaller roles in several Wes Anderson, a billionaire investor with his own island in “Succession.”

Adrien Brody: For me to come your way, I have a little wish list, a little EPS juicing, some stock buyback. Let me in.

Jeffrey Brown: But he’s lamented the dearth of truly important roles. For a time, he put more of his creative energy into an early love, painting.

Adrien Brody: It’s never a clear path. It’s one of constant need to find things that aren’t quite apparent, that you have to make your way through it. And every once in a while, something will come along that is a beacon, that is an opportunity to do the best work and that you’re around people doing their best work, and that it lifts you up and gives you space to exist in the full capacity in which you are yearning to give.

They do not want us here. Audrey, Attila’s Catholic wife, does not want us here.

Jeffrey Brown: He also knows that, with its themes of uprootedness, antisemitism, art in a time of upheaval, “The Brutalist” feels very relevant to our own moment.

Adrien Brody: It’s great to have an artistic film like this present in the conversation. It shows that a film that speaks to much deeper issues and is an artistic work, is not a commercial work can be commercially viable and that audiences are not only curious enough to see them, but yearning for storytelling of this nature.

And so I’m really grateful to be a part of something that speaks to all of that.

Jeffrey Brown: Adrien Brody goes for his second Oscar on March 2.

For the “PBS News Hour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown in New York.