‘The Brutalist’ Director Brady Corbet on Making His 215-Minute 70mm Epic and Including an Intermission

variety.com:

Brent Lang Executive Editor Brady Corbet, the director of “The Brutalist,” is still trying to figure out the best way to deliver the print for his film to the Venice Film Festival, where it will debut next month.

That’s because the epic 215-minute story of a Holocaust survivor forging a new life in America will be shown in 70mm, which means that all 26 reels of film will need to travel in four Pelican cases from Los Angeles to Italy, weighing in at approximately 300 pounds. “We may have to buy a couple of plane tickets,” he said, shortly after Venice unveiled its lineup. “We have to figure out the best way to get it through customs in order to hand deliver it in time.” But Corbet has been resisting the digital tide for years, having shot his two previous films, “Vox Lux” and “The Childhood of a Leader,” on celluloid.

That’s become something of a rarity as the industry has moved towards sleeker, cheaper digital cameras. And it’s a complete anomaly in the case of 70mm, which may be experiencing a renaissance on big studio movies like Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” and Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part Two,” but is rarely, if ever, an option for independent filmmakers like Corbet.

But when he first started planning the movie seven years ago with his co-writer and wife Mona Fastvold, Corbet felt that the format was perfect for a story that begins in World War II and concludes in the 1980s — with a substantial chunk of it taking place in the 1950s.