
Well before she met The Brutalist director Brady Corbet, production designer Judy Becker hoped she could work with him.
Becker — known for her work on Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, Todd Haynes’s Carol, and her Oscar-nominated work on David Russell’s American Hustle — has long had a passion for the Brutalist architecture that gives the film its name. It is a style, developed in the postwar United Kingdom, characterized by raw, exposed concrete and an emphasis on structural elements over fussiness.
“I would have done it for free if I could afford to do it,” she says.
That attitude was helpful, because the movie didn’t have much to spend. Though The Brutalist’s trailer centers on the word “monumental,” the word embraced by many critics to describe it, Corbet made the film for a modest budget of under $10 million.
But don’t attribute the film’s epic sweep to movie magic.
“The budget was ‘low’ because Brady hired the best craftspeople who normally work for more money,” Becker says. “Nobody has unlimited money. I’ve worked with a gamut of budgets and you always want more money, but I’m not going to say the budget limited us.”
The Brutalist is nominated for 10 Oscars, including for Best Picture and for Becker’s production design. Though it has drawn some scrutiny for its use of AI — for fine-tuning accents and a sequence at the end — Corbet has stressed that none of Becker’s work involved AI.
Judy Becker on Her Brutalist Influences

The Brutalist follows the fictional Hungarian Jewish architect László Toth (Adrien Brody) as he arrives in America with his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones). Toth wants to rebuild his life and marriage after being liberated from a concentration camp.
They settle in Pennsylvania, where wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce) seizes on Toth’s talents by commissioning him to build a Christian Institute. Toth makes the project his own by basing elements of it on the concentration camp that held him prisoner.
“I came up with overt and subtle symbolism in Toth’s work, like the incorporation of concentration camp elements,” Becker explains. “I looked at the layouts of concentration camps and I thought about European architecture that Laszlo would have seen in Budapest growing up.”
Becker also pulled from her childhood interest in hidden symbolism. Growing up, she saw a Jewish temple that, when viewed from above, formed the shape of a Star of David. The concept found its way into Becker’s plan for the Institute.
“When you look at the Institute from overhead, it’s in the shape of a cross,” she says.
The DIY Approach to The Brutalist

Corbet’s team agreed to reduce their normal pay because they shared his passion. The film’s seasoned department heads, including cinematographer Lol Crawley, costume designer Kate Forbes, editor Dávid Jancsó, and Becker, went into extreme indie mode to solve problems.
“To deal with the kinds of challenges that we had in creating this movie, you had to be experienced,” says Becker. “You have to have done it with money and without money and met these challenges before.”
She adds: “Brady was probably, of all the directors I’ve worked with, the most skilled at thinking of alternative ways to tell his story if he couldn’t afford to do it one way.
“He knows what he wants to say and he knows there’s not just one way to say anything. There’s a lot of ways to say it, and that’s the attitude you need to have when you don’t have a large budget.”
Except for a brief shoot in New York City, most of The Brutalist was filmed in Hungary. The department heads built a strong camaraderie while working there, starting with location scouts. The group outings were the first opportunity for everyone to connect over the project.
“Those scouts were really important because you’re in the van for hours and trying out different ideas about the movie,” Becker says.
“If I wanted to pitch an idea, I’d do it in the van when there’s not a lot of people around. I’ve got the director’s ear, there’s the DP and all the people that I need to talk to about it.”
Once they formed a sense of community in the van, “there never seemed to be any deviation from that, which was a great thing,” she says.
Becker learned quickly that Hungary lacked the variety of materials available to American production designers.
“I had to be like Brady and think, ‘What’s the other way we could do this?’ It’s not the way I’m used to doing it, but in a way, that’s really good for creativity,” she says.
Most films don’t create complete, life-size buildings like the Institute. Becker built a scale model of it, and it’s what audiences see when they view stunning exteriors of the hillside structure. But watching the film, you would never know the building isn’t a full-scale creation.
A montage of the Institute’s construction was shot with a GoPro and altered with digital VFX to show the building’s development over time.
“I’ve never worked on a movie where I had to design buildings, create furniture, and be an architect, but all of my experience as a craftsperson came together in The Brutalist,” she says.
The Brutalist is now in theaters, from A24.